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Published: July 13th 2013
Erika and I
View from our (still not quite finished!) rooftop terraceCali has now become the city I have spent longest in on any of my travels, and the title of this blog is their motto, roughly meaning “Cali is Cali, and the rest is in the hills/over there” (i.e. not as good as Cali!!). I had best laid plans to only stay there two days, but like all best laid plans they were brilliantly interrupted when I met a beautiful Colombian girl, Erika. Wanting to spend as much time as possible with Erika led to me renting a room in a shared house for a month at the bargain price of £130, fully furnished and all bills included!! It was located in the historic quarter of Cali, San Antonio, and even came with a newly added roof terrace that had beautiful views over the city – especially at night. Unfortunately, the building work didn’t stop at the roof terrace and the constant hammering and banging meant that towards the end of my stay I could no longer have my language classes in the house – instead returning to the relative silence of café tostaky – the place where I had originally been staying in Cali!
It’s safe to say that
La Ermita
The prettiest of Cali's churches meeting and spending time with Erika has been the absolute highpoint of the trip, but the backdrop of her home city of Cali has certainly helped provide some great memories of our time together. It’s not a city that people generally take to instantly, but the number of ex-pats that seem to be staying there long-term is a testament to the friendliness of the locals and the magnetic effect they seem to have – once you get to know them!!
This is perhaps best expressed through their love of salsa. Cali is the salsa capital of Colombia, and having a Colombian girlfriend was all the incentive I needed to get my dancing shoes on and take some lessons. However, the next step might seem a bit strange as my instructor ended up being Richie, an Irish guy who had learnt his salsa in Japan!! I had to be very careful explaining this to the Colombians I met as I’m sure most of them thought it was my dodgy Spanish that was to blame for them hearing such a strange tale!!
Richie was a great teacher, and the fact that he spoke fluent English and had also learnt how
Moody clouds
Nighttime view from the roof terrace to dance salsa himself from scratch as an adult, meant that not only did he know some of the difficulties that us lumbering westerners have in moving our bodies in any sort of smooth and co-ordinated manner, but he also could break down each move into its component steps – which definitely helped me to progress rapidly! I ended up having 5 lessons with Ritchie and can’t thank him enough, I was very soon able to hold my own on the dancefloor, and by the end I had 3 or 4 of the basic “rhythm” steps as well as 8 or 9 turns in my repertoire to try and stop Erika from getting bored senseless on the dancefloor during the course of a 3 or 4 minute song! If you want to judge for yourself, the link below is to a video of me after 3 or 4 lessons. Still a bit rusty – but with the majority of my moves on show!!
The salsa dancing also helped me to become a “star” on Colombian TV, as the regional TV network was doing a program with four chapters – each based on the interesting work or project
of a foreigner in Cali. One of the chapters was on Richie’s salsa teaching, in which I am hanging around in the background trying to dance, and the second is on a language exchange that was run in Café Tostaky, and in this one they actually use a few seconds of the interview that shot with me (In Spanish)!!, and I get “Mark Freitag – Inglaterra” credited in the caption!! If that’s not hitting the big time I don’t know what is! I’m just glad they didn’t feel the need to subtitle my Spanish – that would have been the ultimate embarassment! This one isn't subtitled into English, so you'll need to flick to 3 minutes 45 seconds to hear my dulcet tones!!
While in Cali I, of course, also found time to keep the good run of form going in the pub quizzes, this time leading our team to victory at the appropriately named “London Bar”. We had been a little sceptical at the high entry fee, and the fact that quite a few of the entrants seemed to be hard-core quizzers, but the questions fell our way and we ended up walking away
with the top prize – a cool 50% of the entrance fees. Needless to say the £90 or so went a long way behind the bar and everyone had a great night. I retired gracefully at about 3.30a.m. but I know some of the guys went on a lot, lot longer!!
As well as imported games like pub quizzes, I also got to try my hand at something much more traditional – Tejo. It’s a game that basically involves throwing lumps of iron at gunpowder, while drinking!! If all this sounds a bit hard to believe I’ll try and explain!! You get given a 2 kilo iron disc and four packets of gunpowder and stand at one end of the lane with your weapon. At the other is a board filled with clay that has an iron ring in its centre. After arranging the gunpowder on top of the ring, the aim is to hit it with your disc crushing the gunpowder with enough force to set off the explosion!! Erika and I were throwing from the beginner’s zone, maybe 15 metres away, while a bunch of locals were lobbing their weapons from so far away that they may
have been in a different time zone!! Annoyingly they also seemed to have far more success, with massive explosions coming from their lane on a far more regular basis than ours! To give you a bit more of an idea, this link shows a CNN journalist giving it a go!!
Outside of Cali we did manage to fit in some trips further afield, the best of which was to Lago Calima, a very pleasant lake which at weekends is thronging with Caleños, but during the week we had it virtually to ourselves to enjoy a boat ride, lunch and an amazing rainbow around the sun which apparently is called its “halo”.
One of my general perceptions of Colombians is that they are fiercely proud of the area of the country that they come from, with each having fairly distinct personalities. There is of course one thing that completely unites the country (and my language teacher told me that it’s the ONLY thing that unites the country!!) the beautiful game of football. Colombian football is going through a purple patch at the moment, with a rise to 3 in the world ranking (July 2013) and while I
Christo Rey
Cali's answer to Rio!! was in Cali they secured a 0-0 draw away in Argentina and beat Peru at home to put one foot in the world cup in Brazil 2014. I couldn’t leave without sampling some live football, and the game available to me was a second division match involving the city’s second team “America de Cali”. Now I’m not saying that the fans have a bad reputation, but there’s a saying in Cali that when America are playing you can leave your doors open as all the thieves are in the stadium! Anyway, their apparently light-fingered nature was more than matched by their lung-bursting passion, and it was a pleasure to watch and listen to the end housing the hard-core fans bouncing up and down for the full 90 minutes without pause – even though their team somehow contrived to lose 2-0 against an absolutely hopeless bunch of mugs!
Unfortunately youtube has turned a pretty crisp original video into a mass of pixels, but you get the idea!!
Cali had been an amazing place, and somewhere I was definitely sad to leave. Renting a room there had made me feel a bit more like part of the fabric,
View from Christo Rey
You can see the huge football stadium in the foreground and I really enjoyed getting so involved in the Caleño lifestyle with Erika and having experiences that just wouldn’t have come about if I hadn’t have met her or I was only passing through for a couple of days. Another real highlight involved me being invited to the graduation party of one of Erika's sisters which was being held at their family home. I somehow ended up on chef duty grilling steaks on the BBQ, and as the Colombians like their meat burned to a crisp rather than the rare I prefer, it was a long and sweaty job as each steak had to be cooked for what felt like an hour!!! Luckily only 2 (of the 40 or so I cooked) were sent back, so I think it was quite successful overall and it was great to be such a help to Erika and her family!! Erika and I will be meeting up again at the beginning of August to travel through northern Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica together, so I can’t wait for that!!
As well as Cali, I also spent longer than expected in Medellin, which is now an incredibly modern, liveable and vibrant city, but
Open air theatre
There was a dance festival in town ans best of all it was completely free! it had a terrible reputation owing to it being the stronghold of Pablo Escobar, the most famous of the Colombian drugs barons - something I’ll talk about a bit more below.
Outside of the influence of Escobar, big highlights of my time in Medellin were a day trip to the small town of Guatape, which is a base for climbing Peñón de Guatapé, a giant 200 metre high rock that gives commanding views of the beautiful azure blue finger lake that stretches off into the distance. Luckily on the day I was there, the sky was clear amplifying the blue hues given off by the water.
I was also put in touch with a friend of a friend, Jamie, who while hailing from England is currently living in Medellin with his Colombian partner and their young son. Jaime showed me round some interesting places in Medellin – such as the university where he works, and I’ll forever be thankful for the fact that he invited me round for dinner and cooked up homemade burgers that were certainly the best since Argentina!
Despite being a huge commercial city of 3 million odd inhabitants, Medellin has a vast national
park lurking just outside it. Parque Arvi is reached by cable car – a form of award winning integrated public transport established to help connect the poorer suburbs that have started to sprawl up the sides of the mountain with the rest of the city proper. My cable car ride included free bike hire to explore the park, and while I certainly won’t be looking to use that particular hog to ride the tour de france, it wasn’t the worst, and I spent a great day exploring on 2 wheels – although it will come as no surprise that a mountain top national park contained some pretty severe hills, and in these moments of puffing and panting up the inclines I was left yearning for my smooth hybrid bike that is currently languishing in my parent’s garage!
However, the one name that continues to be synonymous with Medellin is that of Pablo Escobar. At the height of his powers Medellin was regarded as one of the most dangerous cities in the world and it’s amazing to see what has been achieved in the relatively short time since his death in 1993 and more noticeably since 2000 when the security
Runaway Chiva!
This traditional form of rural transport is often jazzed up and turned into a party bus!! situation really started improving.
Whatever your views on Escobar (some in Medellin regard his as a hero given that he cultivated a “Robin Hood” image and regularly gave back to the poor), it’s a part of Medellin’s history that although many Paisas (people from Medellin) are still uncomfortable talking about, the demand for information means that enterprising souls – including Pablo Escobar’s brother – have started tourist tours around the principle sites in Escobar’s life – including his grave!
I was interested to find out more so signed up to what would hopefully be the more objective of the two tours I found on offer (I thought that the tour run by his brother might not be entirely impartial – and it was also nearly double the price!!).
The tour charted his rise from middle class obscurity to one of the most powerful and wealthiest men in the world. We visited some of his properties (most bearing the bullet marks or wreckage from bomb blasts that punctuated his lifestyle!!), and we heard anecdotes from his life which gave character to his personality of never accepting no for an answer – like when an exclusive golf course refused
him membership, so he simply constructed a 10 story mansion overlooking the course so that he could see in and every time the members played they would be reminded of Escobar’s presence!!
The tour concluded with the house where Escobar was shot, and finally his grave which is apparently the second most visited in Latin America after Evita Perron! According to the rumours, Escobar was hunted by a combination of an elite, US trained army unit setup specifically to hunt Escobar, a group of vigilantes funded and supported by those who had been wronged by Escobar, as well as alleged direct involvement by US forces, who between them tracked him down to his aunt’s house where he and his most loyal bodyguard were killed.
Without looking to glorify the life of a man who offered a reward of $2,000 for every policeman murdered, leading to an estimated 600 assassinations, there are two stories about his excessive lifestyle that I want to recount just because they are very funny indeed!!
In one of his private mansions between Medellin and the capital Bogota, Escobar desired a number of hippos to “occupy” the grounds!! Given his power it was no
View from the top of Peñón de Guatapé
The weather was beautiful and made the lake even more azure problem to pay the appropriate bribes to have 4 hippos smuggled into the country! After his death the hippos went feral and finding Colombia’s rainforest and lack of predators to their liking have multiplied to over 40! They aren’t content just to wander the grounds of their former home, so have expanded to the local river systems leading to conflict with the locals and at least 3 being shot!! There was also a rumour that some had been contained and you could now visit a hippo themed adventure park!! Only in Colombia!!
The other involved Escobar throwing a huge party at one of his mansions, and him finding out at late notice that a suspicious wife/mistress was coming to visit him and obviously wouldn’t approve. To skirt round a massive argument he whistled up one of his private jets to gather all the party goers and fly them round for a couple of hours continuing the party in the air, while he survived the interrogation from his partner at ground level. Suitably placated, she left to one of their other mansions, and the plane swooped back into land and the party barely skipped a beat!
The killing of
Escobar marked the beginning of the end of a terrible period for Colombia – a period where travel and trade between the three largest cities of Colombia was severely limited because the routes were controlled by the “narco-traficantes”, and the city of Medellin was a ghost town every night with people afraid to leave their homes after dark. It’s amazing to see how far Colombia has come in the last decade or so, and even though their international reputation is still quite ropey as a tourist destination, I expect that in another 10-15 years it will be one of the go-to places on everyone’s list, and I feel very privileged to be experiencing it during the infancy of what will surely soon be a very successful tourist industry!!
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