Colombia: via Medellín - the city of Pablo Escobar - to the coffee district

The last update was written in Cartagena as you might remember. Well in Cartagena we decided to go for a real Caribbean experience by travelling on Monday to the island 'Isla deal Encantos'. But before we could do that, Henk had to visit the emergency dentist on Sunday evening. The area where a tooth was extracted, was severely inflamed. Result: A full x-ray photo of his teeth plus Henk also on antibiotics (but twice the dose of Frank) and he has a treatment of 10 days . So you can imagine how healthy we are without any alcohol ;-). 

Isla del Encantos was a one hour ferry with a speedboat. It was really nice and quiet after all the day-tourists left the island at 15.00hrs. We only spend there one day which was enough including snorkelling in a small coral reef. On the way back we were lucky that we had the 2 seats in front of the boat, the remainder of the passengers got soaked due to the heavy waves. 

On Wednesday we flew to Medellin which is known as the (former) city of Pablo Escobar and the epic centre of the Colombian cocaine trade. This has been 20 years ago and in that time Medellin has changed substantially and is nowadays a thriving and - in 'South American terms' - save city plus awarded internationally for their innovative culture (re: see Financieele Dagblad from yesterday (20-01-2016)! ).

Furthermore it is the home town of the well known artist Fernando Botero (google him and I am sure you have seen some of his work before). As the Pablo Escobar tour was fully booked for days, we decided to do a biking tour again as it is great way to explore a city. This time it included two hills of which especially the first one was heavier than a spinning class! On Friday we took the bus to Guatapé which has a beautiful scenery with lakes around the "Peñol Rock" (La piedra del Peñol) which you can climb by taking 776 steps. 

On Saturday we took a bus (6 hours) which brought us from Medellín to a small village Salento which is in the middle of the Coffee District of Colombia. The bus was well equipped, we were even able to facetime Henk's dad in Portugal (it remains strange that you can do these kind of things in a bus in the middle of nowhere and are than connected live with the other side of the world). The scenery along the route was really nice but our reward was the view from our new hotel (see photo). We are happy to be in a small village instead of a big city. After Rio, Bogota and Medellín it felt a bit like a multi million citizens city tour. 

Today, we will be doing a tour which will include a hike through the wax palm area, visit a coffee plantation and a hummingbird (kolibri) farm. Well that's it for this week but of course you can watch the latest videos (number 8 and 9) and have a look at the photos. 

Love & take care 
Henk & Frank