After our returning from Ciudad Perdida we boarded a bus from Santa Marta to Medellin (for all those "Entourage " fans, the same place referenced for Vincent Chase´s first movie). It was a 16 hour bus ride that we started at 11am. We originally thought it would be horrendous, but it wasn´t too bad. It was actually pretty interesting to see the rural areas of Columbia. As you may or may not know, there is currently some major flooding going on in Columbia due to "La Niña". Half of the road was underwater most of the way, towns were completely underwater, and there are many landslides in the area (luckily none of them on our road). We got into the city of Medellin around 5 am and grabbed some well deserved sleep. Dawne wasn´t feeling well on Thursday, so we took it really easy. Friday we went sightseeing around the city. The highlite had to have been when we found a guy to take us on a guided horseback tour of a huge mountain park. He helped us climb aboard the horses, took our cash, and said to be back in 1 hour. Apparently it was an unguided tour, and neither of us know anything about riding horses, so it was pretty interesting to say the least.
We went out on the town Friday nightwith a group from the hostel. It was a very authentic Columbia experience. Apparently everyone from Columbia is white, speaks either English or German, and loves rock and grunge music like Marlyn Manson and NIN. Very Columbian !
Saturday we went on a Pablo Escobar tour. For those of you who don´t know Pablo you should really check out his WikiPedia page or something, cause this was one crazy fella. He was the lord of Columbia´s drug market and the head of the Medellin Cartel. In a sense, he is one of the main reason for much of Columbia´s past violence and helped to give Columbia such a bad name. Pablo was at war with everyone... other cartels, police, government... He would pay poor people to kill police officers. Anytime members of his cartel were about to stand trial witnesses and judges were killed, and evidence rooms torched. Really terrrible things, but also known as a "Robinhood" type figure to the poor, as he built homes and soccer fields for those living in desperitely poor neighborhoods. But I´ll leave the reseach up to you. Our tour was really interesting. We went to many of the buildings which Pablo owned or lived in, usually as we were looking at the building, the guide would hand us photos taken of the exact same spot were a major car bomb had gone off in the past in an attempt to destroy the Medellin Cartel and kill Pablo. We also went to that check out his old drug smuggling planes at the airport, the home and roof top where he was finally gunned down, as well as his gravesite. A few people at our hostel went a few days before us (on December 2nd) which was the anniversary of his death. They said there were tons of people there, including several family members when they were there. Too bad we Dawne had to go and get sick that day! Later that day we made our way to the first day of Medellin´s Christmas festival. The city prepares all year, designing the parade of lights and 3km stretch of wonder! Ít´s incredible! We walked for hours and I got a little camera crazy! We´re finally getting into the Christmas spirit!
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