Quito to Bogota to Medellin

The city of Medellin

*I want to preface this blog by saying that my spell checker is working and I was an art major, not an english major, ahemm*

Unfortunately, Stewart and I had to break our pact of using only bus, car, train, and foot to make it back to the U.S. of A.

Three weeks ago while planning the immediate stages of this trip, we flipped on the news one day to see that Colombia had bombed a FARC military headquaters located inside Ecuadorian territory. In a typical melodramtic childish Chavez/Correa overeaction, Ecuadorian and Venezualan governments (Chavez tends to stick his nose into everything down here) responded by saying it was an incursion into Ecuadorian Sovreignty, warranting complete and total retaliation if nothing was done by Colombia. Ecuador and Venezuela both claimed to have sent troops to the border, but Colombia's President, Alvaro Uribe, kept his wits about him and didn't respond in kind.

Admist all of this turmoil, Stewart and I decided that crossing the border between two possibly warring countries by land would not be the best course of action. This combined a history of kidnapping gringos in the south of Colombia was enough to convince my mother to buy a plane ticket to get us into and out of Colombia. And so we were off into cold pre-dawn air of Quito at 5:00 am Thursday morning to catch a 7:00 flight to Bogota Colombia. Out flight on Copa airlines would take us swiftly out of Quito and rush us northwards at astonishing speeds compared to the busses we have been on for the past two weeks. The flight called for us to land in Panama City (not the one in Florida, but the one in Panama), and then back down to Bogota in time for lunch. However, like too much of the culture here in South America... It was delayed. It was delayed on the prettiest, warmest, most cloudless day I have seen in Quito. Eventually we were off, headed towards the capital on the western mouth of the Panama Canal.

After boarding the Boeing 737-800 and falling asleep before take off, I woke up sometime mid cruise and had a weird realization. I no longer felt like I was in South America, but could have just as easily have been on a flight from Atlanta to Dallas. The nuances of air travel: the smell, the beeps and noises, the view 30,000 feet off the ground, lack of leg room, and bad on-board meals; are in fact fairly universal, but are something I had come to associate with American culture and American flights. For the 90 minutes I was flying from Quito to Panama, I felt absolutely at home in this tin can of culture flying across the sky.

I had read that Panama City is a rich cosmopolitan meca, second only to Hong Kong, which was dearly confimred as we deboarded the plane. Crossing the terminal to our subsequent gate, we passed three, thats right THREE Lacoste stores in the span of 500 meters. A prada store, thousand dollar watches, diamond jewlers by the dozen, etc. Void of fulfillment from my 8 dollar excuse of a sandwich, out of Panama city we ran back down south to Bogota, where we were safely on the ground by 1:30 or 2. Stewart and I had heard that Medellin was the capital of night life in Colombia, and as this was our only weekend we would spend in Colombia, we beelined to the bus terminal from the airport to catch one to Medellin and hopefully be there by the evening...

A side note about Colombia: After reading the state deparments warnings about travlling in Colombia, and knowing that much of the US's supply of cocaine was still produced here, and that as little as 15 years ago the government was in a veritable war with jungle seperatist guerillas, I was understandably apprehensious about what I would find. I stand corrected, for Colombia (from the two days I have spent here) is one of the prettiest, most well developed, least impoverished, and nicest places I have been so far. Their country believes (for the most part as you will read later) in infastructure as the route to buisiness confidence and sucess. They believe in simple things (for the most part) like cleanliness. Obvious international influences are evident throughout city planning, types of food, punctuality. All of this is said in the most part purely relative to other latin american countries I have seen. And the people (specifically the girls/women) are absolutely, hands down, by far, the most gorgeous women I had ever seen. Taller, fairer complextion, curvaceous, and confident sums it all up nicely.

At approximately 3:15 in the afternoon, we left the Colombia bus station headed west bound towards Medellin, with an expected arrival time of 1:00 in the morning. Things were rolling along smoothly, cruising on a beautifully paved two lane highway between Bogota and Medellin while watching the sun set over the mountains surrounding Bogota. One item of notice along the trip was the huge abundance of honest to goodness 18 wheelers traveling the same winding road we were on. In the states we learn from an early age to loathe and fear 18 wheelers, destroyers of pavement, harborers of dirty truck drivers, and general nuisance to a kinder gentler population. However here, they represented the movement of goods for trade and buisness, they represented progress, they represented money for masses. I saw very few in Ecuador, and even fewer in Peru. A second item of notice was that it was still clean! Although the affluence dimished as we pushed our way into the countryside and out of the city, there was still a higher standard of upkeep maintaind by the country people.

Stopping for dinner about 10:00 that evening, we were exicted to almost be in Medellin maybe in time to catch some late night clubbing. For the record I am not what you would call a "clubber;" I was merely trying to immerse myself in the culture. However, as we climbed back onto the bus and out on the road, the trouble soon began. At 10:30 PM, in the dense jungle and rolling hills three hours outside of Medellin, in the pouring rain and pitch dark of night, our bus came to a sudden and complete stop behind a train of cars and trucks. It was here that we would remain, in the exact same spot, for the next 18 and half hours. We came to find out that as the rain fell throughout the day, it had turned a hole hillside into soft red mud that eventually caved under its own weight and covered our road with 8 feet of mud for 200 meters. The road was a great road with concrete gutters and asphalt, but is was only two lanes wide, and it was the only road connecting cities the size of Dallas and Denver. Apparently the Colombian road crews do not work at night, so we were stuck at 10:30 p.m. in the middle of nowhere until daylight broke. Curling up as much as I could in my green bus seat with plastic head covers, I threw on the Ipod and called it a night.

As dawn broke over the steaming fertile green hills of nowhere Colombia, I looked out my tinted window to recognize the same rotten barbwire fence, the same rock, and the same little stick on the road I had been staring at for 7 hours. It was now 6:00, 7 hours and 30 minutes since the bus stopped, on a trip that was supposed to take a total of 9. Around 7:00, two eighteen wheelers rolled through the opposite lane with a bulldozer and a backhoe, and a couple of dump trucks. I thought, I sure am glad that they didnt risk driving on the road at night, who knows what could happen! It is totally fine that the entire economic machine between Colombia's 1st and 3rd largest city has been shut down for 10 hours.

Whats even better is that Stewart asks them how often this happens, figuring that this is just a hazard of traveling during the rainy season. They said they cant remember the last time there was landslide like this. Ouch. Maybe every 5 or 6 years they get one that closes the road for more than an hour or two. What good luck on our part, and this is our 2nd land slide in as many weeks to boot.

What followed has proved to be very typical of the fatalistic optimism/unpreparedness endemic to culture down here. At 9:00 am we were assured by the police that the road would be open and traffic would be moving by 11:00 am, so Stewart and I waited in the bus as opposed to walk the 4 miles up to the landslide and try to hitch a ride from the other side. At 11:00am we were assured again by the police with the confidence indicative of a german engineer that the road would be open by 1pm, they had just had a few small set backs. At 1 pm they didnt both to answer us. At 3pm they said it might take a little longer than expected... Really? I am so glad they came to that conclusion. Finally at 5pm our bus driver brokered a deal with a driver from "the other side" to trade pasengers, and we would get on their bus which would go back to Medellin, and his passengers would come get on our bus and go back to Bogota. He takes us as far as he can to the landslide, but we still have about a mile left which we have to do on foot.

So here we are: a random assorment of 35 men, women, children, old ladies with flowering suitcases, old men in shirts with pearl buttons, and babies hugging the hips of their mothers, all walking down the road by ourselves in the middle of the jungle of Colombia next to a 10 mile long string of 18 wheelers. We had all become better friends in the last 26 hours we had all spent on a bus together with nothing else to do. We are carrying cardboard boxes containing who knows what, bags of fruit, rolling luggage, random electronic appliances, and in our case, huges backpacks. The sun was setting and the road was increasingly covered in mud. Soon after we left we passed the group from the other bus, which put a pep in all of our steps as we rushed to catch our last hope out.

After this motley crew crossed the monstrosity of dirt and rock that had postponed our trip, we arrived at the other bus only to find it full of people who were trying to get to Medellin as well from various cars and trucks. They had beat us there, and paid the driver who seemed to have convienantly forgotten about the deal he made with our driver a mere 30 minutes prior. Meanwhile our bus was steaming towards Bogota with his passengers he had managed to unloaded. Chaos insued.

The daylight waned until it was now dark, and the construction crew pulled out a bunch of portable lighting. I stepped back for a second and surveyed the scene: 30 angry passengers standing in front of the only bus left in this makeshift town, screaming in the air and yelling at the bus driver. To complement our mob, there were another 50 of 60 rugged looking travelers/thugs loitering dangerously close to our bus, who also needed a ride out of town. The light from the construction crew casted dark shadows across peoples faces, provided just enough distant illumination to make sure you still had your bag in your hand. Bordering the whole scene were Colombian Army Soliders decked out in fatigues and holstering M-16s to prevent people from trying to cross over the lanslide, and the noise from the backhoe drowned the air in thunder.

I felt like I was standing on the roof of the American Embassy in 1975, north vietnamese bombing the city, and hords of south vietnamese (colombians in this case) all clambering to climb abord the last helicopter (bus) out of Saigon (jungle).

After an hour of haggling we finally convinced the driver to let us board and stand in the aisles while he made the 3 hour voyage back to Medellin. However apparently it is against the law to have passengers standing in the aisle in these types of buses, which would not have been an issue were it not for the 3 police checkpoints that stood between us and freedom. Our solution: he would turn off all the lights in the cabin at each checkpoint and we would duck between the seats while the police shined lights in to check that there were no aisle passengers.

Medellin at last!

Blog point:

1.) Today I saw a portable public phone station... The station was in fact a 50 year old man, and out of his pockets drouped 4-5 long thin metal chains. Each of these chains was attached to a cell phone, one of which was being used by a younger man.

2.) People here loooove grease in their hair, just like many places throughout south america, and as a result the back of every seat on bus here has some kind of plastic cover to protect the seat from getting filled with head grease. The problem is that they missed a key step in this process of cleaning off the plastic periodicially, so when you go to lay your head down on the bus you are greeted by a nice semi-opaque layer of brownish hair grease. Initially this was discomforting... Never to fear, I have found that if I simply do not bath but every now and then, you stop worrying about the hairgrease because you have your own little layer of filth to protect you from the outside world of other peoples filth. It really is a much easier and more cost effective alternative to cleaning that we should look at in the US.

3.) I wont go into details, but I can check off "getting intestinal parisites" from my list of things to do in life.

Till next time

M3