Vote Saxon

Thursday 6 May
Cali – Medellín

Arriving in Medellín, I caught a cab from the bus station. Despite having a card with the address and even a map on the back, the cab driver still managed to get lost. To be fair, that wasn’t hard given that the streets are like spaghetti, stretched across the sides of various mountains in the Andes. And that both the road and house numbering systems in Colombia are completely mad. For a start, the roads are numbered, but not in any sensible consecutive range. Sure, there might be two roads next to each other that are Calle 8 and Calle 9, but then the next one will be Calle 9a and then Calle 9b. And then when that section ends, Calle 10 will be half way across the city in another district.

And the numbers on the houses make no sense at all. For a start there are two sets of numbers, so a house will be number 8 – 173b. Why? Well clearly the city planners were smoking crack. That’s the most sensible explanation that we can tell. Having said that, the first number seems to be the same for all houses on one street, which immediately renders it irrelevant. So the second number is the real house number. So why the first number? Well there must be some reason, and I bet there’s a Dan Brown novel in it. But I never worked it out.

But perhaps the real reason is that it’s an endemic, elaborate scam so that when foreigners arrive in the country, the taxi drivers have free reign to rip them off by pretending that they’re lost. Although they probably are.

Anyway eventually we found the place and the cab driver was only too happy to take my 10,000 peso note as payment, despite the counter not being above 8,000. Rip offs like that are so common that I couldn’t be bothered to argue, I’d rather take the peace and quiet. And as it amounted to about 70 pence too much, it wasn’t a big deal.

In the evening when I was surfing the web I discovered a site where I could view a live stream of the BBC News channel. Since the polls closed at 10pm UK time that was 4pm Colombian time so I could see the results come in. I watched them for a bit and saw the exit polls which was bad news for the Lib Dems but excitingly there was no majority for any party, so we were in unchartered waters as to who was going to form a government for the first time in an generation. The hilarious “con-dem” joke was still a few days away.

In the evening I met up with a couple of guys from Liverpool who had earlier borrowed a plug adapter. We went to a local microbrewery, which was a first for me in South America. We met some girls from Ireland who the Scousers knew and had some fun with them.

After we came back I caught up on the latest developments on the election while the guys kept drinking. Eventually they left before giving me a shout to come with them as they were too drunk to remember. Which was a bit poor. But then I went out to where they were planning to be, but they weren’t. The place was OK – and there were free drinks after you pay the entrance fee – but as there was no one there that I knew, I left after a short while. I had also run out of cash so I had to stop at a cash machine on the way home. I listened to the election results on my headphones as I fell asleep.