ToewsTravels – Page 20 – every country or bust!

the amazon! – adventures in tres fronteras

crossing the amazon, leticia, colombia to santo rosa, peru

my foray into the amazon took me to two fascinating locales: the tres fronteras region where the borders of colombia, peru and brazil meet, and then to manaus, brazil, the largest city in the amazon. i flew from bogota to leticia, colombia, in the far southeastern corner of the country. it is amazing how large colombia is; leticia is almost 2000 km from the caribbean coast, and deep in the rainforest – 700 km from the nearest colombian road. at the airport they seemed to have instituted a new $10 “tourist tax” – not much choice on that one. i walked the sweaty one kilometer or so into town, to the anaconda hotel. the town is famous for its central square, where thousands of chirping birds congregate nightly at sunset. i was able to climb the steeple of the town church to watch this, which was amazing, then eat an amazonian fish for dinner! leticia is an impressively bustling town for being so geographically isolated; half of the town lives on homes on stilts over the amazonian marsh.

the tres fronteras region is composed of the towns of leticia, tabatinga (brazil), and the island town of santa rosa (peru). one can travel freely between the towns, but must clear immigration before moving further into any of these countries. i arrived on a friday night, and when i told the staff at the anaconda hotel that i planned to fly out of the tabatinga airport the next afternoon, they had some stressful and unexpected news – apparently the immigration offices were all closed for the weekend. if i couldn’t stamp into brazil then i couldn’t catch my flight to manaus, and i couldn’t get back to work on time, and it was going to cost a ton to backtrack. i didn’t get much sleep, and before even eating breakfast in the morning i jumped on a motorcycle taxi across the border into brazil to try to figure it out for myself. sure enough, the brazilian immigration office was closed, with a sign in portuguese telling me to come back at 9am monday morning. i asked around and tried to google solutions to no avail, and was feeling quite despondent. then somehow, by the grace of God, i chanced upon a nearby police station, and amazingly, one of the officers was able to stamp me into brazil! next time don’t try to do this on a weekend, he told me.

after that scare, i had a few hours to breathe, so i went back to leticia and took a boat taxi across the amazon river to peru! the private motorized wood longboat ride cost $1, and took about 20 minutes. crossing the amazon was surreal; the widest, muddiest river imaginable. i walked around the sleepy one-road town of santa rosa, peru, before heading back on another ferry. from santa rosa, one could also take a ferry westward to iquitos, which takes about a day. i was a bit confused as to whether tabatinga was in the brazilian or colombian timezone, so playing it safe ended up arriving at the sleepy tabatinga airport way early. at least i had my stamp!

on illegal ubers in bogota

after medellin, i had a layover in bogota for about 24 hours on my way to the amazon, and i’d like to think i made the most of it! bogota is a sprawling city of 10 million people pretty high up in the andean foothills. when i was there it was overcast and chilly, which was rather refreshing. i learned as i went that uber is available in bogota, but illegal. so the meetups have to happen under the radar. my drivers kept calling me and trying to explain things in espanol, and then cancelling when they found out i couldn’t communicate. finally found out they were calling to a arrange a clandestine meetup point in a parking lot or somewhere else than the curbside. when a nice driver who spoke english finally explained this to me, things got a lot easier, lol. she said the police impound the car on the spot if they find out someone is ubering. if we were to be pulled over, i am a friend, not a customer. for this reason they insist you sit in the front seat too. i’m cool with being a friend!

i stayed in a nice area called usaquen, which used to be its own town but has been swallowed up in the bogota sprawl. there were cobblestoned streets along which i got a nice dinner and walked around. in the morning i headed downtown, which took over an hour in the very slow-moving traffic. i went to the main central bolivar square, which is surrounded by government buildings, and is famous as the site of a siege of the colombian government by m-19 guerilla tanks in the 1980s. nearby is the most famous museum in colombia, the museo de oro, which is all about pre-colonial gold and metallurgy, a topic which inspired the mythical city of el dorado. the museum only cost $1 to visit and was actually very impressive – one could easily spend a few hours there. bogota is in a valley overlooked by a mountain viewpoint called monserrat which can be reached by a cable car which i tried to take up, but ran out of time.

the whole reason i was trying to stick with uber is that taxis in bogota sadly have a terrible reputation. in the past they have been some of the most dangerous taxis in the world, with famous “million dollar rides” around to atms at gunpoint, and druggings of passengers for amnesia. at minimum, one could expect to be ripped off. even today, the taxi fare is not metered, but the meter has a number which corresponds arbitrarily with the rate the driver wants to charge, which may or may not be on a laminated piece of paper in the back seat, which the driver may have just switched out for you when he saw you weren’t a local. apparently the taxi cartels have lynched uber drivers to protect their turf, and of course they are the lobby behind uber being illegal. anyway, i got in a taxi out of necessity to make it to the airport on time, and it went all right. whew!

solid day in bogota!

city of eternal spring: medellin!

i got to go on a great little trip for one week to south america – first to medellin and bogota in colombia, and then into the amazon! of note, colombia was the 100th country i have visited!

i started with 2.5 days in medellin, which was very relaxing. this city in the andean foothills is called the city of eternal spring due to its constant spring-like perfect weather. it is also famous for being the home of the world’s most famous drug boss pablo escobar and his medellin cartel, which controlled the streets of the city until the mid-90s, and gave it the highest murder rate in the world during the 1980s. pablo developed an estimated net worth of over 30 billion us dollars smuggling cocaine to america before he was gunned down and buried in medellin, and the sites of his demise and burial have now – perhaps questionably on an ethical basis – become tourist pilgrimage sites. i started watching the tv series narcos on the plane ride down, which is a great show if you haven’t seen it. the city, along with others in colombia, is also now home to many people displaced by the colombian civil war over the past half century, between the leftist revolutionary farc and eln and the government and other paramilitary groups. the war killed over 200,000 and displaced over five million people. thankfully now a peace agreement has been agreed to by the involved parties, and members of the farc are being integrated back into society peacefully. obviously, the drug wars and the civil war were horrible for regular people in colombia, and they are trying to put this violent history behind them, and generally doing an amazing job of it. now, medellin is known as a city where expats love to live and start tech companies as there are all the amenities one could want, it is safe, has perfect weather, and very friendly people.

i stayed where all the tourists stay, in an upscale neighborhood along a hillside called el poblado. really nice hotel for excellent value – about 25% of what one would pay for a similar room in the usa. there are multiple huge, very nice malls, which of course made me happy! the most glamorous is called el tesoro, and is perched on the side of the hill with amazing views over the city in the valley below. one very cool thing about medellin these days is that the city is doing tremendous work to provide top-notch transportation, libraries, and other services to the socioeconomically disadvantaged people who live in the hillside suburbs. in addition to its very impressive metro system (the only one in colombia and a great source of pride), the city has built cable cars to various suburbs to make commuting easier for the locals, which cost a very small amount to ride. i took two of them up the surrounding hillsides for excellent views. there is also a famous series of outdoor escalators which has been built in a once very rough neighborhood called communa 13. now the city has sanctioned a lot of colorful graffiti in the area, and built free escalators. definitely a cool place to check out.

downtown there is a nice museum called the museo de antioquia, which contains many sculptures by botero, medellin’s most famous artist. he had a unique style of sculpting globular, almost spherical people and animals. i also visited a museum devoted to the memory of those lost to the colombian civil war, which, while heartfelt in its intention, was a bit of a disappointment from the tourist/education perspective. i ate a ton of street food, most notably numerous empanadas and cups of freshly cut mango slices covered in lime juice and spicy salt. overall a really great time in medellin!

cancun pit stop

this fall my sister had a baby up in alberta, canada where they live, so we obviously needed to go visit! turned out it was actually cheapest to fly to cancun for a day and then to alberta, so why not!

my flight was significantly delayed, so arrived at about 2 am. of course, i had neglected to arrange transport from the airport to the city in advance, which it turns out is not ideal in cancun if you arrive in the middle of the night, as they recently banned uber. after fighting back the rabid taxi drivers, i finally found a guy driving a resort van going in the other direction that could drop me off at his friend’s house, who could then drive me into the city. whew!

the first night i stayed in a really cheap hotel downtown, but the second night fully availed of the amenities at a brand-new sheraton four-points, also downtown, booked with (not too many) hotel points. it had a nice pool on the roof and a steamroom. between steam sessions, i walked around the hotel zone, which in cancun is along a long, thin peninsula jutting out into the caribbean. it was nice, but i was wearing a boot on my foot as i had recently broken my toe, so wasn’t able to get out into the water. it was a great place for a day, but if you are not at an all-inclusive on the beach, cancun is just a regular mexican city, only much more expensive. i had some fun exploring the downtown malls. glad i went!

toronto

chicago

daytrip from fes: meknes and voluvulis

one of the days in fes i drove out to another nearby but notably less touristed walled city called meknes, where there is a massive city gate of historical importance, some underground storage reseviors, and another medina to explore. nearby, i stopped at an ancient roman ruin called voluvulis, which is a remarkably well-preserved city which in its day was one of the largest in the roman empire.

fes!

our last stop in morocco was a few days in fes, which is another walled, ancient city in the northern part of the country. here we splashed out for a room in a really nice riad (called lune el soliel). riads are the traditional living spaces in the medinas – a large home with many rooms surrounding a central courtyard. there we got amazing breakfasts on the roof overlooking the ancient city. the medina in fes is the largest car-free urban area in the world, and takes days to fully explore! fes is famous for its traditional tanneries, where the animal skins are cured and colored in different pools of liquid, all of which can be seen from elevated viewpoints over the area.

overall it was really a wonderful 12 days or so in morocco! we thought of it as our honeymoon, and it didn’t disappoint!

rehabilitated synagogue, jewish quarter, fes

into the sahara!

after marrakech, we drove seven hours to the edge of the sahara desert! first, we had to cross the atlas mountain range, which is snow covered year round! there is even a ski resort near marrakech. east of the atlas range, we stopped at a famous deserted town called ait ben haddou, which has been abandoned by locals for over a century but has recently been a movie set for many films including the jesus movie and gladiator. it is composed of mud-built houses built on a hill, and is a very fun place to explore for an hour or so.

our destination on the edge of the sahara was a small town called merzouga, which sits beside an area of massive sand dunes. contrary to what i had thought, much of the sahara desert – at least the northwest part of it – is more rocks and mountains than sand. but there are areas of sand that develop where the wind blows right. we stayed at a desert hotel called ksar bicha, which while being rustic was actually really nice and great value. after one night there, we headed out into the dunes on camels for a night in the desert! definitely the highlight of the trip. it was about an hour-long camel ride to a desert camp they had set up; we had a berber guide and were with one other couple from germany. once we got to the camp, we hiked up the largest dune (which took about 45 minutes), and watched the sunset. amazing. then the guide made us dinner and played some traditional berber songs on the drums while i danced, and the rest of the group watched, lol! it was fun. we then played some cards games which didn’t require any verbal communication before sleeping in some little tents and riding the camels back to the hotel in the morning. an amazing experience in the sahara!

marrakech!

we spent about four days in the amazing desert city of marrakech, in the shadow of the snow-capped high atlas mountain range! we were able to stay in a super-nice hotel in the new city using hotel points compliments of a credit card sign up bonus (get at me if you want to get in on the game!). most cities in morocco have a new city where moroccans generally prefer to live and is more modern, and another ancient, walled, car-free part of the city called the medina, which is where most of the excitement for a tourist is.

marrakech is a great place. there is a huge square in the medina called jmaa al fna, the largest and most exciting urban square in morocco. it is filled with stalls selling amazing and cheap fresh-squeezing orange and pomegranate juice, and snake charmers. at night, there are bands playing traditional music, arabic storyellers, and cross-dressing bellydancers, as well as many food stalls with extremely aggressive salespeople. never a dull moment! a moroccan comfort food in the market in marrakech is snail soup, which you can get a bowl of for under one dollar. there are miles of narrow medina passageways surrounding the square, where one can wander for days. that is exactly what we did and it was excellent.

highlights included two hammam experiences on successive days. the first i went to was at a very traditional male-only one called mouassine hammam which is most frequented by the local men of the city for their regular baths. you enter a large, communal, moist room and bath yourself with buckets of water and black olive soap, perhaps helping an old man wash his back if you can understand what he is trying to ask you. i then hired the staff there to give me a rub down with a glove of steel wool, followed by an amazing, aggressive 30 minute massage characterized by a very large man vigorously and systematically attacked every pressure point in my body, including the groin ones and the ones behind the knees. it was very intense but also very relaxing once it was all over. the next day ann and i went to a luxury underground hammam experience at a riad called medina elisa, which was excellent. it was a lot more private and gentle, but again involved another steel wool scrub down, which i would not recommend two days in a row, as my skin was quite pink by that point. there they had a serene pool which we reclined by and then there was a foot massage which was very luxurious. going to a hammam of some variety is definitely the thing to do in marrakech!