El Cerezo

Just as we were climbing out of Rio Claro Elvis's brakes failed!! Actually that's a bit melodramatic, we did have a leak in one of the brake tubes but we still had a decent amount of braking power.

We're really lucky on the timing as the day before we had descended around 2000m and then bombed it up the first decent highway I've seen here. I heard a bit of a bang, the ABS and brake lights came on the dash, and then the brakes were a little squishy but they weren't too bad.

We decided to head to nearby Medellin as our friends had created a new iOverlander spot (THE app for travelers with vehicles) for a brake specialist for their Dodge. On the way we came to a sketching halt (OK, not quite!) as we recognised Pablo Escobar's famous Hacienda Napoles from the Narcos Netflix show.

After crawling down the crazy steep road (in 1st gear for a lot of it) into the valley that contains the city as it seemingly pushes its edges further up the slopes, we then had to contend with Friday afternoon rush hour traffic. There's only really one main road and it follows the river through the city. It's formed of two roads in both directions, each with 3 lines (therefore 12 total), with few places to switch between them. As we were travelling at 5 mph we had sufficient time to work it out and it only took us and hour and a half.

Frustratingly when we got there the guy said he didn't have a scanner for our vehicle, so we found the mechanics' area and got a recommendation (courtesy of iOverlander) who fixed the broken tube. They also sorted out the mildly irritating issue of having to have the hazard lights switch on for the indicators (blinkers to the yanks) to work, and the broken windscreen washer that comes off in heavy rain (hardly ideal!).

We finished up around 6pm and were so glad we knew of a hostel (you can guess how) that we could park outside of not that far away, even if it did take us the best part of an hour to get there.

We spent a 3 nights here enjoying the modern city and we even took in a big cup semi final game for Athletico National. The open stadium was amazing with the city lights stretching up outside of it and the fans were typical south american (i.e. Non-stop singing, drums & general pandemonium behind one goal). It was weird to see it go straight to penalties without extra time, but the home team blazered their first two wide and never recovered.Read more