Advertisement
Published: December 2nd 2008
La Habana to Colombia via Panama…… Medellin airport is a long way from the city…the closest flatenough land I suppose…the taxi pulls out of the airport before asking me where I’m going?…when I tell him he doesn’t know the hotel…flags down another cab, no idea either…back to the airport…a gathering of cabs argues about the location…I had booked online, it looked impressive in the photo on their website, and they did have a website (?) eventually we get there, one of several hundred el cheapo hotels, the neon sign looked vaguely like the impressive façade of the website ….up the narrow stairs which barely held me and a skinny suitcase….but friendly people, nice little kitchen jammed into the courtyard…dead centre of the old city….just fantastic…lots of galleries, museums and the sculptures of Medellin’s favourite son Fernando Botero whose oversized, jolly, rotund figures pack the surrounding parks and gardens….and also big crowds of people, lots of beggars and street scruffs, danger abounds for the unwary. By now I can sort of blend in and not stand out as such a touristy type…..on every block bundled shapes of homeless sleeping on the sidewalks…..reminds me of New York in summer.
Medellin stretches along the
narrow floor of a steep, steep valley. Along the valley floor the river, railway, metro and highways scramble over each other for passage. The aboveground metro is modern and a little overefficient. Once I was late getting to the door and as they started closing I pushed my shoulder forward, as you do, except here the doors just kept closing….amputations not unheard of, I backed off shocked.
Sic Transit Gloria:
A few days in the country. I take the metro to the bus terminal and let myself be carried along by the crowd until I see something that resembles my destination and negotiate a ticket. The old bus, painted up like an old tart, her name proudly emblazoned across the windscreen in red Romanesque “Gloria”effectively blocking 85% of the driver’s vision and reminding me of a certain fishing boat.
I found a vacant double seat and sagged in but I was right over the rear axle. Right where the springs must have been, once apon a time. I was thrown out of the seat several times. There’s a very pregnant girl opposite me, must be 9.5 months at least, I’m preparing to boil water and tear up
sheets, she’s going to pup any minute. Maybe her doctor/husband sent her out to get things moving? She’s looking sic.
Eventually I get off at the little colonial village. Fabulous old stonework, cobblestone streets, old guys on even older horses clobber past. My hotel is enormous, labyrinthine, massive stone walls, dark corners, wide, well-worn stairways, huge stone columns, an almost-horizon pool, baskets of flowers hanging from balconies, big shade trees. Clecking geckos echoes fill the courtyards of 1,000 year old stone walls. The spa quietly bubbles in the corner. I’m out doing midnight laps in the full moonlight thru the palm fronds.
By day, tiny, exquisite hummingbirds hover and sip at the nectar from the hanging basket flowers.
Down the street, the inevitable, enormous, stone block church dominates the square. It’s pigeon-shit stained whitewash looking somewhat forlorn at the south end of the pebble paved Parque Centrale, complete with elaborate fountains, statues from the valiant past and wonderful, expansive shade trees.
In the centre of the park, stone seats and old cowboys, two dogs chase each other around the statue then flop into the fountain to cool off. The usual jumble of hippie-bead-stalls ring the park, something universally same
about them, is it reassuring or boring? Canadian dream catchers, Guatemalan weavings, Jamaican faux rasta caps, Chinese beads and bangles, anything Colombian?
Around the square, restaurants and bars sprawl plastic chairs and tables out under the shade trees, little motos put-put around, more horses clatter past, all v tranquil, boys watching the girls watching the boys, mamas and papas watching the daughters, big family atmosphere, almost a party feel especially in the evening. Very slow during the day.
Incongruous internet booths and coke vending machines in ancient stone clefts.
At my hotel, the pool would be horizon except for the low stone wall. The view is out over high mountains and steep valleys. Huge birds, poetically Condors, in reality turkey buzzards, riding the currents up the valley will suddenly appear over the wall like those movie shots of the gun-bristling helicopter rising up over the cliff.
Atop the opposite mountain storm clouds are brewing. It’s getting darker, the wind picks up, the pool fills up with leaves stripped from the trees and swirling around the courtyard. On the other side of the valley the farmers battle the steep slopes to gather their sheep and goats. In the
hotel, the staff look apprehensive, no guests other than me, plastic umbrellas and chairs are being blown away.
Later at night a big storm blows up the valley and cracking thunder and lightning engulf us. The little party lights strung thru the trees twinkle bravely, bluely, thru the palm fronds in the pissing rain like some aquatic disco. There are no gutters so the rainwater gushes off the roof from the semi-circular terracotta tiles.
Next day it’s calm again. Down the cobblestone street a couple of cowboys on horseback clatter past. Stocky, sturdy and sure-footed. And the horses are pretty good too.
4 days of egg omelette breakfast and they still can’t get it right. I have told them every day how to do it. Finally I go to the kitchen and discover why…..the melt point of their cheese is somewhere south of aluminium.
More incongruity, outside the 700 year old church, thru cracks in the stucco ancient stonework, a crew of slightly built labourers desperately manhandle an independently minded jackhammer. The shiny Ingersoll Rand compressor purs away as the jackhammer rattles all windows and teeth within 100 feet. They’re cutting a trench with pick
and shovel thru the cobblestones and other previous road surfaces. As they get deeper I spot what looks like shards of Aztecian pottery but can’t get close enough to confirm it. They cut off the water for half a day. Shades of La Habana. It’s that déjà vu thing again.
Betel nuts in the palm of my hand……
Back to Medellin. Fabulous TV. Ads for health promotion, condoms, anti-cocaine, support lines for good health, addiction cures, news of more guerrilla/drug cartel busts and a wonderful 2 minute spiel explaining the 10 reasons why kissing is good for you!! Fantastico!!
Next to my hotel, in the red light district, I befriend a number of the girls who spend the days and nights leaning against the shopfronts, preening themselves, chasing tourists and seemingly getting very little business. It’s the poorer end of town and the quality of the asset enhancements shows it. Some of the inserts are bizarre, improbable, but somehow in keeping with the nearby Botero sculptures. Grotesque trannies and misshapen tits and bums. I discovered, more or less by accident, that silicone is quite cold to the touch. (if it’s thick enough?) Quite a surprise in
such a hot and sweaty climate to feel something so cool
Leaving Medellin: 6am start, my concierge mate hails a cab, the girls on the corner wave, the skinny young driver is chirpy enough, music blaring, strong smell of herb superb, when I ask him about it he cracks up. And it’s back via the tortuous, winding, roller-coaster road, dodging washouts, mudslides and water rivering over the road. Passing over double lines and blind corners, once again pondering my fate in the hands of lunatics….but after all, family, employers, education, politics, substance abuse and children all prepared me for this.
Mama told me not to come. Mama’s influence….omnipresent, omnipotent, omnivorous….I’ve been watching too much Jeopardy. Conga lines of beautiful chicas but all vacuous eyed, chewing their gum-cuds, sniffling, hacking, spitting, snarling sweetly….you know the story.
On the plane again, 30 mins into the flight, with all the precision and accuracy that modern science provides, the captain announces the forecast for clear skies and smooth flying about 25 nanoseconds before we plunge 10,000 feet. What about just looking out the window? Flight attendants pick themselves up and scrape off whatever they were carrying. It almost disrupted some people
from their cell phone conversations.
The well lubricated KY life:
Back in the USA. The land of the free, incredible amount of spitting, smoking, butts thrown down with gay abandon, cell-phone conversations while driving seem mandatory even texting is normal, the cops are from a different planet…not to be fooled with, and down here, back in Kentucky, the hillbillies meet the rednecks, the city meets the bush….it’s fantastic, a lot of similarities with parts of rural Oz…an old guy in a bar tells me how he went to Oz about 20 years ago, rented a car and drove inland (he doesn’t like cities) and told me how friendly the people were and that it was like going back in time 50 years. I told him I had the same feeling.
Back to Kentucky. Big bearded beer bellies, blue bib and brace coveralls. Autumn colours changing so rapidly. Every day new shades of red and yellow. The sound of leaves falling, spooky. Lots of deer, hunters in the woods, deer jumping on cars, the highways strewn with dead ones. And so much space and big rivers. Cincinatti is a just-the-right-size city, big enough for all that big city
stuff you might need or may want to see every year or two…then 10 minutes drive and your in rural surrounds, 20 minutes drive and you’re in the backwoods.
One of the last places on Earth where you can go into a pub and sit up at the bar and light up. One of the last tobacco states, Kentucky has cheap cigarettes and slack laws.
And now the winter of my discontent approaches too quickly. Thermal underwear, insulated coveralls, gloves (several pairs) beany, ear-flap hat, thick(er) socks, boots, layers of material. One has to be v careful putting anything in a pocket. With so many layers and positions it can be a long search to go thru all the options. It’s getting really cold, like below freezing sometimes all day! The car is frosted over, doors frozen shut, you can feel the coldth seeping thru pantlegs and gloves, if the gloves get wet it’s painfully fast how the cold carries thru’. And all the houses, cars, stores etc are superwarm so you get an unreal, artificial half minute or so to get from house to car or store to car. It’s fine as long as you don’t get caught
Dallas Bookstore
the Dallas book depositoryout for more than 5 minutes. It is in fact quite fun skating on the icy stupormarket carpark
Thanksgiving, like xmas, the catalyst that bring families together but simultaneously rubs salt in the wounds of family divisions. My first Thanksgiving in the US and a wonderful day.
For many people it has been reduced to ‘turkey day’ which just about sums it, or them, up.
There’s snow this morning. They had tipped a foot or more but only a light dusting. I can see now how it is that the Innuit have 25 words for snow. There are so many different types. This morning it’s a dusting of very small balls of ice, not hailstones but v small balls of snow. Yesterday it was big fluffy flakes, on the road I saw a few other varieties. But I think I’ve seen enough.
On the Road:
I’ve been fortunate to be working with a guy who designs, constructs and sets-up garden railways. So hard to explain but here’s the link
www.appliedimagination.biz
And I’ve been able to travel around a bit doing the set-ups. Dallas for the Texas state fair, it was big and everything
early days - Washington
early days Washington DC about Texas that you hear is probably true. Strange days indeed!. I can barely understand some of the broader accents, ditto for Ky and I expect the reciprocal is also true. Who has the accent?…..You call that an accent?
I had time one arvo to nip down to Elm street where JFK got shot. Walked the street, saw the book depository window, saw the 2 X’s on the road, the only indicator of what happened, I clambered up on the actual grassy knoll, agreed with the ‘second shooter theory’ took a photo. Quite surprising in the land of bigger brighter everything there is not a single sign or plaque to commemorate JFK’s assassination!!
Then a 3 week road trip. The drive across to Washington was pretty speccy. I’m driving one of the big GMC trucks towing one of the big trailers. Endless miles of autumn colours, rolling hills, huge rivers, settlements and cities. Roadkill deer wall to wall, I’m surprised at how much bush there is, miles and miles of it. The incredible highway infrastructure never ceases to amaze me. The whole country is crisscrossed with these endless steel and concrete and bitumen bands that leap over rivers,
George Washington Bridge approach
approaching George Washington Bridge - NYC cut thru mountain ranges sprawl across the plains and then weave into mindboggling spaghetti spools at their convergences. I’ve invested in a Garmin and I have the Australian girl voice so we call her Matilda. She’s not real bright but gets us where we’re going most of the time!
Washington DC: just across from the Capitol, in the botanical gardens, sweet set up. Down the road is the American Indian Museum. A fabulous place and a great cafeteria (I love eating Indian) Lunchtimes driving around to see the Lincoln memorial, Arlington cemetery, the White House, and we were there on Election Day with celebrations after work. It was strangely subdued on the Wednesday. After so many months of election hype, and it was tedious, interminable and scary hype, and after the euphoria of the Tuesday night, it was quite the anti-climax on Wednesday. Somehow it was over and won but now the long wait until he gets into the big house.
I got a break from driving and took the highspeed train from Washington to NYC. It was pretty cool. There’s something universally the same about the view from trains. Everything is old and covered in that brown
gunk. Mazes of overhead cables, giant fractured insulators, steel poles like girders, archaic power substations with rusty, illegible warnings of instant death, enormous transformers and mazes of cables and all blurred by the brown powdery grime. The garbage, the grafitti and those super-resilient bright green vines that disguise so much. This could be anywhere.
Hypnotic strobic flashes of sleepers, the whipping and jumping rail lines on the other track, the endless tons of ballast, and the peeping-tom views of backyards. It’s like people whose properties back onto railways don’t give a rat’s about the trains, everything in the yard is shamelessly open and exposed, I’m getting to see their intimacies, and you can see how the front yards, that front the street, are all so pristinely manicured and so neat and tidy.
Sunny backyards with autumn leaves falling, mesmeric flashes of light thru the leaves in time with the rocking rolling gait of the train. Small settlements of densely packed, identical houses and apartments, miles of bushland, leaves whipped up by the train flash past the window then we burst out onto the flats by Chesapeake bay.
Wilmington, Delaware, Philadelphia, cities of legend and folklore.
Industrial wastelands. You
can’t believe how many million acres under these weird and dangerous looking complexes. Ominous spurts of coloured gasses vent from towers and tubes, windsocks around the perimeter fence alert the neighbouring residents as to whom should be nervous.
And railways unfortunately become the dumping ground for all sorts of rubbish. Under an old bridge, way out in the bush, a rather comfortable looking oversized stuffed office deskchair, something from a CEO’s office in the 50’s sits with a lovely view of the trains, some trainspotting derro’s throne.
Travelling North and the autumn has beaten us, trees are barer and drabber, it’s colder too and the bare branch bareness of a bleak winter show us what’s coming. It’s similar to a post-bushfire landscape. And you can see further. Big billboards promoting everything from automatic assault weapons to strange solutions to even stranger health problems. And the gun culture is as inanely popular as ever. Guns are as popular/necessary as Prozac on the downtown train.
We got into Penn station and walked down to Grand Central. Always good to be back in the City, jesus wept, I’m starting to sound like somebody I don’t like. 5th Avenue was closed off for
about 30 blocks for a street market with all sorts of food and goodies and the same hippy bead stalls as are everywhere. Did I tell you about them?
New York: we’re way out of town, up in the Bronx, at their Botanical gardens, great gardens, a Henry Moore exhibition I had seen in July with 25 of his huge sculptures spread around the million acres, absolutely perfect situation for these works and interestingly different to now see them in winter.
We walked into the huge, heated, glass-domed exhibition space where we were to set up. I was confronted by a huge twisted gum tree and a giant bottle brush. What more iconic Aussie bush could it have been? We set-up the train display weaving thru the plants.
I got my 15 minutes of fame after chatting up a photographer from the NY Daily News ..see if this link works….and the audio slide show…
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/bronx/2008/11/18/2008-11-18_little_big_apple_natural_materials_used_.html
Then an overnighter long haul to Chicago: an absolutely astounding botanical gardens, really mindblowing but again a long way out of town and it was really cold. One day it didn’t get over 28 F. The gardens are set in
La Gorda, Medellin
La Gorda - Medellin one of the shmicker neighbourhoods, fabulous houses and sweet little shops, the Chicago Bot Gardens have 10 times the budget of the NY ones partly because it’s like the private gardens of the rich locals(?)
In Chicago I got to feel the cold. It was dark and snowing going home from work at 5pm. The stupormarket carpark was covered in ice, it was slippery as snot. Snow drifts up against the motel walls and in the carpark. More than 2 or 3 minutes outside and you were frozen. Great time to quit smoking.
Little things I’m learning. You can’t leave the esky in the boot with beer in it or it’ll be frozen by morning….yes, inside the esky, inside the boot. And this isn’t really winter yet. There are still some idiots wearing shorts around.
Somewhere along the way I drove past Kent State University…now that’s only for the old hippies out there but it really gave me the goosebumps…remember Kent State?
One of the bummers about the work was that by the end of the 10 hour day, you’re tired, it’s dark, it’s cold and all you want is to get back to the motel,
have a shower and a couple of beers and maybe get something to eat and find The Family Guy marathon on the cable TV. It was difficult to get energised enough to get downtown.
Anyway, now it’s all over. I’ve retired. I’m catching the train out of Cincy at 1am Sat morning, 10 hours to Chicago, then 43 hours to LA, then a 10 hour wait and a flight back to, yes, you guessed it, Fiji. That’s some sort of full circle. Then on to Sinny and a connecto to Melbourne. I’ll be back in town on Wed the 10th in the arvo.
Hope to see some of you, thanks for all of you who have travelled with me, especially those of you who sent comments and news of home.
Where will we go next?
Advertisement
Tot: 0.068s; Tpl: 0.021s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0355s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.2mb
