I left for Medellín at about 8 am, with the idea I could get
there by 4 pm. I had an idea that there was a route connecting Cali and Medellín,
but to my great disappointment found that I was going to have to go back over
my own tracks back to Pereira (a city I
found difficult to navigate). The road was beautiful, but I still had the
grumpy feeling that this was a movie I had already seen.
Once in Pereira I got lost, and wasted a good hour
untangling myself from the rat’s nest they call daowntown here. I am not given
to belly aching, but I would like to lodge a complaint with the Colombian
people about the lack of road signs. There has to be a goodly number of people
trying to get to Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, and it would be to
everybody’s advantage to route those people out of their precious city.
Finally, at about noon, I was on the straight and narrow
(very narrow) road to Medellín. This has to be the second most important route
in the country, and by following the lower reaches of the Rio Cueca it is
fairly straight, but it is plagued by landslides (shales and sandstones of the
forearc basin as far as I could tell), so the going was extremely slow. Then,
at about 60 km from Medellín the road starts climbing and climbing, in the
slowest, windingnest, and traffic-chocked road you can possibly think of. Think
the carretera libre to Cuernavaca compounded with the carretera libre to
Puebla, and you will get a pale idea of what I was facing. Really? This is the
main access to Colombia’s second largest city? Really?
I finally reached Medellín at about 7 pm. From the vantage
point of a tired tourist it looked steep, enormous, and with crazy traffic. I had
downloaded a map of the hotel I was shooting for, but the reality on the
ground, in the dark of the night, and with crazy traffic coming against me (and
no road signs) was grim. My guardian angel worked twice as hard, and with the
helpful hints of a couple of taxi drivers I finally made it to my swanky hotel,
high in the hills overlooking Medellín.
I am not sure tomorrow I will have the courage to take my
little car into Medellín proper.
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