The prince of medellín
A pauper in Los Angeles can live like a king in Medellín.
As soon as you touch down, you hit that conversion rate going from USD to Colombian pesos and – poof! – money is no longer an issue. You’re rich.
This concept was front of mind as I tucked into the back seat of a taxicab idling in the airport parking lot. We had just touched down on a flight in from Bogotá. “Finally,” I thought. “A fucking respite.”
Windows down and seat belts strapped, we drift out of the José María Córdova Airport and get our first licks of the city. They built the fucker right in the middle of a jungle. The perfect confluence of society and nature. It’s an incredibly lush and green jungle, with rain dripping from massive greenery like sweat from the brow of an athlete. But within the jungle there’s also businesses and residences and sidewalk cafés with little mesas and sillas balancing on uneven pavement as a reminder of the negotiation between concrete and dirt.
The air in Medellín is clean, clear, free of the dankness that plagues the skies in many other places. It’s discernably different as it whips you in the face for the first time, streaming in from a cracked car window. I realize it’s the first real fresh air I’ve had in a while. Or maybe I’ve just been on a plane for too long.
We go through a tunnel that cuts right into a massive mountain and spits out into the main city. It stretches for roughly 8 or so kilometers and is currently the second largest tunnel in South America. The first largest is also in Colombia. They’re building one now that will be roughly 10 kilometers, and when it’s done it will change the current tunnel size rankings.
Our driver cranked up his window the moment our two front tires crossed the threshold of the tunnel. I was so enamored with the crisp wind; I didn’t take the hint to follow suit with my window. Though I learned quickly. The tunnel was all fumes, and thousands of vehicles of all sizes must pass through it daily to get to their destinations across the city.
We hit the end of the tunnel after what felt like forever. All of the travel must be throwing off my perception of time, or maybe it’s just the uncertainty that comes with experiencing something for the first time.
After the tunnel, you get your first glimpse of the great valley vista of Medellín. Houses stacked upon houses all the way up and down the mountains, with cable cars running from bottom to top and round again. Medellín is a place of great transportation innovation. Instead of digging underground, they built into the sky, utilizing the space above them brilliantly. The metro is not a train in Medellín. It’s a cable car system. The people are not afraid of heights there.
We wind through the city’s cluster of calles, carros and carreteras. The streets are active, mostly with what appear to be young travelers with large packs on their backs from far flung places. There are also some local street venders selling their wares and tons of bustling restaurants and businesses. Many of the food places appear to be upscale and foreign. French, Venezuelan and Japanese cuisine all mixed in with domestic fare.
We then reached our destination: 23Hotel. Its architecture is striking. The building is a tall, stone cylinder with one circular window per floor. Plants pepper the sides of the building, seemingly growing out of the stone.
Before I had even set foot outside of our taxi, an ebullient bellhop has our bags out of the trunk and smiles at us as if he has been waiting his whole life to receive us. He addresses us in broken English, to which I respond in broken Spanish. We both crack smiles at each other’s effort.
He escorts us to our room, which is quite claustrophobic but about what one should expect from a boutique hotel.
“You make it just on time. Rain comes soon!”
I looked out our window. The sun was shining but dusk was on the horizon, where perhaps a storm was concealing itself and would spring upon us shortly. This was the tropics, after all. Weather changes as quickly as the moods and temperaments.
---------_
We waited out the storm in our room. I stared out my circle window in a daze as I watched the tropical rainstorm, sipping malt beers and chewing pizza from the downstairs kitchen. The pizza was incredible. Pizza is the only food I can think of that tastes good everywhere. It is truly ubiquitous. Burgers and tacos come close, but the Italians really figured it out with pizza. Even bad pizza is good.
Out the window, I spotted a few people in the distance scurrying in the rain, hunched over like Golem under their jackets as they desperately headed towards refuge inside the hotel. I smirked to myself and took a rip of beer from the bottle. “Suckers,” I thought.
Then: “I wonder if this will affect the tour tomorrow?”
“Mmmmm….” Eventually came a sleepy little voice. I turned around. My girl was completely passed out, sprawled in the middle of the bed. There was still more malt beer to sip and pizza to munch on and regret eating all of later. And perhaps some more suckers to watch in the rain.
---------_
I quickly learned that the pace of life is slow in Medellín.
The next morning, we scurried down to the kitchen to have our breakfast. It was 7:35am, and our tour bus was leaving at 8am. We had just enough time to scarf down some arepas and café.
7:55am rolled around and our order still hadn’t materialized. I also noticed that the rest of our tour group hadn’t even shown up, save for a few hungover shells of human beings sipping steaming beverages in a corner booth. Maybe they were all skipping breakfast, or maybe they had all slept in. Or maybe they were all loading onto the bus early, getting the good seats.
I shot up from our table and whipped into the hotel lobby. Aside from the hotel staff, it was empty.
I plopped back down into my seat.
“Told ya,” smirked my girl.
The coffee had finally come. A few sips and my nerves were soothed. There’s nothing like that first sip of coffee. Especially in Colombia. Not only because it’s so damn good, but because you likely waited a considerable amount of time for it.
Around 8:05am, the rest of our crew rolled into the restaurant. No one seemed rushed. Everyone greeted each other, sat down, rolled the sleep from their eyes and pulled the desayuno menu to their faces. No one seemed to care we were now 5 minutes and counting late for our tour.
Even the tour guide didn’t seem to mind. She ambled into the kitchen and realized us tourists had shifted into Colombian time. She propped herself up a table nearby and poured herself some tea.
I ordered another round of arepas and stuck my pinkie out as I sipped my coffee. I almost felt at ease.
---------_
They pile us into this hulking metal object that was to perform the duties of a bus. It was supposed to be a 3-hour ride to our destination: a large rock called El Peñon in the city of Guatapé. I grabbed my girl’s hand and got us a seat close to the front. I like sitting as close to the exit as possible on buses. I think it’s a Jewish thing. We’re always thinking shit is about to go down.
We traverse the city streets for about an hour, finally winding up in the mountain roads. After a while, the driver busts a U-turn and whips us down a tiny dirt road that would be tight even for a car let alone a full-sized “bus.”
Then the first rain of the day came, taking this journey from 6 to midnight on the perilous scale. We pass by farms, houses, random animals, all of it looking like it had existed untouched for centuries. We’re straight up in the country at this point, far from civilization.
I’m looking out the window the whole time at the treachery of the roads, waiting for the moment where the bus driver will halt the bus and turn to the tour guide to say “We shall not pass. It’s too dangerous. We can go no further.” Up until this point, our driver hadn’t even broken a sweat.
And then it happened, as if I had willed it into existence: a massive cluster of potholes. These fuckers looked like the result of Zeus sending down lightning bolts into the ground. They were actually like craters.
The bus comes to an abrupt stop and I start envisioning my soon to be future: me and several other able-bodied folks in the pouring rain, mud up to our noses, pushing the bus back to the paved road. It would take us days. We may have to start eating people. I don’t know why I jumped to cannibalism so quickly.
The bus driver analyzed the situation from his cockpit for all of 20 seconds and then made his move: he pulled the bus to the left, easing over one of the first potholes in the process, stopped, then eased right, then shimmied left, proceeding this way until we had made it across the bad patch of road. The man didn’t even seem to be nervous. He was like the Neil Armstrong of bus drivers.
---------_
As we pulled in closer to El Peñon, our tour guide made an announcement with a stern look on her face:
“OK, guys. We’re getting very close. El Peñon is always very busy with travelers from all over the world, and Saturday is the busiest day of the week. We need to all work together to stay together. We’ll allot two hours for those who want to journey up the rock, and we meet at the base at, let’s say, 1:25pm. Don’t forget, we have more appointments and places to get today so it’s important that no one is late.”
I start thinking to myself, “no way we need two hours to ascend this fucking rock, how long could it actually take?” and also, “no way all these yahoos are going to stick together and be on time, we’re definitely going to be late for lunch.”
Then we pull into the parking lot and the gravity of the situation finally began to permeate my thick skull: there were hundreds of people swarming around from tourists to vendors to hustlers to armed guards to people yelling in a global variety of languages and rustling around in all directions.
I grabbed my girl’s hand and hopped off the bus as soon as we parked. I secured our boletos from the tour guide and we headed for the base of the mountain.
El Peñon’s narrow concrete staircase rising hundreds of feet into the sky was slick from rain and crawling with people from head to toe. We got in line to go up, but I wanted to hit the bathroom to avoid having to piss off the side off the rock once I got to the top. I went to pull away from my girl, but her grasp did not ease. I looked at her. She was purple.
“We don’t have to do this…”
“We do,” she gulped and then smiled at me.
“OK, toughie.”
I smiled back and ran for the bathroom marked H. H for hombres. Not M for mujeres. Which are women. I saw some people in our group make that mistake and I was going to try to stop them but I didn’t.
I turned the corner into hombres and found myself toe to toe with an armed guard holding a very large rifle. My man looked like he was going on some dangerous military operation in the jungle hunting narcos. I had a little pep in my step now that the pee had built up in me, so he stopped me with a firm palm to the chest.
“Señor, 50 pesos, por favor.”
I held my bladder as we ascended.
---------_
“We don’t have to do this…”
Now it was my girl offering me a way out.
We were about 10 steps in when I had told her I thought we had made a terrible mistake. All around us were gobs of people. Some were young, punkass kids with their young, punkass friends pushing each other and yelling “go faster, faggot!” Some were old and hunched over, barely manifesting themselves forward and with great effort. One of them mentioned she hoped her wheelchair would still be where she left it. Some of them were large, gordo, looking as if this was the first bit of exercise they had ever done. One of the gordos was even eating a fucking sandwich as he climbed. There were winos drinking beer and seltzers purchased at the base of the rock, dancing and bobbing up the stairs like they were at Burning Man. I swear one of them even had their eyes closed half the time and was popping little white pills that I heard her say was for her “sciatica acting up.” I was wall to wall surrounded by blissful idiots, hungry slobs and geriatric bucket listers.
I hate judging people by their covers but when you’re in a life or death situation and are surrounded by people you start thinking this way.
Not to mention, the rain slicked steps. No railing to hold on to. No one to call for help. All it would take is for one of those winos to lose their footing, topple back a few steps into the people behind him, and you’ve got yourself a cataclysmic domino effect. I could see the chyrons burning up the international news channels for days. “Ravers cause stampede in Colombia; Two Americans amongst the dead.” People would forget all about the war in Ukraine, Covid outbreaks and protests in China, weird new allegations against both the Bidens and the Trumps, the latest crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, surges in homelessness and crime, NFL playoffs and House Speaker McCarthy’s strange growing resemblance to a mouse. I started to feel heroic, like perhaps I should be willing to sacrifice myself on this goddamn rock just to bring Americans and hell, global citizens together in mourning for a few minutes.
I shook these terrible wanderings from my mind and pressed on ahead. We had gone too far to turn back. I was no hero. Just a man on a rock.
---------_
About halfway up, my lungs started to go.
I really had started to feel it about a quarter of the way up, the tightness in my chest, my lungs seemingly losing the ability to take in air at their normal capacity.
An uncomfortable cold and clammy sweat populated my underarms and middle of my back.
I looked up at my girl, right in front of me. She didn’t seem to be having the same problem as me, but her back was turned so I couldn’t make an accurate assessment.
I turned to look behind me. The gordo was there, still eating his sandwich. He was having no problems at all. The sandwich looked delicious.
A few steps below him, I saw an elderly woman getting along just fine. She wasn’t moving fast by any means, but she was making her steps.
So at the halfway marker, I tapped my girl.
“I… gotta stop…”
She turned to me.
“Thank god. Me too.”
She looked to have my same symptoms, but worse.
We tucked into a tight little cove where we could stop and still let people behind us go by. Gordo gave us a nod as he passed by, little pieces of bread stuck in his beard, some toppings dropping gracefully from his sandwich as he passed.
“Is it the elevation?” I asked my girl.
“I think… so,” she said.
I watched many people pass us. Many of them old, silly, inebriated, fat. The one thing in common is that they all seemed to have joy. To not be caught up in their feelings or observations as I was, but to be truly beholding the majestic beauty of El Peñon.
There was a plaque nearby our little cove, sealed into the rock. It was a phone number one could call in case of an emergency. I wondered how they could even get to you if you did need to use that number. I remarked at the fact that through some kind of fate, my girl and I had landed at the place were that plaque was visible. I pulled out my phone to see if I had reception.
“You gonna call,” she asked.
“Nah,” I said.
We pushed on and made it to the top, where there is a restaurant, a bar, some souvenir shops and a bathroom with no armed guard.
There are also some incredible views of Antioquia Department’s man-made water reservoir and lake.
We looked out at the vista, marveling in its beauty.
“How do you think they get all the goods up here?” My girl asked. “You think they hike that shit up here every day?”
“Good question.”
Down at the bottom, we cracked some celebratory beers. It was 1:45pm. Most of the rest of our group had not yet made it back yet and we were late for lunch.
I sipped my beer and noticed a cable system transporting goods in little bins suspended in air, going from the base of El Peñon to the top.
Commerce finds a way.
---------_
We had lunch on a yacht.
When I first heard we were going on a yacht, images of Leonardo DiCaprio on a wood deck throwing lobsters at Kyle Chandler popped into my head. Also, Succession. “Sails out, nails out.” Yachts to me are luxurious pieces of aquatic machinery, reserved for big budgets. I knew based on how much I had paid for this tour, I may need to broaden my definition of “yacht.”
This yacht was more of a two-story shuttle boat, one like you might take to Catalina Island for a weekend getaway. It had a bar and four hot tubs, lounges and couches. It was very, very, very nice. It just wasn’t a yacht. My only issue was that there were four hot tubs, unlimited flow of alcohol and only one bathroom. The math seemed off.
I kept it low key, up on the deck of the second floor. Had some beers and took in the incredible scene as we embarked on a sail around the Punchiná Dam. A storm was on the horizon, chasing us, gaining ground. I guzzled beer and stared stoically into the abyss of water until my father-in-law ambled over and nudged my shoulder. He had three cameras slung around his neck, a backpack full of lenses strapped to his back and an iPhone gripped in one hand. He sort of looked like a modernized version of Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now.
“Keep a look out for it,” he whispered, eyes wide and bulging.
I nodded slightly and sipped my beer.
Pablo Escobar had had a house out on the dam. I looked at the hills and all of the homogenized houses littered along the slopes and shores. Each one was a replica of the other. There is no way we would be able to discern which one was Pablo Escobar’s vs. Pablo Joe Schmo’s.
Then a hurried flutter of taps came on my shoulder.
“There it is!”
My father-in-law sprinted from one side of the boat to the next. I followed.
Sure enough, there was a house that was VERY dissimilar to all the others. It was larger, bombed out and graffitied. It looked like it had been hit with an aerial precision strike and then tagged by half Medellín.
My father-in-law only took photos with his iPhone. I think the cameras around his neck were purely a fashion choice.
I didn’t bother with taking any photos of my own. I was too far away. I have the moment in my head.
I stared at that house and sipped on my umpteenth beer. Then, I noticed a figure over by the house. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and jeans. He had bushy, messy brown hair and a thick mustache. He was a bit pudgy. He stared at me with hard eyes. I took a few steps back and looked down at my beer. I shrugged and then chugged the rest it.
We passed that house as the storm hit us. Light sprinkles turning into full-on rain graduating to torrential downpour. Drunken hot tubbers shot out of the tubs and slipped their way to cover.
The man never stopped watching. I was the last one on the deck.
---------_
We had been docked for 30 minutes and they still weren’t letting us deboard. We were huddled in groups down on the first floor passing whispered rumors and shifting glances, mostly segregated by nationality. The bar had run dry, the mood in the room tense.
Rain pounded the boat as two large men paced in front of the exit to dispel anyone from leaving. I wasn’t sure where they even came from. I swear they had not been on the boat until now.
“They just gotta be waiting for the rain to die down a bit,” I thought. “But our buses are right there.” A two-minute dash at most.
Then it occurred to me: “they’re not worried about us getting wet. They’re worried about the buses not being able to make the drive.”
One of the tour guides hopped up on a table.
“OK guys, listen up! We just received a report that there’s been a major mudslide on the main road back into town. They already have maintenance crews on the road working to clear the road, but we don’t know how long it will take. We’re going to monitor the situation and will keep you up to date. In the meantime, we think the best thing to do is to stay on the boat and party! Drinks on us!”
With that, two boxes arrived out of nowhere. The two large men grabbed them and carried them over to the bar. The bartenders opened them and pulled out bottles of liquor and cans of beer. The room erupted.
Someone threw Bad Bunny Radio on the sound system and the Latin Americans proceeded to whoop it up. 5 minutes in, one guy in the Venezuelan group started doing a strip tease for a girl in a chair while his friends poured beer on him.
We were stuck on the boat for 5 hours. The alcoholic care package lasted for the first 2.
There was laughing, drinking, yelling, crying and a surprisingly limited amount of puking.
As I stood with the rest of the Americans, arms folded, awkward look on my face, not a trace of rhythm coursing through my body, longing for my warm bed and my pajamas back in the hotel room, I thought, “maybe we aren’t stuck, but gifted this time. Maybe an extension of the party is just what we needed.”
I began to tap my leg to the beat, still lacking rhythm. I learned the Tao of Bad Bunny that day.
---------_
The next day was the wedding, the underlying purpose for our travels to Colombia.
It rained all day, which they say is good luck for a wedding. A spiritual cleansing, creating a fresh slate for the nuptials to build their foundation on.
It was my first gay wedding. The mothers walk their sons down the aisle.
Other than that, it was a typical wedding affair: high nerves and emotional speeches, an incredibly scenic venue and hopes that the rain would eventually subside in time for the ceremony, a confluence of people from far-flung places dressed in fancy attire, booze and loud music, dancing and joy and love. Little moments in the dark with people you care about.
It really was a way to take in Colombia and appreciate all of its offerings and the things it stands for. A land of selvas and pasteles and café and la gente magnifico. Of windy canyon roads and the Neil Armstrong of bus drivers. It’s a place of innovation, strength, beauty, grace and resilience.
Trips like those also make you miss home and fall back in love with the things you take for granted there. Each trip you take, you bring something back with you. Not just gifts or magnets for the fridge, but something inside. A new and enhanced perspective that comes with setting your gaze on a place that is new to you. For me, things learned on trips are not something I can always articulate, even though they are printed on the walls of my brain. Perhaps they are best left that way, making a subconscious impact. What I can tell you is that Bad Bunny is now my most listened to artist on Spotify.