th<\/sup>\u00a0and headed south towards Medellin. We had wanted to stop and walk around Medellin, but the traffic was too chaotic, and the only parking lot we found was quite a distance from where we thought the city center was. A lot of businesses employed armed security guards to patrol their property with slackly-held pistol-grip shotguns. With safety and logistics in mind, we decided to move on, albeit disappointedly, without seeing the city.<\/p>\nWe drove further south through the spectacular Colombian countryside, on narrow shoulderless roads carved into mountains thousands of feet from the valley floor. The scenery in the United States pales in comparison to Colombia. It\u2019s indescribable. The mountains are terraced here, so cows can graze on them (I think? It seems like an incredible amount of work to raise a cow), perched on a 40%+ grade. It seems like they would fall more since cows aren\u2019t known for their agility.<\/p>\n
We found a hotel in La Pintada with a pool to stay at, about seventy kilometers outside of Medellin. We spent two nights there because of the pool. The first night we drove into the town of La Pintada, two kilometers away at the bottom of the mountain. We parked, and walked around for a while. We needed to buy a few things, namely bags of water (or boulsas de agua, an ingenious and yet incredibly unwieldy way to sell it). When we walked back to our car we were greeted by a couple of people who gestured for us to come over to their restaurant. Our Spanish isn\u2019t very good, especially the \u2018listening\u2019 part, so there\u2019s a lot of guesswork. They gave us bottles of juice and suddenly we were surrounded by incredibly nice and inquisitive people. We talked to them for about an hour before we headed back to our campsite. Several of the people were in a band, and they gave a copy of their CD which is great, downtempo, Colombian music.<\/p>\n
The next day, my brother, dad, and I drove into town to buy groceries, look for an ATM and email a photo to our insurance company. We found the ATM, then began to look for Wifi. There were several internet cafes in town, ranging from dust caked, sun bleached Gateways sitting on a dirt floor to shiny new 32\u201d LCD monitors with webcams and headsets. But everywhere seemed to run their computers on Ethernet cables. It looked like nearly every storefront or house in the town had a Wifi router from the scanner on my phone, but every single one was locked\u2014a feat that the people of Louisiana or Florida still can\u2019t seem to achieve. We found a restaurant that had free wifi, and ordered three pandequesos; a bread that theoretically has cheese in it, hence the \u2018queso\u2019, however every pandequeso I have seen has been all pan and no queso. The restaurant was an open air caf\u00e9, and surprisingly upscale for the area. They did all of their cooking on a charcoal stove, and the whole kitchen was visible from the seating area. They have no idea how incredibly hip they are\u2014a restaurant serving traditional, locally grown, Colombian cuisine cooked over a biomass stove\u2026 We finished using the Wifi and went to pick up some produce before heading back to our camp site for the night.<\/p>\n
The next day we got up and stopped in town to attempt to get the address of the family we talked to the first night in La Pintada so we could send them postcards. It was then that we realized that Colombia might not have a national postal service. We talked to them for twenty some minutes trying to convey the concept of postal mail, and ended up with two pages of contact information (no physical address still). I wrote down the name plate on their store, their names, and the road; I think with that I can deduce how to get mail to them if something like that does exist in Colombia.<\/p>\n
We drove south towards Cali out of La Pintada. Another 200km of winding mountain roads through rural Colombia. It\u2019s stunningly beautiful, but after a week and a half of it, you become a little jaded. The sun is hot here, nothing like the sun in the US, and especially not like the sun in Alaska. In Alaska, the sun contains barely any heat, like holding your hand inside the lampshade of a 70w bulb. Here it\u2019s like holding your hand near a gas stove. Our van overheats going up the huge hills, and we have to turn the heater on in the already hot climate. I think I\u2019ve acquired some minor heat resistance from the 110F car. That day we figured out that we could take the one window off to allow some airflow, which helped tremendously. The temperature decreases substantially as you go up\u2014from the mid 90s at sea level to the mid 70s at 6000 feet. The difference might be from Houston to Denver, but here you can traverse it in thirty kilometers.<\/p>\n
We spent the night that night near Tulau, forty kilometers outside of Cali. We pulled into a gas station and, as always, were the center of attention. After about forty minutes of talking to people about our trailer and Alaska, we were able to retreat inside. The people were incredibly nice yet again, and I think we made a new facebook friend or two. The place we were stopped at was like one of those exits on the interstate outside of a major city where all of the seedy hotels congregate, except in Colombia. Several of them had their hourly rates on their sign. We were almost out of drinking water, but all we could find in the village was 600ml bags of water, and we ended up paying ~7000COP a gallon for it. We saw a bus hit a taxi in front of our gas station\u2014about all the excitement for the night. Nothing appeared to have happened to the taxi, but the Mercedes bus probably had $1000 in frontend cosmetic damage. Everyone on the minibus got off right away and walked to the adjacent restaurant where manager looked excited that he\u2019d be able to sell the three empanadas that had been sitting under a fluorescent light bulb since 4:00pm.<\/p>\n
This morning we got up early before the heat and left at about 7:00am. We stopped at a truck stop with Wifi to check a few things before proceeding on past Cali to Popayan. We made good time across the flat plain, and had climbed the three thousand feet to Popayan by 3:00pm. We looked for a parking lot for the night, but couldn\u2019t find one so we drove to the next town. We also needed an ATM, but after twenty minutes in the town we figured out that the only ATM was out of service for the day, forcing us to go back to Popayan. We found a parking lot on the way back and dropped off our trailer before we drove into the \u201cWhite City\u201d. Popayan\u2019s historic town center consists of hundreds of whitewashed Colonial buildings densely packed into a valley. Popayan also happens to look very American on the main roads, strangely so. There were more than a few times when I like I had been transported to some sort Spanish-speaking United States. One giveaway, though, is that the United States seems to be the pinnacle of cool in this Southern Colombian city. In the mall we went to, nearly all the stores were tapping into this market. One was called \u201cJOSH: define yourself\u201d, another was all about the wonders of New York, and had giant pictures of New York symbolism \u201cSubway Wall Street Empire State Building Times Square Brooklyn\u201d proclaimed a giant green sign also filled with pictures of buses, taxis and other urban miscellanea. I am far from a mall person, I can\u2019t even ironically go to malls in the US, they just grate on me, but this Colombian mall was pretty awesome. Most of the stores actually had cool stuff, from a vintage South American leather store with a window full of Che Guevara-Motorcycle Diaries bags and jackets to a Colombian Hot Topic (titled \u201cB KUL\u201d) and a Latin American watch designer.<\/p>\n
At the mall, I hunted down the Movistar store to try to buy an unlocked broadband router. The clerk spoke some English, I spoke some Spanish, and together we figured out that I would have to buy it myself in Ecuador and that \u201cunlocked\u201d doesn\u2019t seem to translate. I looked for a Claro store, but only found a kiosk in the upscale Supermercado that anchored one side of the mall. From what I got from them, their modems\u00a0are\u00a0<\/em>unlocked, but they only sell modems and not routers. It amazes me how pervasive the incongruency seems to be in cellular providers down here. Claro is a giant company, but it appears that their phones don\u2019t work from country to country, even though they exist in seemingly every nation from Mexico down. Movistar, I still can\u2019t figure what they are. I did some research in the mall last night on my phone, and I think that Movistar and Clara moved in recently and bought old telecommunications networks in different countries, making them more like a conglomerate than a single operator. While this may explain why some phones wouldn\u2019t work internationally, it doesn\u2019t explain why a Claro SIM card in my iPhone would work in Colombia but not Ecuador. I\u2019m hoping that the Claro dealer in Ecuador might have an English speaking clerk to help me buy a data plan for my phone, as unlikely as that sounds.<\/p>\nWe stayed late at the mall, we spent an hour or so sitting in some sort of indoor park checking things on our phones while my dad, Sylvia and Annebelle spent time at an amped-up Chuck E Cheese. A couple of people eagerly tried their English on me; it must be how a European person would feel in the US.<\/p>\n
We left the mall at about 8:00 and stopped to buy water but were only able to find 600ml bags for 700COP each. We bought twelve (because I couldn\u2019t remember how to say fourteen), and drove back to the parking lot where we were staying. The parking lot wasn\u2019t in the best area of Popayan, sort of like the end of Peger Road in Fairbanks. At about 9:00pm, and bunch of people started fighting and chanting across the street\u2014it sounded like a two-by-four brawl. That was when I went back into the trailer. Sometime around 11:00pm, a giant trash pile was set on fire at the bus barn next store and a plume of acrid smoke settled over our trailer.<\/p>\n
We left the next morning to head to Pasto, but the road was slow going. We made it within 100km of Pasto, but the road climbs 7000 feet in the next sixty miles. We camped at 4:00pm at Texaco station because this is one of the most dangerous stretches of road, and we didn\u2019t want to be caught out after dark. I don\u2019t know the name of the town where we\u2019re at, but it\u2019s in the center of the weird part of Colombia. It\u2019s in some sort of desert complete with giant cacti. It actually isn\u2019t dissimilar in appearance to the Sonoran Desert, but it\u2019s a little more verdant. We\u2019re in some sort of plain at an elevation of 1700 feet. People stand in the road with bamboo poles so you can\u2019t drive past in your car until you give them change. It was kind of amusing at first, but after six roadblocks in the same village\u2026 You don\u2019t\u00a0have<\/em>\u00a0to pay them, but it really helps expedite the process. Several of the groups of people at the roadblocks were in costumes, including a guy in a wig pretending to be a pregnant woman. There\u2019s also faded billboards with a Junta Hotline on them\u2014completely serious here, you call the toll free number if you have Junta problems.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very desolate place.<\/p>\nTomorrow we\u2019re planning on making it to Ipales, the Colombia-Ecuador border town about 150km and 7000 feet away. We need to find wifi somewhere, so we might be in an internet caf\u00e9 for a few hours in Pasto. These major Colombian cities are extraordinarily difficult to navigate, so it\u2019s hard to tell where we\u2019ll end up. Internet cafes are really hit or miss too, most seem to have dusty emachines in a particle board booth, and none that I have seen have wifi.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been updating this nightly for the past several days, so the continuity might seem jarring. It seemed like a better idea than publishing three separate posts at once.<\/p>\n
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