Tag: Colombia

Cartagena, Colombia

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Sadly our trip to Cartagena didn’t go exactly to plan. Unlike others we have met who are slowly meandering through each country and visiting each city and local landmark, our travels encompass the highlights tour of South America. Originally we planned to only visit Bogotá and Medellín in Colombia but after speaking to other travelers most rated Cartagena higher than Bogotá. With limited time we decided to forego Bogotá and instead book last minute flights with Viva Colombia to the Caribbean coast. Our plan was to spend a couple of nights in the walled city of Cartagena and head up the coast to Santa Marta. Unfortunately the tail end of storm Matthew ensured this wouldn’t be the case.

Our first full day in Cartagena was spent exploring the old walled town which included taking intermittent refuge from the humidity. We ventured into the Gold Museum and an emerald ‘museum’ (more of a shop masquerading as a museum) and feasted on artisan ice lollies. Controversially I don’t think Cartagena is as beautiful as I had heard. Yes, it is a pretty city but it’s a little bit gritty around the edges and having been to Dubrovnik it’s hard not to compare it to the beautiful Adriatic walled city. In hindsight the weather (intense humidity and sun, or torrential rain) didn’t help and it was also the first city we had been to on our trip with so many pushy and persistent merchants.

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Entrance to the walled part of the city

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The next morning we awoke to unrelenting rain. The kind of rain that floods ill prepared streets in seconds. We stayed in Getsemani, an up and coming area just outside the walls of the old town. Our first accommodation Hostel Mamellena was fine for the first few nights but with all of the communal areas located outside it didn’t lend well to the sudden change in weather. We quickly located a small family run hotel (Casa Sweety) around the corner that offered a more comfortable stay for our change of plans. The next 48 hours included swimming in the rain, playing pool, reading books and searching out eateries in running distance from our new home.

The weather brightened a day earlier than expected. On our second last full day we awoke to blue sky creeping through the clouds. We booked onto the mud volcano tour. Reviews online were mixed but with the weather still unpredictable and some roads impassable we thought it was a wiser option than heading to the beach. The mud volcano is exactly that, located over an hour from the city it is a small volcano filled with buoyant mud. You climb up some rickety wooden steps before queuing to get into the tepid grey mud. Sounds bizarre and it is but we befriended a lovely lady from Buenos Aires, and a surprised Aussie who made the experience all the more enjoyable. I say surprised because he booked the tour with no idea what was entailed and was expecting a sightseeing tour. This we figured out after he asked us a number of questions about facts, figures, and history of the volcano and the revelation that he had not brought any swimwear. The basic cost of tour included entry, transport and changing facilities. At the volcano you have to pay extra to have a local guy take pictures of you on your phone/camera, have the mud massaged into your skin and finally have help getting the mud off. As “thorough” (removing the mud was akin to been washed as a toddler) as some of these extras were it would be nice if all the additional costs were included in the tour price. Unfortunately we had a bit of a mishap with the photos from the day so we’ve inadvertently spared you the image of us in our swimwear covered in mud!

During our stay in Cartagena the people of Colombia narrowly voted no to the proposed peace deal with the rebel FARC group. The deal which laid out lenient sentences for the rebels but promised and end to decades of guerrilla warfare was years in the making. It was a limp end to a suspense that had been building for us since Medellín and for the people of Colombia for years. In so many ways Cartagena wasn’t quite what we expected but we had amazing food (ceviche, fish tacos and tapas to name but a few), saw an incredible sunset from the city walls and got to experience it all first hand.

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Old meets new

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Bright building in the setting sun

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Medellín, Colombia

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Our first taster of Medellín was driving through the lively El Poblado area on a Friday night. From that first glance we instantly liked the city. Medellín is an artsy, cultural city bursting with independent eateries, shops and bars. We stayed in El Poblado, the more affluent and touristy area of the city. The Black Sheep was an excellent home for our entire stay – clean, modern with extremely helpful staff – highly recommend if looking for a budget friendly option in Medellín.

Still tired from our previous day of travel we spent our first day in the city exploring and eating good food. We started the day with a delicious American style brunch and the most amazing coconut macchiato (so good it gets its own special mention). More on Medellín’s coffee culture below. After much meandering through the streets of Poblado we took the metro to Acevedo and the cable car up to Santo Domingo. The price of the first cable car is included in the metro ticket and connects some of the poorer barrios (neighbourhoods) to the rest of the city. The brief journey takes you high into the hills overlooking the greater Medellín area. The highest stop – Santo Domingo is the gateway to the second cable car (an additional cost) that connects to Parque Arvi which is an expansive nature preserve perched on top of the valley. To be honest we kind of stumbled into Parque Arvi. From Santo Domingo the cable car looks like it goes a short distance to the top of the mountain but in fact it goes much further. Unprepared for a hike instead we availed of the food stalls at the top and took a small stroll around before making our way back. That night we headed out to sample the night life first hand. First stop was the highly recommended Cafe Zorba for some amazing vegetarian pizza. Afterwards we tried a number of the bars in the locality!

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View from the cable car

Sundays are quiet in Medellín. Most of the tours and excursions run Monday through to Saturday. The main road in Poblado was closed allowing families, runners and cyclists to move freely. The owner of the Black Sheep recommended a small local Sunday market for food. After an early lunch of empanadas and arepas (corn cakes) topped with queso we wandered over to Medellín’s Museum of Modern Art. Definitely not the most impressive modern art collection but still a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon. The main exhibit featured a lifetime collection of works from local artist Débora Arango and depicted how her style and subject matter evolved during her career.

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Farmer’s Market

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The following day we booked onto the free city walking tour. The tour guide picks you up from your hostel and you all travel together from Poblado metro station to El Centro. Unlike other walking tours I’ve done in Europe this tour focused on information about the history of the city rather than the actual attractions of the city. Along the way our tour guide, Juan, pointed out places to come back to later and revisit but his tour centred on Medellín’s re- generation from most dangerous city in the world to one of culture and innovation. Juan was an incredibly upbeat guy despite telling us that 6 of his 8 childhood friends were murdered and 2 of his uncles were kidnapped for ransom during the 90s. Like so many people we met in Medellín he refused to let the dark past of the city overshadow his present day and future. The tour concluded in Parque San Antonio beside two statues by the famous Colombian Fernando Botero. Originally the square was home to just one statue but sadly in 1995 the FARC planted a bomb under the statue killing 23 innocent people as they attended a concert. Rather than remove the sculpture Botero installed a second bird by its side. The destroyed remnants of his statue titled the “Pajaro de Paz (Bird of Peace)” sits next to an intact replacement, a literal symbol of the transformation that the city underwent in the last few decades. After the walking tour we spent our afternoon re-tracing our morning steps and taking a more in depth look at Rafael Uribe Uribe Palace of Culture, the dramatic black and white Gothic building in the centre of Plaza Botero (presumably so called for all the Botero statues that frame the square).

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Rafael Uribe Uribe of Culture

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Medellín is located in the department of Antioquia, home to one of Colombia’s coffee regions. We tried to book a couple of the highly rated coffee farm day tours but at short notice and in low season they were quite expensive. Instead we opted for the tour offered by our hostel to San Antonio coffee farm. I won’t go into it in too much detail because Caoimh has written a comprehensive overview of the day and the coffee making process but it was one of the best tours of our trip so far despite neither of us being major coffee drinkers and it costing half the price of others online. Read more here…Measuring Stubble – San Antonio Coffee Farm

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Coffee Plants on San Antonio Coffee Farm

We hoped to do the Pablo Escobar tour offered by Pasia Roads earlier in our stay but when we tried to book it, it was already booked out. There’s numerous Escobar tours on offer in the city (ironic really qiven that the city is trying to move on from it’s violent past). One tour is connected to Escobar’s family and even features an appearance from his brother Roberto however, we felt that Pasia Road would offer a more real and unbiased account of Escobar’s lifetime. So as timing would have it we spent our last day touring Medellín with them and learning about its grim past. Buildings that we had innocently walked by in the days before become pivotal to the story of Escobar’s life and death. It was a sombering end to a fantastic week in Medellín listening to the the emotion in our guide Paula’s voice as she retold what it was like to grow up in a city riddled by murder and corruption.. Although unintentional I’m glad we left the Escobar tour to the last day because although we heard snippets of stories we only fully realised the true extent of Escobar’s reign as we got
ready to leave. Like the people of Medellín want our stay wasn’t tinged by the past. That night as we physically left Medellín it was hard to forget the last few days and how a city shadowed by so much grief can be filled with so much hope for the future.

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Escobar’s Grave

Measuring Stubble – San Antonio Coffee Farm

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So where counting freckles gives us a great overview and reminder of what we got up to, measuring stubble is a more detailed look at some of the things we learned. First up, the coffee farm tour from Medellín!

We signed up for a tour through the hostel with Ana from Tripping Antioquia. Really cool brave woman who went from being a vet to a hostel manager to setting up her own tour business. She was a bit of a crazy driver but no more than most Colombians so we’re told, (she definitely didn’t get it from her mother who drove the rest of the group in her car) so with some closed eyes and the best of queen playing we made it to the coffee farm.

It’s a large enough coffee farm who are trying to go back to the manual process as much as possible for quality and probably touristic purposes.

We were joined by a group of 4 Irish lads who said they were looking to invest in a coffee farm and were conveniently looking for a software developer and packaging design expert to join their supposed investment team of experts. Smart lads determined to make each other and themselves out to look like idiots. My kind of lads, queue an abundance of stupid questions and most of the information for this account to be fair.

So the coffee plants (not trees or bushes) are grown on hill slopes and ideally between 1800m and 2000m above sea level. It makes for stunning views of the surrounding mountains and valleys:

Coffee can only be grown in a certain belt around the equator, and within that belt it needs the right altitude and with the right amount of rain and sun. So there are very few places in the world that can grow coffee and this part of Colombia doesn’t really have seasons so can grow year round and harvest twice a year making it one of the best places in the world to grow and produce high quality coffee.

Not being a fan of coffee I’ve never really thought what part of the coffee plant is used to make coffee. Turns out it’s a small cherry type fruit.

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The pickers are paid by the kg and bad pickers would pick around 70kg a day whereas good pickers can pick around 200kg a day. Manual picking ensures quality by only taking the good red cherries whereas machines would take it all. The details resulting from many questions about employee motivation schemes, training, and what skills differentiate the good pickers from the bad are too much to get into here. These questions as well as the name “el maestro” from a man rumored to have picked 700kg of cherries in a day came courtesy of the lads of course.

The cherries are gathered in bags and sent by green pipes from the hills to stores beside the processing buildings.

From here they are fed into a long horizontal cylinder which separates the outer skin from the almonds inside by vibrating.

The skin is brought out and reused for compost on he farm, and the almonds go into a washing process before being sorted roughly by size. From here they’re dried in large vertical cylinders with 4 chambers again for sorting by size. The bags were automatically brought to the top of the cylinder but for efficiency purposes during the harvest 40kg bags of cherries were carried up a narrow spiral staircase.

Once dried the inner coffee ‘bean’ is removed from the coffee ‘almond type thing:

After removing 2 layers of a tiny cherry, the tasteless part we need to roast, grind and add to boiling water to drink is ready. Whoever figured this out was either a genius or had way too much time on their hands.

The coffee is separated into 3 classes of coffee:

A) Top quality coffee for direct export from the farm

B) Second best quality coffee sold to the Colombian Coffee Federation

C) Low grade coffee for local Colombian use.

This farm is lucky enough to be able to export directly to foreign buyers in Korea (the good one) and Italy. But 70% of the dried almonds are sold to the coffee federation who apart from sounding evil could also be viewed as a mafia type organisation, but to be fair they seem to do a lot of good for coffee production in Colombia. Prices for coffee are set by quality of the goods but also working conditions, safety and best practices. They can also be used to get loans for improving your farm. But the main advantage is that all major coffee buyers (kenco, nescafe etc) all buy from them. It is extremely hard to find a buyer for your coffee year round year after year without them. Of course for this safety they take a decent cut for themselves. They actually mix all the beans from different farms together and then process the beans themselves. So your cup of coffee could actually contain beans from many different farms. We got to see how this process works for the exported coffee ourselves.

It’s pretty simple, again a horizontal cylinder with a 10kg capacity but usually taking only 6kg at a time is used to roast the beans. The beans can then be sold as is or they can be ground down before packaging and selling. After the group questioned the capacity of the roaster a number of times it was time to taste the coffee. Now as I’ve said I’m not a fan of coffee… but I do love the smell. I have to admit, it tasted as good as the smell. I’m not looking to take up another vice (the few beers and occasional naps are enough), but I now appreciate why people drink coffee and especially those who drink it in the more pure forms. A strong coffee is a good coffee.

After this we went for a drive around and up the farm in a jeep, meeting pickers, visiting children in the local school in the farm mid exam. Ana did not fill us with confidence disclosing the fact that it was her first day driving the jeep where one of us had to sit on the spare tyre at the back.


But in fairness to her she earned it with some skillful driving while answering many insightful lines of questioning such as whether the car was fun to drive. We ended the tour with frank discussions about profit margins over lovely bbq’d plantain covered with a locally grown ricotta type cheese. A great tour and day out for both coffee lovers and the likes of myself.

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