January 26, 2008
Day 850

El Peñól.

I decided to get out of the city for the day and took a trip to the hills surrounding Medellin. After a short uphill bus ride, I was out of the city and in another world. My first stop was El Peñól, a massive 200-meter high rock sitting on top of a high hill. The Colombian genius engineers had built a staircase all the way to the top of the rock in a small crevasse on the side. I huffed and puffed my way up the stairs, constantly minding the broken guardrails, low-hanging overhead rocks, and crumbling steps. At the top of the rock was a three-story building with an amazing panoramic view. I could see the entire chain of lakes created by the dam that supplied power to Medellin, as well as the mandatory resorts and rich peoples' houses that came with such a beautiful place.

Next I took a shuttle to the nearby town of Guatapé. People were offering pontoon cruises around the lakes, there was a zip line at the edge of the main lake, the buildings and churches were prettily painted, and there were plenty of people from Medellin getting caught up in the hullabaloo. The little town, the lakes, and the forests that covered up most of the rest of the land in the region reminded me of Minocqua, WI. It was kind of a strange remembrance considering that Guatapé was thirty-five degrees closer to the equator than Minocqua.

The photo album for this entry is here.

January 24-25, 2008
Days 848-849

Downtown Medellin.

Medellin used to be the most problematic city in Colombia. Pablo Escobar's drug cartel was more powerful than the government and was constantly at war with the other cartels, paramilitaries, and the legitimate military. Bombings and shootouts often happened in the middle of Medellin, and its inhabitants were generally afraid to leave their houses because of the violence. But as soon as I stepped off the bus in Medellin, I saw that everything had changed.

Medellin has undergone an incredible recovery since the days of Escobar. I immediately had a nice conversation with a vendor as I ate breakfast, and he seemed genuinely happy that tourists were coming to his city to see what it was really like. As I rode the above-ground metro through the city, I saw that it was surrounded by green hills, had almost no garbage on the ground, was full of parks and forests, and felt safe. People were going about their daily business in the streets, and had no intentions of kidnapping the tourists. But the best part was the climate. Being about 1500 meters above sea level, it was known as the "city of eternal spring," and had Goldilocks-style perfect weather year-round much like Arequipa, Cochabamba, and Sucre. It was obvious why I had gotten so many recommendations to visit Medellin from other backpackers.

A nice place to relax with some coffee and watch the city.

I spent my first few days CouchSurfing with a local paisa named Carlos. He was getting ready to go on vacation to Ecuador and the Galapagos, but he still had some time to host me for a bit. He had traveled extensively in Europe, a bit in northern Africa, through most of South America, and lived in the US for a year to study English. Under his advice, I went downtown to the Botero Museum and finally figured out why I had been seeing so many statues of fat people around Colombia. I also went to the botanical gardens, which were largely under construction, but still had some nice, pretty flowers to look at. I don't normally like traveling in big cities, but Medellin seemed like a fine place to spend my last days in South America.

The photo album for this entry is here.

January 21-23, 2008
Days 845-847

Two guys standing still for money.

When I left Santa Marta, I took a bus along the coast to Cartagena, a big city with the same sweltering climate. Many backpackers had raved to me about the city's old fortress, so I checked it out on my first day. As soon as I entered the confines of the large stone walls, I was brought back to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's vivid descriptions of the city in his novels. It did feel like stepping back in time since the only traffic on the streets were the horse taxis, so there was no modern big city noise. However, the fortress wasn't as big as I thought it would be; maybe twelve square blocks were contained within its walls. A few hours was all I needed to see it.

I also walked to the other side of town where the high-end tourists chose to stay because some book told them that the old city was too dangerous. It was packed with five-star hotels, but the beaches were tiny, crowded, and dirty, and there wasn't much else to do there. I didn't understand why anyone would pay big money to stay there when there were so many nicer places along the Caribbean coastline.

I had originally planned to stay in the Cartagena region longer, but my extended jaunt around Santa Marta, combined with the fact that the heat was beginning to cook my brain, told me that two days were enough. I left on an overnight bus for Medellin, another city everyone seems to be talking about in a positive light nowadays.

The photo album for this entry is here.

January 19-20, 2008
Days 843-844

I decided to stick around Santa Marta to watch the Packers game, and what a waste that turned out to be. Not only did they lose, but I sustained an injury to my hand when I was cheering and it came into contact with a spinning metal ceiling fan. The fan was so mangled, it barely rotated anymore and I had to spend several minutes pounding the kinks out of its blades. My hand was left bloodied and bruised, but nothing was broken. I learned my lesson from my scuba diving course. You're always supposed to put your hand up when ascending to the surface because "it's better to lose a hand than a head." I put that advice to good use today.

There wasn't much else to report from Santa Marta other than that it was time to go. The heat there was unbearable, hitting 38 C (100 F) every day. The heat drained me of my energy, causing me to sleep almost all day until a small amount of relief came at night. I was in the area over two weeks, yet never experienced even a drop of rain to cool things off. I don't know how people can live in a climate like that.

January 16-18, 2008
Days 840-842

A plantain man.

After finishing my scuba diving coursework, I needed a few days to relax. I went with Samantha, a girl from Bogotá who was on vacation visiting her brother in Santa Marta, to Tayrona National Park. It was only an hour from Santa Marta, but only had a few dozen vacationing Colombians, compared with the thousands around the city. The park was beautiful and the beaches were endless, giving a perfect, relaxed atmosphere. And for once, I was able to walk barefoot through the sand and not worry about getting a shard of broken glass embedded in my foot. It was unlike anywhere else I had seen on the Caribbean coast.

The photo album for this entry is here.

January 9-15, 2008
Days 833-839

Me under the water.

I started my PADI open water diving course with Gretel, an Australian who had been traveling for the last seven years, doing various jobs around the world. Teaching English in Japan and Ecuador, doing office work in Canada and England, and being a dive instructor in Honduras were all experiences she spoke fondly of. She had spent a total of five months in Taganga as a dive instructor, so she must have liked it.

Before my first dive, I had a lot of studying to do. The workbook I was given was filled with boring-but-necessary stuff about diving like how strong the water pressure is at different depths, how a diver can affect his/her buoyancy, and the constantly-stressed message that you can never hold your breath underwater. The book showed an example of a balloon being filled with air at a deep depth, then ascending to the surface, and expanding until it exploded. Then it said to imagine that the balloon was your lungs. Enough said.

When I went to my first lesson, I had to watch some videos that reemphasized everything I had already read and immediately put me to sleep. The funny thing I did remember from the videos was the constant reminder that the dives I would be doing would be in a swimming pool. That's strange, I didn't remember seeing a pool at the dive shop.

After the videos, Gretel and I loaded all of our equipment onto a pontoon boat with a bunch of other people going out diving for the day and headed along the coast for twenty minutes to our dive site. I put on my equipment, filled my BCD (an inflatable life jacket) with air, and jumped into the water. Gretel pointed where we were going and I tested my regulator (the thing you breath from) to feel what it was like before going under the water. When we were both ready, we let the air out of our lungs and our BCDs and began sinking. It was a creepy, yet exciting feeling.

Gretel grabbed my hand and led me to the bottom, only about five meters down. I had to do a bunch of exercises like take my mask off and swim around with it in my hand, take my regulator out and continue exhaling, and turn my air supply off and use Gretel's spare regulator. If one person runs out of air while diving, it's not like the movies where you have to pass the regulator back and forth. Instead, everyone has a spare, so two people can breath simultaneously from the same tank. After completing all of the tests, we went for a swim and got down to fifteen meters (fifty feet). The weightless feeling, being able to breath underwater, and the entirely new world I was experiencing were all amazing, but I was too focused on the pressure building up in my ears and not running out of air to appreciate it.

A good place to learn to dive.

We did five more dives after that, most of which involved a few tests to start, followed by half an hour or more of swimming around and looking at stuff. Coral was everywhere, as were the colorful tropical fish. We saw a few eels every dive, lurking behind the rocks in search of prey. At one point we saw a barracuda, a rare find for these waters. Every dive was interesting, and the more I dove, the more I got used to the environment. By the end of the course, I was able to hover upside down with my nose inches above the ground to look at something. I was hooked.

Once my open water course was done, I decided that I'd love to dive some more, and learning in the ocean was much better than in a pool, so I stayed for the advanced course as well. There wasn't so much studying this time, and our main objectives were doing a deep dive (to 30 meters/100 feet), a navigational dive using a compass, a buoyancy control dive, a photography dive, and a night dive. The deep dive had me a bit on edge, but I didn't experience nitrogen narcosis I was hoping for. The photography dive was fun because I was able to use an underwater camera and go nuts photographing everything I could. But my favorite was the night dive. There were lots of animals like lobsters and starfish that never were out during the day. I could only see a small amount of stuff at a time with my spotlight so I was able to take in more detail than I was during the day. On top of that was simply the thrill of going underwater at night, something people wouldn't normally think of doing. We also did some fun dives during the day, looking at whatever seemed interesting at the bottom of the sea.

Now I have done thirteen dives and am certified to go to forty meters depth and basically do everything you'd do on a normal recreational dive. I can feel Central America beckoning me to use these new skills in her waters.

The photo album for this entry is here.

January 5-8, 2008
Days 829-832

The main beach in Taganga.

Santa Marta was full. It was high season, so Colombians and foreigners alike were vacationing in the sun. I couldn't find any hotels with vacancies, so I slept in the hallway of a hostel for the first two nights. There wasn't a lot of touristy stuff to see in Santa Marta, and it wasn't the cleanest city, but the fun atmosphere was a great change of pace from Venezuela. People were drinking, listening to music, and dancing in the streets all day, every day, and I felt entirely welcome to join them.

The beaches in Santa Marta weren't very pleasant, so I took a short trip to Taganga, a small fishing village just north of the city. There I found several beaches that were cleaner, but still overcrowded. The other thing I found in Taganga were a bunch of scuba diving shops offering cheap lessons. I decided it would be a nice place to learn and signed up.

The photo album for this entry is here.

January 4, 2008
Day 828

There were no buses going to the border with Colombia, so I shared a taxi with a Venezuelan family on vacation. The taxi was a 1974 Chevy Malibu beast that immediately put the song "Stick Shifts and Safety Belts" into my head. The driver and the dad got to talking about gasoline, and when the dad said it cost 4500 bolivares (90 cents) to fill the tank in his new Volkswagen, the driver remarked how nice it must be to spend half as much money on gas as he did. So just like taxes, no matter how low gas prices go, people still complain about them.

On the way to the border, there were seven police checkpoints, sometimes within three minutes of each other. Only one guy searched my bag, and it was of the quick, "I've got better things to do than mess with this gringo" variety. Another annoyance happened when we waited in line for half an hour to pay a toll to cross a bridge. Other cars kept jumping ahead in line, much like people here do when they're not in vehicles, and my driver had to make sure his bumper was practically touching the car in front of us to protect his position. But the worst thing was that because of the country's falling economy, the toll price was only six cents. Even by Venezuelan standards, we probably wasted more in gas waiting in line than the toll cost. The crazy toll booth and having to show my passport nonstop made a ride that should have taken less than an hour (look at a map and you'll see what I mean) take four.

The line to get stamped out of the country wasn't long, but it ended up taking over an hour because there was only one person stamping passports. Thousands of people crossed that border daily, yet the Venezuelan government felt the need to employ twenty people at the border to stand around and do nothing, but only one to stamp passports. It was socialism at its finest.

When I finally was officially out of Venezuela, I walked across the border to the Colombian side and saw that the line was even longer. Judging by how slow things were moving, I figured it could take three more hours to get through. I got lucky, though, because the dad from my taxi had been saving my spot and was near the front. It quickly became apparent that an angry mob mentality was in effect because every five minutes someone tried to skip to the front and practically got their head torn off. People were giving me lots of stares, so I laid low as best as someone who's 6'3" in a land of midgets could while the dad fended for me. An American I had just met in line at the Venezuelan side started talking to me and the jeers from the crowd were immediate. The dad gave me a look that said "I'm protecting you, not him," and when an official opened the door, he darted through shortly before the crowd could execute him. Later he told me he had never seen anything like that debacle, even in his travels through Africa.

I wanted to go to Santa Marta, but because the passport stamping line was taking so long, I had to wait in a bus for two hours for more passengers to show up. I left Maracaibo as early in the morning as I could, but I still didn't get to Santa Marta until late at night. So after three days of straight travel, I was finally back somewhere I could relax. I had to make the quick journey because my cash was running low, and if you don't have dollars in Venezuela, it's more expensive than Europe.