Medellin

 We arrived in Medellin early last Saturday morning.  The last leg of our journey from Bolivia was an Avianca flight from Bogota to Medellin, the 13th flight of our trip so far.  It was not the flight I was most looking forward to - not because I suffer from triskaidekaphobia (I have plenty of phobias, just not that one) - but for reasons that Colombian history buffs (and fans of the Netflix series Narcos) will be well aware of (others should read on). 

In light of the US State Department’s Colombia travel advisory (“reconsider travel due to crime and terrorism”), and recent headlines (“more than 32,000 displaced as violence spirals in Colombian drug trafficking region”), one might ask - and fairly so - why Medellin?  So before I get into the highlights of our visit - which was a blast (as in fun, not as in a bomb) - just a little bit of the backstory for our visit.

This time last year Melanie and I took a 2 week hiking trip to Colombia (don’t worry, you didn’t miss my travelogue about that trip - I didn’t write one). It was an awesome trip that included a number of beautiful hikes around the country.  The most epic was a 4 day, 60 kilometer hike in the Sierra Nevada mountains (in 90+ degree heat and >90% humidity) to an archaeological site known as La Ciudad Perdida (the Lost City) which is 700 years older than Machu Piccu and was only rediscovered in the 1970s.  As usual, our strenuous hiking efforts were rewarded by (near) luxury accommodations

As part of the trip we also had the chance to visit Bogota and Cartagena  - both of which we enjoyed tremendously.  However, our guide on that trip - a terrific young Colombian named Dani - insisted that we had missed out on the best city in Colombia, his hometown of Medellin.  So we came back to check it out!

The first part of our visit was heavily focused on the history of Medellin over the past 40 years.  As those of us “of a certain age” (meaning old) know, Medellin was not a place one would ever consider visiting back in the day when Pablo Escobar was synonymous with Medellin.  During our visit, we spent the better part of a day on a tour focused on those times, including visiting the apartment building where Escobar was finally killed in 1993 [for you Narcos aficionados, most of that series seemed pretty consistent with history as told to us by the Colombians, with the exception that in reality Escobar was killed by Los Pepes,, not by the Search Bloc]

The cemetery where he is buried

And, most importantly, the memorial to the 46,612 victims of Escobar’s 1984-1993 narco terrorism campaign of targeted assassinations and indiscriminate bombings (including 107 people who died in the bombing of an Avianca flight in 1989 - thus my less than enthusiastic boarding of our Avianca flight to Medellin as I mentioned earlier) located on the grounds of a property formerly owned by Escobar.

Despite their troubled past, Colombians are a remarkably resilient people.  The Medellin neighborhood known as Comuna 13 is a striking example of this.  In the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, it was controlled by Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel, and was considered one of the most dangerous places in the world.  Post-Escobar, it continued to be the site of deadly battles between left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary groups.  In 2002, the Colombian military, in coordination with the paramilitary groups, and backed by tanks and US-supplied Blackhawk helicopters carried out Operation Orion, an infamous and deadly operation during which the army killed scores of innocent civilians in an effort to uproot the leftist guerrillas.  But the story of Comuna 13 did not end there.  Instead, Operation Orion served as a catalyst for the neighborhood to transform itself, largely through street art, hip hop music and break dancing.  Today, it’s a fun and vibrant neighborhood and a popular tourist attraction, even as the art recalls elements of the neighborhood’s difficult past.

 

While Colombia is still struggling with violent narcoterrorist groups, particularly in the jungle areas near the border with Venezuela, it’s kind of meaningless to talk about “left-wing” guerrillas or “right-wing”paramilitaries these days, since the only ideology that motivates these groups is protecting the enormous illicit sources of money they derive from trafficking cocaine….and gold….and oil.  And so long as the demand remains, it’s hard to imagine how these groups will ever truly be brought to heel.  That being said, these ongoing battles definitely do not define Colombia today, and in our two visits we have never for a moment felt unsafe!

We’ve had a great time, whether it was practicing Tejo - Colombia’s national sport - which involves tossing a stone and trying to explode a packet of gunpowder (Melanie is convinced there’s a big untapped market for Tejo in Boston)

Or learning to play “carambola” a type of billiards popular in Colombia (note the absence of pockets on the table)

But with the same rule that “losers drink”!!

And as is usually the case when we travel, we had the best time just being in nature - here on a challenging 15 km hike in the town of Jardin in the Western Andes to 7 different waterfalls - easily one of the best, if not THE best, day hike we’ve ever done

And checking out the local flora and fauna like the beautiful, but strange looking, Cock of the Rock

And to top it all off, a visit to a truly remarkable orchid collection containing 5,000 different species, including some of the weirdest flowers we’ve ever seen (Colombia is reported to have the largest number of orchid species of any country in the world)

The only thing I didn’t get to see was one of those famous cocaine hippos!  Guess we’ll have to come back again….. But in the meantime, tomorrow we have an early flight to a remote area of Panama for a week of scuba diving.  Back at ya after that!