Day 74 - Medellin, Colombia (31 May 2012)

Day 74 – Medellin, Colombia (31 May 2012)

Today was a travel day, well kinda, we had to prepare our gear in the morning, check out of our hostel and store our gear there while we have another look around town.  We had done most things yesterday as there is not much to do in Medellin for the tourist.  Don’t get me wrong it is a nice city, but there is not much keeping the tourist here for more than two nights.  We catch the metro train system to a gondola.  This gondola is positioned at a stop on the metro train system and then passengers hop on this gondola and go up the hill to their neighbourhood, it is a very good and modern system.  We however are heading up the gondola to catch a view of the city.  It is about a ten minute ride up to the top and it is another magnificent view of the city.  We admire this view and then make our way back into town.  We feel we have covered Medellin now so we head back to the hostel and cook some dinner, and then go to the bus station.  We have waited until the 5pm bus so we arrive in Cartagena at a reasonable hour of 7am (14 hour overnight bus).  We don’t want to arrive in the middle of the night and there be nothing open.  At 5pm we catch our bus, the air conditioning is on full blast, it gets pretty cold.  I have prepared for this however and packed a jersey and jacket in my day pack, luckily I did because they were definitely needed!  The first half of the trip is through the Andes mountains.  I get to sleep about midnight on the bus as it was hard to sleep for the first half as going through the mountains there are a lot of corners.  However as we exited the mountains and got into flat territory, the ride became smoother and I was able to snooze until our arrival in Cartagena the next morning.