FARC off.

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Woah, what a title! So many different levels! What? Have I been abducted? No, I just thought, you know... sometimes along comes something that's pithy, terse and succinct, and that's too damn good not to use. Oh come on! You'd have done the same. Anyway, it's better than this entry's working title "Colombia, Backpack, Graham". Hmmm, is it too late to start again?

Colombia! Crash! Backpack! Bang! Graham! Wallop! No, wait... too much explosive energy in the first six words methinks. This entry's in danger of climaxing too soon. Peaks and troughs, dear boy, that's what people want... OK, one last try...

On 17th June 2006, my mother's dreams came true when her little boy grabbed a rucksack and went for a stroll around Colombia. Oh, you should have seen her face when I told her I was going; it was an absolute picture. The way those lived-in little features of hers crinkled up around those rolling tears, that's something that'll stay with me for years to come. The truth was, it didn't matter how much of a fuss she made, I'm afraid I simply wasn't prepared not to come. I'd had a few evening classes before leaving England to try and give myself a grounding in Spanish and ever since getting to know my teacher I was desperate to come here and get to know the people. She was like the Colombian version of my mum (minus the tears, obviously). Every bit as lovely, and full of Latin spirit. Having sacked off my plans to come here down the Brazilian rainforest, this makes Colombia my final destination before my fast-approaching departure from these shores.

And this place continues to exceed my expectations. From the second I touched down in Bogotá even the thought alone that I'm here is enough to make me smile. Smile at the fact I've finally arrived, smile at the fact that so many things here are beautiful and lovely and, if I'm being honest, even my determination to come to a place that so many people won't even consider visiting makes me pleased with myself. Oh, and a smile for the fact that I'm finally out of Bolivia, claro que si!

[If you're after the gist of my last entry - which I wrote as a concession to my non-English speaking latino friends - I went to Bolivia, not much worked, the people are (relatively) miserable - though not without good reason. Saw some salt decided to come to Colombia for the World Cup got stuck in La Paz as my flight company folded in front of my very eyes, bussed it to Peru and flew in from there. Meaning about 96% of that entry must be waffle.]

I spent almost a week in Bogotá where about six hours every morning were taken up with the football. And I didn't do too much in the afternoons, either. The place I was staying in had wheeled in a TV for the occasion but it just stayed on all day and with a dozen chairs pointed at it. There didn't really seem too much else to do in the afternoons anyway. Plus having just arrived in the place I was erring on the side of caution to begin with and once it got dark I was too scared to go for a walk from the hostel anyway. Ooph, you should have seen the beggars for my first few days; they must have thought Christmas and birthday had come at once. I mean, who knows which ones are strapped with gats?

The nightlife was cool though. Very expensive but there's a lot of fun to be had around La Zona Rosa. And you've never seen two such dribbling idiots as the first time Chris and I went out. After Brazil and Argentina you think you've seen precisely how stunning the feminine form can get. And then you go to Bogotá (incidentally reputed amongst Colombians to have the country's ugliest women. ¡Oh dios mío...!)

Still, after about six nights we were ready to move on. There wasn't much to keep us there - one afternoon a few of us had even resorted to going to Latin America's (self-proclaimed) oldest bowling alley, complete with sweaty men racking up the pins and rolling your balls back to you.

And so we booked a nightbus to Medellin, Colombia's second biggest city. Turned out to be an immensely eye-opening journey. Up until 2am it was also possibly the most uncomfortable squeezed into a minibusish bus with broken reclining seats on very potholed roads.

Eventually we got to a mountain pass and stopped for three hours. Because of heavy guerrilla activity everyone had to wait for daylight. The police routinely close this section of road as it was notorious for kidnap. And so, we sat around waiting and talking with a Colombian family with two small kids and it was quite educative to see first-hand how this was simply a way of life in Colombia.

At daybreak an enormous police convoy escorted maybe 20 buses, 30 HGV's and countless other cars through lush mountainous cloud forest so beautiful I felt guilty for not being able to stay awake.

We arrived into Medellin at around 8am and our taxi driver - like so many other Colombians - bowled me over with his cordiality in welcoming us to his country and his city and we checked into our hostel.

Above everything else, Medellin strikes me as being famous for two reasons; if you've seen Blow then you'll know throughout the 1980's the city used to be the world's drug smuggling capital. Additionally at around the same time it also had the world's highest murder rate outside of a war-zone.

It wasn't until the 1980's that various mafioso groups started cultivating cocaine but things took off rapidly to say the least. Within ten years the biggest player in all of this was the Medellin Cartel, led by Pablo Escobar. At the height of all this, Medellin was suffering thousands upon thousands of murders each year, while the cartel's bosses were free to live in luxury. They founded two newspapers, their own political party and in 1982 Escobar himself was elected into Congress.

A year later the governmnet began to fight back and gradually an all-out war ensued. In 1989 Luis Carlos Galán - the favoured Liberal presidential candidate - was assassinated. As a result of this the government confiscated 1,000 mafia-owned properties and appeased the US by passing a host of extradition laws.

The Medellin Cartel's response was ruthless, massacring and car-bombing anyone who stood in its way. The following national government opened negotiations with the country's various cartels and a deal was struck repealing the extradition laws while the surviving cartel bosses handed themselves in. Escobar built his own luxury prison and spent a short time there. When the government decided to move him to a more secure location, he fled.

The truth is, Escobar considered himself something of a Robin Hood figure. He certainly had a lot of supporters, as over the years he'd ploughed plenty of money into the poorer sections of the communities around Medellin. He'd even built a rather neat-looking shantytown up on the slopes of the city. At weekends he'd take hog-roasts to those with nothing and it's thought that many of his supporters helped him to evade the authorities for so long. In the end it took a special force of 1500 men 499 days to track him down and he was finally killed in December 1993.

Since the cartel's destruction normality has returned to Medellin. It's a friendly lively city of some 3m people. The place has a sizeable (mind-blowingly beautiful) student population and feels full of energy.

I'm sure there was culture in Medellin but no one from my hostel was looking for it! The nightlife is just so good and now Medellin will be forever up there in my mind with Guadalajara ("Would you like me to lapdance?") and Rio ("OPAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!") as my all-time favourite cities. I've started thinking about coming back here for a few months' work in between Japan and getting a real job. (Uh-oh, does anyone else picture my 'real job' interview like I do? "Hello! Yes, I'm 57 and finished my degree before you were born, you little whippersnapper. Experience? No, but what do you think about this lovely leathery tan? It's all paid for!")

Had a great ten days in Medellin although the excess did half kill me. With the exception of Monday and Tuesday nights you're really never far from a party and plenty of clubs with different music nights means you can always find something you like. (Incidentally the music genres around in Colombia can be categorised as the following: salsa, merengue, vallenato, tropical, lots of reggaton and UB40's Red Red Wine, which they can't get enough of.)

After a week or so, the guys I'd arrived with were ready to go up to Cartagena, Colombia's most beautiful colonial city on the Caribbean coast. I'll be on my way there at some point but for now was itching to get away from all of the gringoes in Medellin because, nice as it can be spending time with them, I can pretty much do that at home.

I decided to go to the nearby town of Santa Fe De Antioquia, a beautiful colonial town that's extremely popular with Colombian tourists getting away for the weekend. And not a foreigner in sight (except this one)!

The place is really pretty laid-back, and quite reminiscent of Antigua, Guatemala as far as the architecture's concerned. Rows of one-storey stone houses and shops each painted in soft tones of pinks, yellows, blues and strung along cobbled streets. One day I'm going to teach the world that tarmac's just better all round but for now it looks quite nice.

I got kicked out of my hotel after two nights for shitting in someone else's bed when I was blind drunk. Just kidding... it was my bed! Or the hotel was fully booked that weekend, I don't remember. Anyway, I couldn't get a bed in any of the hotels and would have been happy to have moved on but a couple of local families I'd got friendly with decided to take me in when they heard about my predicament.

In the end I stayed with them for about ten days. And I absolutely loved it! And they absolutely loved me, hurrah! They were two single sisters who lived side-by-side, one with her 13 year-old son and the other with her 22-year-old daughter. As well as this they had a couple of crazy washed-out alcoholic uncles one of whom I first met when he was having a full-blown argument in the street with what can only be described as a parked car. It turns out his life used to be pretty peachy not so many years ago working as one of Pablo's favourite right-hand men but when the cartel was destroyed his life went off the rails and he hit the bottle in a big way. Eventually his wife left him and recently one of his children died and now he seems to spend his time stumbling around the town, shirt open and bullet wounds hanging out rambling utterly incoherently to anyone who'll listen. Really quite sad.

But let that take nothing away from the family; they were absolutely lovely and once again I couldn't help but feel immensely flattered that I'd been so warmly received into these people's houses and made to feel such an integral part of the family.

Because it was still the high Colombian holiday season, no-one seemed to have any work to do and they had a lot of their relatives from Medellin staying around the town and coming over to visit most days. Most of my time there was just spent playing with the children and drinking and dancing with the adults. Between them they all kept cooking up long-overdue healthy tasty food. When we had fish they found it hilarious that it hadn't crossed my mind to eat the head and as much as it pained me, I dutifully indulged them (and under their guidance I was really shocked to learn just how few parts of a fish's head can't be sucked, plucked or eaten).

I kept threatening to cook something up before I left. I suppose the onus was on me to come up with something simple, flashy and above all as quintessentially English as war. The good Lord alone knows why, but to that end I stubbornly decided on Beef Wellington. Beef fucking Wellington, I ask you?! That square meal that I, for one, eat at least three times a day.

It was doomed from the start. I mean, what's a country coming to when you can't buy frozen packs of ready made puff pastry from your local supermarket? No matter; I'll just make it myself... how different from pancake batter can it really be? Hmmmm, what's next on the list? Oh, of course. The goose pâté. What's that, Señor? You don't stock foie gras because as a country you're languishing somewhere around the third world? Well, I'll just take the tub of luncheon meat; that fat-tongued mockney twat Jamie Oliver'll be the first person to tell you it's a fine alternative for mashed-up bird bits...

Thinking about that last substitution, I gave it the go-ahead purely and simply because luncheon meat, too... was pink. As for the beef tenderloin, well that just seemed a little pricey, really. Just give me that hunk of leather that those flies seem so satisfied with...

So, with the help of my able-bodied assistant some four hours later it was ready. OK, hands up all those who think that Carne de Vaca Wellington was a resounding success. Yeah? Really? Well then, let me tell you something: It tasted like the back end of an arse. But none of that mattered because, washed down with lashings of cheap wine cartons I can't think of anything that's made so many people laugh so much! (I wish I still had the photos I'd taken from those weeks, but I lost them all along with yet another camera. I don't really want to talk about it, but rest assured I finally decided that I'm done with buying cameras until I move to Japan, so unless I carry on stealing photos this blog's going to get a whole lot duller.)

A couple of days later, and it was time to leave. Instead of just threatening to leave and staying deciding to stay another night. Friends of the family gave me a lift back to Medellin and, well, being Medellin maybe I'd just hang around for another day or two before deciding where to go next.

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Photos

Paying my Respects to Pablo
In one of my 'I´m a rich foreigner, please rape and mug me' T-shirts that I occasionally have to use as a last resort.

Central Bogotá again
(Another photo that I didn't take myself)

Bogotá's Gold Museum
Gold. Old. Boring.

Puente de Occidente
Just outside Santa Fe de Antioquia. One of Latin America's first suspension bridges.

A Police-Style 'E-fit' Reconstruction...
of my adoptive family in Santa Fe De Antioquia. God, I'm sick of losing cameras.

Comments

[Mother]

Almost time to kill the fatted calf!
So glad you made it safely to Colombia, son. My tears have now all dried and I have been busying myself putting your newly-acquired favourite food in the freezer for your return, as fish heads are somewhat cheaper than fatted calves! Every time I open the freezer their faces look back at me ~ their littlefeatures even more lived in than mine!