How Pablo Escobar’s city looks now

Today we’d like to show you, in our opinion, the best Colombian city. Due to the Netflix series “Narcos” about Pablo Escobar’s drug kingdom city of Medellin became viral during last years. Columbians aren’t proud of that, but for sure this increased number of people travelling there. Of course, we have seen this series, but it wasn’t the reason of our visit. We decided to go there, because every Colombian was telling us, that is the safest, most friendly and always singing town in Colombia. Ready for another trip? 😊

Road to Medellin:

Roads in Colombia aren’t the best in the world, but we didn’t think they are that bad. So, after we spent few days in Villa de Leyva we’ve decided to move to that famous Medellin. We had two choices: back to Bogota and get a bus through highway or go to Tunja and ride through the jungle. We’ve decided to go via Tunja, so we booked a night bus to “Narcos” capital city. The whole journey from Tunja took us about 13 hours on leaking bus. Yes, the bus starts leaking in the middle of the night, when it was raining cats and dogs. Water burst in through windows and roof. What else we can say – Welcome in South America – love it or leave it 😊

Finally, we’ve arrived at the main bus terminal at 6 am.

First contact with the city:

Luckily, we arrived at Medellin on the game day between Poland and Colombia at FIFA World Cup in Russia. Full of hopes, we went to see the game and have breakfast in one of the local bakeries. We met Giovanny there and when he heard we are from Poland and the game is about to start he invited us to watch the game together. Poland lost, but certainly we won, this was the beginning of our great friendship. As we imagined before, people from Medellin surprised us even more with their kindness and peaceful way of living.

Giovanny on Daniel's left

Because Monika is a culture lover, we couldn’t miss the famous sculptures made by Fernando Botero, whose son was a politician and had a drug connection and appeared in “Narcos”. We saw his art for the first time in Bogota, so we knew what to expect, just check this out:

Monika is also fascinated with cemeteries in different countries and cities, so she decided to take us to San Pedro Cemetery Museum and Cemetario Jardins Montesacro, Itagüí in Medellin. She loves to visit graves of known and “famous” people. She has seen few of them already and Pablo Escobar was next on the list, while being in Medellin. She’s interested in graveyard’s architecture and the way how people organized them. We took a walk around contemplating about life and death, meanwhile some workers tried to force and rush us to see this bastard grave, but we took our time and tried not to pay attention to them.

San Pedro Cemetery

Cemetario Jardins Montesacro

Few moments before we left cemetery, we just stopped by to take some shots of this murderer’s grave. Surprising was the fact that, during our 5 min brake there, we saw at least 10 different people who were praying and making Christian crosses above his name. Were they one of his sicarios? Paid assassins? We don’t know that, same as we don’t know why people still respect him.

Another day we’ve decided to see if the poorest part of the town is really that dangerous as they say. We jumped in to the cable car which took us to last station before national park and we walked down between narrow streets of Medellin’s favela. We were the only white, tall, blue eyed people over there, so everyone’s first reactions were – Hola gringo! We don’t like when people call us like that, so Daniel used his Spanish to explain each time that we’re from Poland, home country of Jan Pawel II, their beloved pope. After this short introduction, people became friendlier and welcomed us with smiles and handshakes. They really don’t like Americans. What’s strange, no one offered us any gram of weed or cocaine, which is so popular over there.

Medellin’s National Arví Park

Did you ever think about getting into the National Park via cable car? Yes, in Medellin you can do it, 30 minutes and you’re there. There’s no entrance fee, but you must buy second cable car ride, which is not connected with the urban area and it’s more expensive. Costs 5000 pesos which is about 2$ for return ticket. Cheap isn’t? Anyway, going there you must be prepared to lower temperature than in downtown of Medellin, because of its altitude which is 2200 – 2600 meters above sea level. During rainy season don’t forget about rain jacket and waterproof shoes. If you are adventures seeker you can camp inside the park completely for free. More info about park you’ll find at its official website: https://parquearvi.org/en/

Swinging above favela

On top of that, we became very close friends with Giovanny and we’re expecting him to visit Poland next year. He invited us to his place and we lived together for about 2 weeks. We smoked the best Colombian weed and spent hours talking about travels and we cooked our national dishes.

Together with Giovanny eating delicious polish pierogi

Thanks for staying with us,

M&D