Medellin

Next stop in Colombia after Bucharamanga was Medellin. Getting there involved an 8 hour bus ride which turned into a rather uncomfortable 10 hour journey during which I was sick twice because of the windy bumpy roads. Fortunately, a fellow passenger felt my pain and offered up one of his travel sickness tablet which seemed to get things under control for the last few hours of the journey, although they were spent with my eyes firmly shut.

Having made it to Medellin at last, we managed to navigate our way to Poblado - the barrio in which we were staying - and then the skies opened. We had not realised that we were arriving in the midst of the central Colombian wet season but this was soon apparent. We took a cab from the tube to our hostel to try and miss the worst of the weather but, when our cab driver couldn't find the hostel, we still ended up getting drenched whilst walking in circles putting our minimal Spanish to use trying  to find our hostel. We made it in the end but looked and felt like drowned rats and so with a take away pizza in hand, retreated to our room for an early night.

Feeling refreshed the next morning, we thought we'd start the day by treating ourselves to coffee and breakfast at a nearby cafe which had been highly recommended in the Lonely Planet. However, something must have gone wrong between the printing of the Lonely Planet and our visit as both the breakfast and the coffee were abysmal. Disappointing.

To be honest, between the rain and the rubbish coffee, it kind of set the tone for our time in Medellin. We had been feeling like a couple of low key, lazy days after a few days of travelling and the rain - which barely let up in the three days we were there - gave us the perfect excuse.

Medellin itself - or what we saw of it - is a pretty uninspiring place. A perfectly good place to live we expect but there is not an enormous amount to see on the sightseeing side of things. The central square is decent enough with a few quite cool Botero sculptures. We stumbled across a fantastic juice stand and a less than fantastic but very cheap Hare Krishna restaurant but it is fair to say that Medellin didn't cover itself in glory from a food perspective either.

The one massive positive though - particularly for us in our chill out at the hostel mindset - was that we came across an absolutely brilliant supermarket (think Waitrose rather than Tesco). We shopped hungry which is always a bad idea, buying plenty of vegetables, tropical fruit from the fruit salad bar and ingredients for dinner which, while costing more than a flash meal out, made for a couple of delicious meals in.

To be fair to Medellin, it is renowned more for it's nightlife than its sightseeing which wasn't top of our agenda whilst we were there, so we may have skipped on much of what it has to offer. We were, however, ready to push on to Manizales after a couple of days.