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Woah, what a title! So many different levels! What? Have I been abducted? No, I just thought, you know... sometimes along comes something that's pithy, terse and succinct, and that's too damn good not to use. Oh come on! You'd have done the same. Anyway, it's better than this entry's working title "Colombia, Backpack, Graham". Hmmm, is it too late to start again?

FARC off.

Graham Perkins
2006-08-21 12:41:33

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(self-proclaimed) oldest bowling alley, complete with sweaty men racking up the pins and rolling your balls back to you.

And so we booked a nightbus to Medellin, Colombia's second biggest city. Turned out to be an immensely eye-opening journey. Up until 2am it was also possibly the most uncomfortable squeezed into a minibusish bus with broken reclining seats on very potholed roads.

Eventually we got to a mountain pass and stopped for three hours. Because of heavy guerrilla activity everyone had to wait for daylight. The police routinely close this section of road as Gold. Old. Boring.it was notorious for kidnap. And so, we sat around waiting and talking with a Colombian family with two small kids and it was quite educative to see first-hand how this was simply a way of life in Colombia.

At daybreak an enormous police convoy escorted maybe 20 buses, 30 HGV's and countless other cars through lush mountainous cloud forest so beautiful I felt guilty for not being able to stay awake.

We arrived into Medellin at around 8am and our taxi driver - like so many other Colombians - bowled me over with his cordiality in welcoming us to his country and his city and we checked into our hostel.

Above everything else, Medellin strikes me as being famous for two reasons; if you've seen Blow then you'll know throughout the 1980's the city used to be the world's drug smuggling capital. Additionally at around the same time it also had the world's highest murder rate outside of a war-zone.

It wasn't until the 1980's that various mafioso groups started cultivating cocaine but things took off rapidly to say the least. Within ten years the biggest player in all of this was the Medellin Cartel,
Medellin from the Top of the Cable Car Full Image
led by Pablo Escobar. At the height of all this, Medellin was suffering thousands upon thousands of murders each year, while the cartel's ...