Crime! Drugs! Drug lords! Murder! Poverty! Litter! Rotten
transport! Lousy roads! Third-world hotels!
You must be absolutely mad!
What on
earth is possessing you to go there?
This was the general reaction when I mentioned where we were
heading for our holidays this year. But the detractors and smart-Alecs couldn’t
have been more wrong.
Crime, well we certainly saw none, nil drugs, yes, some
abject poverty, but hey, there are around a dozen people currently sleeping in
doorways on Manchester’s Deansgate. There was no litter anywhere, with tripartite bins
for paper, glass/tins and non-recyclables on most street corners, superb, speedy, reliable
and cheap public transport with no peak fares (like we here in the UK pay for our quite substandard services), no road
potholes, fabulous hotels . . . . yes,
Colombia is nothing but fantastic! Well, providing you exclude car drivers. They are like the drivers in Rome or Paris - suicidal!
We kicked off in Medellin, former home to drug lord Pablo
Escobar, one-time richest man on the planet. However, it is now possibly more
famous for Fernando Botero, the incredibly prolific “fat” artist. There are still
signs of Escobar’s association with the city, but they are doing their level
best to erase this somewhat murky blot on the past, although because of what he
did for the poor, it has not been an easy task. Poor locals of a certain age still worship him.
Because it sits in the Andes at around 4,905 feet (1,495
meters) and is extremely temperate, it is called the City of the Eternal
Spring. It is so strange to visit a city where you won’t find central heating
or even a solitary heater in any building or on sale in any shop. And what a
pride the locals take in their city. Yes, there may be graffiti all over the
show, but you won’t see even a cigarette butt on the ground, let alone the
McDonalds coffee cups you see strewn all over the paths of Salford.
Yes, you’ll see unfortunate Venezuelans on every street
corner trying their hardest to sell you all manner of goods and chattels you
don’t need in an honest effort to support themselves, having been forced from
their home by the political situation in Venezuela. But everyone has a smile on
their face. Everyone is proud of what they are. And they don’t have the
equivalent of our rather expensive Brexit sucking their economy dry. In fact all
Colombians in the international know think Brexit is a total joke.
Medellin (and Colombia as a whole) has turned around its
legacy as the world’s Cocaine capital to become an incredible tourist
attraction. It’s just that it doesn’t quite know it yet. The world-infamous
District 13, where drugs, murder and mayhem ruled for several decades is now
the premier tourist attraction not only for foreign visitors, but for
out-of-town Colombians themselves. But there is something rather surreal about
being able to access what is in essence an almost ramshackle, huge Favela-style
hill town of several hundred thousand people via a series of escalators!
Medellin District 13
But this is just partially how Medellin (and the reminder of
Colombia) has reinvented itself. Perhaps the most expensive commodity in
Colombia is electricity. You see minimal if any lighting in most local shops
(the large shopping malls are certainly the exception!) throughout the city.
The region’s electricity company, owned by the city, generates (no pun
intended!) in the region of $1billion profit a year, which unlike many British
utilities owned by foreign interests, is ploughed back into Medellin’s
infrastructure and transport. This is the reason they have a wonderful metro
train that costs pence to travel on, public attractions that are free or as
near as makes no difference to free to visit, a continual ongoing road
improvement initiative with flyovers and flyunders attempting to ease road
congestion with almost a complete one-way system throughout the entire city,
fuel at around 23p a litre and a spectacularly low cost of living. And a four-bedroom,
four-bathroom, three-reception house in gated grounds will set you back around
£110,000.
However, we were spoilt – we had the services of a private driver for the entire week in Medellin, so we had a very full and
well-planned itinerary (recommended).
And so on to Cartagena on the “Caribbean” coast. The famous
walled city with its castle has seen many a blockbuster filmed there, including
“Romancing the Stone” (Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner), and more recently Netflix’s
“Narcos” and Will Smith’s latest film “Gemini Man”. The old city has a tourist
peninsula just over a mile ‘up the road’ from the old town with some of the
usual suspects such as the Intercontinental and Hilton. And across the bay near
the cruise terminal is the business district with matching hotels that are less
of a tourist attraction and more for those with corporate charge cards.
Unfortunately, what dirties the brush in Cartagena is the constant on-street harrying
by people trying to sell you boat and coach trips or trying to usher you in to
their restaurants. A trip to the Volcan de Lodo El Totumo (a dormant volcano
filled with mud) is quite an experience. However, with the mosquitoes having had
my legs for lunch on a visit to a coffee plantation outside Medellin the
previous week, I found the mud masseurs relieved the irritation almost
immediately!
The famous Bogota Cathedral, star of stage, screen and Spaghetti Westerns galore
Bogota, the capital is a quite attitudinal 8,660 feet
(2,640 meters), meaning that when you land at the airport, your ears don’t pop.
It is an enormous city, home to over seven million people. For those with
little time for a working capital city, you won’t be impressed, although the
ludicrously famous Bolívar Square with its cathedral is the main tourist
attraction in the city, beloved by protesters, celebrants and the film industry
alike – the cathedral has featured in absolutely hundreds of South
American-filmed Spaghetti Westerns and crime dramas over the decades. Worth a
visit is the Gold Museum, with its incredible exhibits that are so rare and
fabulous that they actually cannot be valued. Personally, I loved the vibe, and
my camera never stopped once!
We stayed in the suburban Dan Carlton Hotel, a quite luxurious five star conference hotel. It was
somewhat of a surprise to find that five coffees, a beer and a sparkling water
left change out of £10! But then that’s prices in Colombia for you!
In summation, I really can do nothing but recommend
Columbia.
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