Medellin is the second largest city in Colombia and according to my Lonely Planet has a population of about 2 million. It feels like they are all on the roads driving motor bikes, scooters or cars. It’s a bit of a concrete jungle and the roads are endlessly full of traffic jams. The cars and scooters all jostle around for position on the road and it’s noisy with horns and techno music blasting out everywhere. I’ve taken a couple of taxis today and they don’t have seat belts in the back (that work) and the drivers are all manic. Of course none speak English, so to get to your destination you need a photo of the place, name and street address to show them. They are cheap, about £4 to get a 30 min thrill ride downtown.
In the morning a few of us went with out tour leader to the HQ of Safetti cycling clothes. https://www.safetti.com The style is not dissimilar to Rapha kit. It took ages to try on and pay in this little shop in a side street, but I whiled the time away by looking at the bike collection the owner has and other cycling memorabilia. Some beautiful bikes!
After a small snack lunch, I headed on my own downtown to the Museo de Antioquia, which is an art museum with a variety of exhibits but includes a lot of work by Fernando Botero, whose almost carton like characters are displayed both as paintings and huge bronze statues. In the square outside there are many of the Botero statues attracting lots of tourists and the inevitable street sellers. It was a crowed noisy place in the square and one of those places you keep your possessions close to your chest. The taxi journey back was a total sensory overload with a very helpful cheerful driver trying to drive me at quickest speed possible through the heavy traffic with music blaring loudly from his car speakers. It’s quite a relief to sit quietly now in my room at the end of the day.
It’s been interesting to see Medellin but not really my sort of place, far too noisy and too much concrete. Lonely Planet tells me in the 1980s, under the violent leadership of Pablo Escobar, Medellin became the capital of the worlds cocaine business, gun battles were common, and the city’s homicide rate was one of the highest in the world. The end of this violence came when he died in 1993, and it’s now a much more accessible place. Interesting to see but not a place on my list to come back to.
Stephanie in Colombia 2022 