Bitty, Betty, and Batty do the Land of Fincas to the Land of Escobar

Bogota: Bogota started becoming a little too drizzly, seemingly dangerous and boring in the hostel so we decided to leave. I honestly think that, like Quito, I may have been there at the wrong time but there was just not alot making me want to stay in Bogota. One, the city has a huge problem with urban sprawl. Everything is incredibly hard to get to and the places that everyone was telling us to go to were 40 minutes by cab ride and $30. Two, we heard a story about a group of gringos that were having a rousing conversation with a Colombian that they had befriended when, amidst a lull in the conversation, said Colombian takes a knife out, calmly places it on the table in front of them and says "Ok, guys, now we go to the ATM." I'm sure not all Colombians are like this but....one is enough.

Salento: FiFi and Kitty had heard about some farm that people could stay at in a town further north called Salento. 6 hours north of Bogota we got to Armenia where we had to take a cab to Salento (its too tiny to have a bus station which is great.) The "farm" ended up being a really nice ranch style house outside of town which had pigs, cows and horses. We made three attempts on 3 separate mornings to get up at 4am to milk the cows...again, I'm terrible at farming but so are Katherine and Fiona apparently so it's alright. Collectively, we're the three laziest people on the face of the planet. Salento is home to the tallest Palm Trees in the World too I guess. We never saw them because you had to get up early to get a cab up there and no one took responsibility for the alarm...but I hear they're lovely. I'm sure you can find a picture of some in the internet. However, we did have the energy to do horseback riding and go to some surrounding Coffee Fincas (farms). Salento is the region where a huge majority of Colombia's Coffee exports come from but here's some interesting facts. Coffee within Colombia is not that great. They export 90% of it out of country so keep literally none for themselves. Also, contrary to popular belief, Colombia only supplies some 12% of all coffee in the World. I attribute this to all those creepy commercials from the early 90's where Juan Valdez was hiding in someone's closet trying to give them coffee when they woke up. I don't think most people are keen to a Colombian and his horse breaking into their houses in the wee mornings of dawn, even if it is to serve them delicious roasted coffee. This most likely served to weaken Colombia's share in the market.

Medellin: A pretty cool city. It's called Ciudad de la Primavera Eterna because the weather is temperate year round.
This was Escobar's home turf and where alot of gnarly stuff went down. He poured alot of money into the place and because of this it's one of the few cities in South America besides Santiago and Buenos Aires that has an extensive Metro train system that can take you most places. Went to the Museum of Modern Art which is pretty great. Fernando Botero is a Colombian and so alot of his "fatty" sculptures are outside of the museum as well as in it. I like his paintings too...looking at an obese Jesus Christ on the cross is just too sacrilegious to pass up. Everybody should see it. Going out in Medellin is fun too. I was duped into going to a gay club again. I don't know how these things happen. Not like there's anything wrong with gay clubs, most of the time they're fun but this place was in the middle of a creepy warehouse district outside of Medellin, and had a bunch of uninterested Men dancing around. Me and the Irish dude I was with hightailed it out of there as soon as we could.

We've only spent 4 nights here but I think it's time to go. Next stop: La Costa.