Colombia Day 3: a travel day

Let me start with my learning of the day: don’t book mid day flights if you already don’t have much time ;-)

Today is a travel day. I’ve booked a flight to Medellin around 1:30pm. So I got up in the morning, had breakfast, chatted with some friends at home, packed my bag and left to the airport with Heine, the Dutch guy I met, who was on the same flight. We were very early at the airport and all went well, except for more than an hour delay. So we were only around 5pm at our hostel in Medellin. It’s again the Masaya hostel (like in Bogota), this one being an 8 floors high hostel with a rooftop bar including a pool. So after checking in I went straight upstairs and enjoyed my welcome beer :-) there I met a nice Dutch girl (Anouk) and we decided to explore the city a bit. It’s quite fascinating, right around the corner from the hostel is a huge bar & restaurant area. They’ve closed the area off for traffic and it looked really cool. It reminded me a lot of Bali. If you want to shop, eat and party in a tropical ambiance with western standards this is your place!

For dinner we went to a restaurant outside of this area though as Anouk had gotten a recommendation. As the place wasn’t open yet, we had a beer at the local bar nextdoors. The dinner place looked slightly fancy and the food was just exquisite. I had beef with rice and avocado and couldn’t believe it, so yummy! For local standards dinner was expensive, for the Netherlands it was still cheap ;-) and I learned that Colombia doesn’t produce any wine. Seeing that Argentina and Chile are big wine producers, that really surprised me. 

Back at the hostel we went up to the rooftop. The local karaoke was not a hit - we didn’t know any song. And there wasn’t much animo either. So we went to the top area and hung out in a big net there :-) we met some nice people and enjoyed the amazing view of Medellin at night. At around 10 the jet leg hit me again and I went to bed. Unfortunately I am not that luckily with my roommates this time. You would think that people are a bit quiet after midnight in a dorm. Well, these ladies clearly weren’t. Getting up the next morning at 7am, I really had to tell myself over and over again that I’m better than that and not to pay it back. Let’s hope these ladies left the hostel now. 









Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Columbia Day 1

Image
 I can’t believe it. I’m on the road again. After 5 years I’m solo backpacking again. And from my first day I can say I don’t think Colombia will disappoint me. But let’s start with how I got here.  As you may know, my last couple years I spent most of my holidays with Scotty in South Africa. Which was great. What a beautiful country and still so much to discover. And of course great to see the family. And now it was time to go backpacking and explore more of this beautiful time. And as Scotty misses his family and I understand that he wants to go there, we decided to go at the same time, but to separate destinations.  When I started telling people „no Scott is going to SA, no I haven‘t book an organized tour, I’m solo backpacking!“ there were a lot of surprises faces  at that moment my stubbornness kicks in: “remember I’ve done that in the past quite a lot?” But I have to admit that the start of every solo trip has that little bit of “uuh, what am I doing?”  Bu...
Read more

Columbia Day 2: 20.000 steps

Image
 I completely forgot how awful a jet lag is! I was so proud that I had managed to stay up until 9pm (3am our time), but unfortunately I was bright awake at 3am again. Well, at least that helped to get up as I had planned to go with a guy from another hostel to hike up Montserrat at 7am today. So bright and early I had breakfast at the hostel and went to his hostel around the corner. But no one was there, no answer to my messages. Luckily I had met some other people at my hostel who had planned the same hike for today. So I went back to the hostel and ended up leaving around 8:30 with Heine from the Netherlands. They are everywhere those Dutchies.  We walked about 20 minutes to the starting point of the hike and I already realized then: this won’t be easy. Bogota itself is at about 2600m above sea level. And if you spend most of your time at or below sea level in the lovely flatlands called the Netherlands, you quite notice the impact altitude has on your body.  The climb ...
Read more

Colombia Day 8-11: Ciudad Perdida

Image
The Lost City trek, what an amazing 4 days. As usual my preparations were so-so and I didn’t really know what to expect. But I’m so glad I’ve done this trip. With 510€ for 4 days it’s not the cheapest adventure. And the hike is definitely not an easy one. But all of it so worth it. But let’s start at the beginning.   It’s Tuesday morning and I’m at Santa Marta. My tour provider is about to pick me up, but I’m still waiting for my breakfast. The guy had said that the avocado mushroom sandwich can be ready in 15 minutes. Well, those 15 minutes are over. So I ask for a to go sandwich. Sure, no problem. I just have to wait another 10 minutes. At this point I’m 5 minutes late, which really doesn’t fit to my Germanness. Finally I get my sandwich, meet my driver and am on my way to the tour operator office. And by the way: mist of it went into the trash, as it was more a garlic sandwich then anything else… We pick up some other people and first I was afraid I would be with only Spanish sp...
Read more