Medellin - Day 1

Got in a few hours sleep and headed back to the airport to catch a plane to Medellin. Picked up our rental car at the airport and started driving to Guatape. Gorgeous scenery winding through the mountains.

Two hours later arrived at Piedra de el peñol. A huge rock jutting straight up several hundred feet. It has a staircase to the top built into a natural crevice of the rock but unfortunately was closed for repairs. Still the views from its base were high above Guatape and made for fantastic sights. Enjoyed a cold beer here and then drove down to Guatape

Guatape is a small, colorful colonial town that has been beautifully preserved. Took a while to find parking and finally had our first meal of the day at 4pm. Walked around the cobblestone streets and waa repeatedly rewarded venturing down random side streets with charming buildings and murals and artwork everywhere.

Would have loved to spend a lot more time exploring but it was getting a bit late and we still had to drive back to medellin and i really didn't want to be driving those mountain roads in the dark.

The drive back took about 3 hours. The approach into medellin was pretty spectacular. Medellin sits in bowl completely surrounded by high mountains and our approach was high, high above the city. Completely dark at that point but the lights below and up the mountain sides was quite a sight

Took us quite a while to navigate our way down the mountain and find our condo building. Using only a voice assisted gps is almost useless because there are so many possible splits in the road, its incredibly easy to make wrong choices. Which we did a number of times haha.

Checked into our luxury condo and eventually got ourselves to the very busy and richy area of el poblado for some drinks and a bit more food before calling it a night. It felt like the entire city was on this one particular pedestrian street with hundreds of restaurants and bars. I found one called medellin beer company and we relexed there for a while. And hit a few other places amongst the crowds until our eyes were starting to close. We were still super tired from the journey from canada plus a very full first day.Read more