Wednesday 5 May
Cali – Medellin
I didn’t do much today either. The hostel was still empty. I did have a nice almuerzo at a cafe near the hostel that no one recommended, which was a nice surprise.
In the evening I met up with an amusing, fat guy from Malta who had a great accent. It was essentially an Italian accent with all the musical ups and downs that come with it with a sprinkling of cockney and a smidgen of weird randomness. He told me how great Medellin was. We had dinner and then I caught the bus to Medellin. It was pretty cold so it was lucky that I had my jacket and sleeping bag with me. I fell asleep pretty quickly.
Thursday 30 September 2010
I Like to Watch TV
Tuesday 4 May
Cali
I woke up late after the previous night. For some reason everyone was leaving today. So from the hostel being almost completely full last night, there were only about six people in the whole place by midday. I filled my time by updating my blog and uploading photos to Facebook. I had downloaded the DVD of the Pet Shop Boys gig that I went to in December, so I killed some more time by watching that too.
In the evening I watched a few films on the TV in the hostel with some English guy who was there. I saw the end of Apocalypto which I had been meaning to do for ages but had never got round to doing. We watch Book of Eli but I fell asleep during that. I don’t think I missed much. And then we watch This Is It, the Michael Jackson documentary on his final concert filmed during the rehearsals. It did seem to show how out of touch he was with reality. Every time someone disagreed with him he would get agitated and say “It’s all about the love,” for no apparent reason. Mad as a box of frogs.
Cali
I woke up late after the previous night. For some reason everyone was leaving today. So from the hostel being almost completely full last night, there were only about six people in the whole place by midday. I filled my time by updating my blog and uploading photos to Facebook. I had downloaded the DVD of the Pet Shop Boys gig that I went to in December, so I killed some more time by watching that too.
In the evening I watched a few films on the TV in the hostel with some English guy who was there. I saw the end of Apocalypto which I had been meaning to do for ages but had never got round to doing. We watch Book of Eli but I fell asleep during that. I don’t think I missed much. And then we watch This Is It, the Michael Jackson documentary on his final concert filmed during the rehearsals. It did seem to show how out of touch he was with reality. Every time someone disagreed with him he would get agitated and say “It’s all about the love,” for no apparent reason. Mad as a box of frogs.
Blame Canada
Monday 3 May
Cali
I was woken up in the morning by the other people in my room arriving home from the club. So I killed them. Killed them all to death. No I didn’t. I was just mildly annoyed and tried to sleep some more.
Come the morning I hung out with them and went to breakfast with some of them. The breakfast was OK. I didn’t do much during the day. Cali’s not exactly a city of beauty. Its culture comes from it apparently being the world capital of salsa, but they haven’t bothered with anything visual like architecture. It has a similar brash, commercial, uninspiring look of some of the more slapdash, American-style towns in Ecuador and Brazil. I had a bit of a walk around town but there wasn’t much to be said for it. In the evening I made some pasta.
I was in two minds whether to go out that night as I was still a bit tired. But in the end I decided to go anyway. We caught a taxi to some salsa place. The girl from the hostel told them where to go. Then we set off. There was a torrential rainstorm taking place and the roads were soaked with water. Of course that didn’t stop our driver racing as fast as he could down the roads like some crazy, possessed rally driver (though still no patch on that driver from Salvador). The roads weren’t exactly in the best condition. There were potholes everywhere and badly surfaced tarmac. We seemed to be travelling at about 100 miles an hour and then suddenly jerking back and forth as though the steering was faulty – which it probably was – past invisible obstacles in the road. The car’s movement combined with the road surface meant that it felt like we were in an extremely fast washing machine, that hadn’t been secured properly to the floor. Another way to describe it would be like being driven at high speed by an epileptic, during a fit, in a typhoon. Which we probably were.
We arrived at some nightclub, but it wasn’t the one that we had asked for. We didn’t have much Spanish between us in our car, but there was another cab with us that had someone who did. They seemed to be waiting for a while which was confusing, as we should have been going to the correct place. I left the car and went and asked what was going on. After a bit of back and forth we were on our way to the correct place.
Another life-threatening taxi journey later and we had arrived. On the way it seemed like the taxi driver was trying to charge us more than the pre-arranged fee, but we weren’t sure because of the lack of language skills. So we paid him the original fare and went in.
Once inside we realised that after a while, only half of the other cab were in the club. I asked why they weren’t here. It seems they had decided to wait in the other cab, until we had paid what the cab driver was asking. This was complete madness. Firstly, they were trying to rip us off, secondly, it wasn’t their cab. These people were idiots. They were also Canadian. I guess they were being nice to the point of stupidity. I went outside and told them to come in, which they did. Someone’s got to tell them what to do. Very strange.
Inside the club we experienced how the capital of salsa works. Of course all the guys and girls have been dancing salsa since they were conceived (in fact, that’s probably how they were conceived) so they were pretty good at it. What was unusual was that as each song ended, the entire dance floor cleared and everyone sat down again. And then ten seconds later, when the next song started, everybody took to the floor once again. How on earth were you supposed to hit on the girls when you only had one song to do it? They were really making it hard for themselves. Or rather, they were making it hard for us uncoordinated gringos that couldn’t dance.
As anyone who’s watched X Factor knows, lack of talent is no reason not to try, so we had a go. Back in London in beginner salsa classes I look quite good – I can pick it up pretty quickly. Here in Colombia in the capital of salsa I’m as sexy and fluid as a can of baked beans. It didn’t help that my dancing partner was a Kiwi girl with even less fluidity than me.
Then, a couple of hours in, our taxi driver returned and asked for the extra money once again. I of course brushed him off but he had spied a weak point and exploited it mercilessly. He started hassling our Canadian cousins again. Eventually for some crazy reason – probably to make him go away – they paid up, which was plainly ridiculous. They had now let themselves be ripped off for someone else’s cab, which, to be fair, takes some doing. What were they thinking? Anyway I gave them a bit of cash because I felt sorry for them, but the other people in my cab were on a tight budget and weren’t going to pay. They shouldn’t have paid in the first place.
Anyway once we had made the most of it we headed back home.
Cali
I was woken up in the morning by the other people in my room arriving home from the club. So I killed them. Killed them all to death. No I didn’t. I was just mildly annoyed and tried to sleep some more.
Come the morning I hung out with them and went to breakfast with some of them. The breakfast was OK. I didn’t do much during the day. Cali’s not exactly a city of beauty. Its culture comes from it apparently being the world capital of salsa, but they haven’t bothered with anything visual like architecture. It has a similar brash, commercial, uninspiring look of some of the more slapdash, American-style towns in Ecuador and Brazil. I had a bit of a walk around town but there wasn’t much to be said for it. In the evening I made some pasta.
I was in two minds whether to go out that night as I was still a bit tired. But in the end I decided to go anyway. We caught a taxi to some salsa place. The girl from the hostel told them where to go. Then we set off. There was a torrential rainstorm taking place and the roads were soaked with water. Of course that didn’t stop our driver racing as fast as he could down the roads like some crazy, possessed rally driver (though still no patch on that driver from Salvador). The roads weren’t exactly in the best condition. There were potholes everywhere and badly surfaced tarmac. We seemed to be travelling at about 100 miles an hour and then suddenly jerking back and forth as though the steering was faulty – which it probably was – past invisible obstacles in the road. The car’s movement combined with the road surface meant that it felt like we were in an extremely fast washing machine, that hadn’t been secured properly to the floor. Another way to describe it would be like being driven at high speed by an epileptic, during a fit, in a typhoon. Which we probably were.
We arrived at some nightclub, but it wasn’t the one that we had asked for. We didn’t have much Spanish between us in our car, but there was another cab with us that had someone who did. They seemed to be waiting for a while which was confusing, as we should have been going to the correct place. I left the car and went and asked what was going on. After a bit of back and forth we were on our way to the correct place.
Another life-threatening taxi journey later and we had arrived. On the way it seemed like the taxi driver was trying to charge us more than the pre-arranged fee, but we weren’t sure because of the lack of language skills. So we paid him the original fare and went in.
Once inside we realised that after a while, only half of the other cab were in the club. I asked why they weren’t here. It seems they had decided to wait in the other cab, until we had paid what the cab driver was asking. This was complete madness. Firstly, they were trying to rip us off, secondly, it wasn’t their cab. These people were idiots. They were also Canadian. I guess they were being nice to the point of stupidity. I went outside and told them to come in, which they did. Someone’s got to tell them what to do. Very strange.
Inside the club we experienced how the capital of salsa works. Of course all the guys and girls have been dancing salsa since they were conceived (in fact, that’s probably how they were conceived) so they were pretty good at it. What was unusual was that as each song ended, the entire dance floor cleared and everyone sat down again. And then ten seconds later, when the next song started, everybody took to the floor once again. How on earth were you supposed to hit on the girls when you only had one song to do it? They were really making it hard for themselves. Or rather, they were making it hard for us uncoordinated gringos that couldn’t dance.
As anyone who’s watched X Factor knows, lack of talent is no reason not to try, so we had a go. Back in London in beginner salsa classes I look quite good – I can pick it up pretty quickly. Here in Colombia in the capital of salsa I’m as sexy and fluid as a can of baked beans. It didn’t help that my dancing partner was a Kiwi girl with even less fluidity than me.
Then, a couple of hours in, our taxi driver returned and asked for the extra money once again. I of course brushed him off but he had spied a weak point and exploited it mercilessly. He started hassling our Canadian cousins again. Eventually for some crazy reason – probably to make him go away – they paid up, which was plainly ridiculous. They had now let themselves be ripped off for someone else’s cab, which, to be fair, takes some doing. What were they thinking? Anyway I gave them a bit of cash because I felt sorry for them, but the other people in my cab were on a tight budget and weren’t going to pay. They shouldn’t have paid in the first place.
Anyway once we had made the most of it we headed back home.
Wednesday 29 September 2010
A Man, a Plan, a Canal: Panama!
Sunday 2 May
Cusco – Lima, Peru – Panama City, Panama – Cali, Colombia
We arrived in Lima at about 4.30. I caught a taxi to the airport, found a cafe and had a bite to eat and a cup of tea to revive myself slightly. I then decided to see if I could check in to get rid of my large bag at least. It turned out that there was actually an earlier flight leaving in just over an hour that I could get on, rather than having to spend most of the day in Lima airport and arriving in Cali late at night. Sounded like a plan to me!
I boarded the flight, and they were playing the film Invictus which I wanted to watch, so I saw that. For some reason, they didn’t mention that they poisoned the All Blacks in the final and they changed François Pienaar’s character from gregarious to introverted – but apart from that, it was a good and factually accurate film. I slept afterwards and woke up just as we landed in Panama.
So here I was, unexpectedly in Central America, for just over an hour. All I saw was the inside of the airport, which wasn’t particularly exciting. It seemed a bit tacky and over commercialised. So it was probably a good thing I wasn’t there for long.
I flew to Cali and took a while to find a cash machine, before taking a taxi to the hostel. I had a shower and then fell asleep, catching up on the sleep lost to crying infants. I woke up in the afternoon and hung out with the people in the hostel, which was putting on a barbeque. I had a drink and a chat and then went to sleep again.
Cusco – Lima, Peru – Panama City, Panama – Cali, Colombia
We arrived in Lima at about 4.30. I caught a taxi to the airport, found a cafe and had a bite to eat and a cup of tea to revive myself slightly. I then decided to see if I could check in to get rid of my large bag at least. It turned out that there was actually an earlier flight leaving in just over an hour that I could get on, rather than having to spend most of the day in Lima airport and arriving in Cali late at night. Sounded like a plan to me!
I boarded the flight, and they were playing the film Invictus which I wanted to watch, so I saw that. For some reason, they didn’t mention that they poisoned the All Blacks in the final and they changed François Pienaar’s character from gregarious to introverted – but apart from that, it was a good and factually accurate film. I slept afterwards and woke up just as we landed in Panama.
So here I was, unexpectedly in Central America, for just over an hour. All I saw was the inside of the airport, which wasn’t particularly exciting. It seemed a bit tacky and over commercialised. So it was probably a good thing I wasn’t there for long.
I flew to Cali and took a while to find a cash machine, before taking a taxi to the hostel. I had a shower and then fell asleep, catching up on the sleep lost to crying infants. I woke up in the afternoon and hung out with the people in the hostel, which was putting on a barbeque. I had a drink and a chat and then went to sleep again.
Saying, as He Drowned the Third...
Saturday 1 May
Cusco – Lima
I woke up nice and early to catch my bus. I had breakfast at the hostel and while I waited I checked the internet. And then I waited. And then I waited some more. And just to change things up a bit, I did some waiting. A couple of days later, my breakfast arrived. DON’T THEY KNOW THERE’S A WAR ON?!?!? It was lucky I had woken up early...
I had a quick shower and packed and then managed to share a cab to the bus station with some Dutch girls who were also heading there. They were good fun to spend a ten minute cab journey with and it was a shame they weren’t going to the same place as me.
On the bus I had a seat right at the front, which was good for the view but short on leg room. The bus was OK, so not as good as the ones in Argentina but not as bad as Ecuador. In fact the worst buses are in Ecuador and not Bolivia, where bad buses do exist but you can pay a small amount more for the nicer ones with personal butlers and fine wines*. It was also a shame that I didn’t take the one I had originally intended to – I saw one of their buses and it looked like a sleek, black spaceship.
At first I had two seats to myself but then an hour or two in and a fat, old, smelly Peruvian woman came and sat next to me. At least I had a great view of the mountains as we worked our way down to the coast.
I drifted in and out of sleep. And then, across from me, there’s a couple with a child. The kid is screaming. Constantly. I resign myself to no sleep, and start to watch movies on my laptop instead. The kid has a nasty habit of screaming for an hour or so and then stopping for about an hour and a half, before starting again. It makes me worry that if I were a parent, I might think that at times murder might be an entirely reasonable parental behaviour.
I worked out later that the distance to Lima from Cusco by road is around 600 miles (which makes an average speed of 30 miles an hour) but as the crow flies it’s 350. The mountains almost double the length of the trip, and possibly slow it down by more than twice as the average speed would probably be much faster if the road was direct. Then divide by the number you first thought of.
The wilderness out there was something else, though I wouldn’t want to get stuck in it. I try and get what sleep I can in between thoughts of infanticide.
*may not be true
Cusco – Lima
I woke up nice and early to catch my bus. I had breakfast at the hostel and while I waited I checked the internet. And then I waited. And then I waited some more. And just to change things up a bit, I did some waiting. A couple of days later, my breakfast arrived. DON’T THEY KNOW THERE’S A WAR ON?!?!? It was lucky I had woken up early...
I had a quick shower and packed and then managed to share a cab to the bus station with some Dutch girls who were also heading there. They were good fun to spend a ten minute cab journey with and it was a shame they weren’t going to the same place as me.
On the bus I had a seat right at the front, which was good for the view but short on leg room. The bus was OK, so not as good as the ones in Argentina but not as bad as Ecuador. In fact the worst buses are in Ecuador and not Bolivia, where bad buses do exist but you can pay a small amount more for the nicer ones with personal butlers and fine wines*. It was also a shame that I didn’t take the one I had originally intended to – I saw one of their buses and it looked like a sleek, black spaceship.
At first I had two seats to myself but then an hour or two in and a fat, old, smelly Peruvian woman came and sat next to me. At least I had a great view of the mountains as we worked our way down to the coast.
I drifted in and out of sleep. And then, across from me, there’s a couple with a child. The kid is screaming. Constantly. I resign myself to no sleep, and start to watch movies on my laptop instead. The kid has a nasty habit of screaming for an hour or so and then stopping for about an hour and a half, before starting again. It makes me worry that if I were a parent, I might think that at times murder might be an entirely reasonable parental behaviour.
I worked out later that the distance to Lima from Cusco by road is around 600 miles (which makes an average speed of 30 miles an hour) but as the crow flies it’s 350. The mountains almost double the length of the trip, and possibly slow it down by more than twice as the average speed would probably be much faster if the road was direct. Then divide by the number you first thought of.
The wilderness out there was something else, though I wouldn’t want to get stuck in it. I try and get what sleep I can in between thoughts of infanticide.
*may not be true
Why Does Everything Have to Be Such a Performance?
Friday 30 April
Cusco
I had booked a bus to go to Lima on Saturday, as I had a flight on Sunday afternoon to Colombia. It was booked for midday as the journey was about 20 hours and, accounting for potential delays, I would arrive in good time.
However when I picked up the ticket it turned out that, as it was Workers’ Day on Saturday, i.e. 1st May, half the buses weren’t running and my midday bus had disappeared into a puff of worker’s solidarity. The people at the travel agency had booked me on a bus for 5.30, but that was too close to call for catching my flight. The only other option was to catch a bus at 8.00 which was frankly far too early in the morning to be civilised, but that’s all I had.
In the evening I met up with an English guy from my room. We set out to find an Indian restaurant somewhere on the edge of the centre of town. We knew the road and how to get there but didn’t have the full address. Plus the house numbering system in Cusco was a bit erratic (not as confusing as in Colombia, but that’s another story). The road the restaurant was on was a long road and despite walking to the edge of town and back, and asking people who sent us off in some interesting restaurant-free directions, we did find it eventually.
The curry was OK though of course nothing compared to Palace Tandoori on Fulham Palace Road – but then what does? Nothing I tell you. Nothing! I had a chat with the English guy and it turns out he’s an actor. Now there’s something I’ve noticed about actors and that is that some of them, when you’re with them for long periods, can become a little bit irritating.
It’s a bit of a cliché to say that they act (...) like everything is a show, but that’s how it comes across. It’s like they’re more interested in making an impression on you – of any sort – then just having fun and going with the flow and enjoying whatever happens. Well that was the case with this guy. He was alright at first but as the evening wore on he became just a little bit tedious.
After the curry we went out to the clubs again and I ended up going back to Mythology as I liked it so much there, and the other guy went to another place where there was free drinks. Not that it mattered too much as I wasn’t staying out late anyway as I had my bus to catch in the morning.
Cusco
I had booked a bus to go to Lima on Saturday, as I had a flight on Sunday afternoon to Colombia. It was booked for midday as the journey was about 20 hours and, accounting for potential delays, I would arrive in good time.
However when I picked up the ticket it turned out that, as it was Workers’ Day on Saturday, i.e. 1st May, half the buses weren’t running and my midday bus had disappeared into a puff of worker’s solidarity. The people at the travel agency had booked me on a bus for 5.30, but that was too close to call for catching my flight. The only other option was to catch a bus at 8.00 which was frankly far too early in the morning to be civilised, but that’s all I had.
In the evening I met up with an English guy from my room. We set out to find an Indian restaurant somewhere on the edge of the centre of town. We knew the road and how to get there but didn’t have the full address. Plus the house numbering system in Cusco was a bit erratic (not as confusing as in Colombia, but that’s another story). The road the restaurant was on was a long road and despite walking to the edge of town and back, and asking people who sent us off in some interesting restaurant-free directions, we did find it eventually.
The curry was OK though of course nothing compared to Palace Tandoori on Fulham Palace Road – but then what does? Nothing I tell you. Nothing! I had a chat with the English guy and it turns out he’s an actor. Now there’s something I’ve noticed about actors and that is that some of them, when you’re with them for long periods, can become a little bit irritating.
It’s a bit of a cliché to say that they act (...) like everything is a show, but that’s how it comes across. It’s like they’re more interested in making an impression on you – of any sort – then just having fun and going with the flow and enjoying whatever happens. Well that was the case with this guy. He was alright at first but as the evening wore on he became just a little bit tedious.
After the curry we went out to the clubs again and I ended up going back to Mythology as I liked it so much there, and the other guy went to another place where there was free drinks. Not that it mattered too much as I wasn’t staying out late anyway as I had my bus to catch in the morning.
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