Well! I arrived in the hostal in Calì, feeling totally exhausted and met a group of Aussie guys, who had been in Calì and were leaving in a few hours…considering by now I was truly sick of my own company, coupled with the fact that they said Calì is really only fun over the weekend, and this was like a Monday or Tuesday, I thought fuck it and decided to leave with them. They were going to Salento, the coffee region, I don`t even like coffee but they seemed cool so I went with. Quickest exit ever!
Total time spent in Calì… 6 hours!
So…we headed to Salento, next to Armenia, in the south-centre of Colombia, and on the bus on the way there I managed to maintain a conversation with a woman entirely in Spanish for an hour! My Spanish was probably quite rubbish, but we understood each other so I was fully stoked! We rocked up at a hostal called Plantation House, really beautiful, rolling hills, traditional wooden htu bedrooms and 2 beautiful collies that looked just like lassie!
The dude who owns it, Tim, is an absolute, Brian Blessed style Emphesima nosed Alkie, who proceeded to inform us within minutes of entering `I don`t like alcohol`. yeah alrite mate, I light your breath and then you can repeat that statement!
Anyways, met some really cool people here, which is what I was after, turned out the Aussie boys and I were not quite on the same page and we parted company pretty much as soon as we completed a `nice country stroll`which turned out to be a 12 or 13k hike up a really steep hill that took about 5 hours. It was beautiful, I just wish I had been prepared!
The next day I met up with Roger, an English dude who was on the same bus from Calì and Vlad, a Romanian-American dude with some seriously funny stories. I swear I laughed so hard that day that my sides hurt! We took a tour of the coffee plantation nearby(much to Tim`s annoyment cos he wants all tourists to visit his place…oh well!) and the guide we had looked just like the dude from Del Monte! Got caught in a rain shower afterward and there was a massive powercut because of it, rendering the whole village basically useless. We dealt with it by cooking on gas and getting absolutely shitfaced!
I had the best afternoon, got to know some wicked people, including Chris and Colette, who I will talk about later! Anyways, it was time to go so me and Roger (or Ray Ray as I will from now on refer to him) headed off to Bogotà.
After Quito I head North to go to Otavalo, a town famed over all of South America for it`s Saturday market. I head to a hostal out of my guidebook(unless you get advised otherwise it`s pretty hard to choose one!) And when I get there I realise there are the remnants of market stalls littering the sides of the streets but I figure it`s just a daily thing, this is marketland after all….
The hostal is cool and my room is so pretty! A real little cabin feel with private bathroom and a writing desk! The owner tells me when I ask him that it is Saturday, but no, I tell him, it must be Friday. I ask 3 more people and am told by all that it is Saturday….So I have missed a whole day and am here for no reason basically! I decide to go to the market tomorrow and leave after.I want to stay here but I am really keen to get to Colombia.
I head for the market the next day and enjoy Otavalo for a little bit. The men here wear their hair in those typical, western movie plaits and the women too, who are adorned with strings and strings of gold beads, but the weird thing is that because of the money involved here in the market trade, there are as many 4 wheel drives blaring rap music and kids with emo haircuts and new clothes, as there are traditionals and artesanias.
The market is horrendous. Heaps of middle-aged overweight americans are waddling around asking for cheaper and cheaper prices, without even bothering to attempt any Spanish. The produce is all pretty much the same and I leave fairly swiftly. I pack my bag and head for the bus, on the Pan American Highway.
I get a bus to Ipiales which is next to the border and after a 3 ish hour journey I am at the border, roughly 3pm. I get over the border and am amazed by how much police prescence there is, certainly the most since I arrived in South America. I go through immigration, and get buses overnight to go to Calì, by the time I get there(7 hour bus ride and 4 random police checks later) I am so tired and the idiot taxi driver I get doesn`t help either…he drives me all around the place on the meter to 3 places I don`t ask and then tries to make me pay, the hostal I finally end up in has this miserable, grumpy asshole working and when I am lead to the dorm-read prison, I feel so depressed, wired and exhausted I can barely sleep.
Got to Cuenca, found a really nice hostal, called Cuencita, on Hermano Miguel and Calle Larga if you ever go there! Was feeling quite depressed about being on my own and the stress of travelling, and was really missing Alberto. The son of the hostal, Jonathan took me under his wing, gave me wine and I was happy again! The next day he took me to a bar called Prohibido, kind of a museum, and considering this place is super catholic it`s quite a big deal…there are even 3 real crypts there of people who agreed or who`s families agreed for them to buried there. Sculptures of Jesus with bullet wounds, lots of vampires and devils, and when u wash ure hands in the ladies there is a horrid little gnome who wees the water out at you!
Cuenca is super pretty, rains in the afternoon but that`s really no biggy…I felt really safe there and had a really cool 3 days. I also visited the Panama hat factory, cos they don`t make em in Panama!
Left here to go to Quito on an overnight bus….
Quito I hated. I stayed there for a day, I have never been told(even in London) not to take my stuff out with me so often cos I was gonna get robbed or whatever, the weather was shit, my hostal was cheap enough(3 dollars a night) and I reckon if my mind was in it I could`ve gone out with the guys at my hostal but I felt so anti I just wanted to leave. It completely lacks the architectural value of other big cities and after seeing the Equator(which is cool but the bug museum is the best bit) I got the fuck out of there!
And by the way…did anyone ever know it was the French who `discovered`the Equator?????
Ok so when I left Trujillo, I caught an overnight bus to Sullana, but it arrived at 5 or crazy in the morning so I stayed on until Piura…It had been raining too so was proper grotty and dark. Arrived in Piura at 7am and waited an hour or so for a bus to take me to the border with Ecuador.
Got there, crossed over but it had been raining for 3 days, so there was no power so I had to wait for another 5 hors for my passport to get stamped(I meanwhile journeyed into the nearest town called…Macarà, which was horrid) and then was finally on my way on a bus to Pasto at around 1.30pm. We arrived there at 6, really couldn`t be assed to keep there so I got straight on another bus to Loja, which arrived there at 8.30 ish. Holed up in a sleazy motel style affair, but it`s only one night so fuck it. Found a delicious potato cake there though(which doesn`t sound like much but after eating basically rice for 4 months it was sweet!”)
Had a walk around the next day, not much to do and hopped on a bus at midday to go to Cuenca.
Forgot to say, that on the second day in Trujillo me and Netta went to get cultured by the battleaxe, who drove us in her beaten up old beetle to some ruins nearby, called Chàn Chàn. Basically it`s the biggest city ever discovered by a pre-Inca tribe. There are mad adobe latticed walls, carvings of animals and symbols in the walls, and 2 huge temples, one for the sun and the other for the moon.
The pyramid structure of the moon temple is basically a burial place for the kings of the empire, it has 6 levels and each level has different pictures carved onto it, going from slaves to snakes to spiders to kings, each meaning different things and carrying different powers.
The colours used to decorate the temple are immense, and only the inner parts that were preserved by sand have survived! Basically the Spanish came and cut the 2 temples in half, almost entirely destroying the Sun temple and taking all the gold. The intricacy of the carvings and the sheer size and detail of the structures themselves are immense, and considering they about 1500 years old is even more amazing. It`s just a shame they have been so ruined.
