We took the metro to Acevado, first missing the stop altogether becuase we didn’t pay attention to the announcement (in both Spanish and English) that only some doors would open due to construction. So we overshot then returned, this time careful to ask a man in a uniform where we should stand.
I must say, Medellin’s metro, despite being crowded, is not unpleasant. I wonder if it’s partly the climate, and the fact that metros are open to the air, so you don’t feel like you’re in a stale box, even an airconditioned one.
At Acevado we changed to the metrocable. This is something I’d heard about years ago, and which sounded very intriguing: a cable car system that had, for the first time, connected the rich valley floor with the impoverished slumlike barrios climbing up the hillside. It is a remarkable thing, truly a wonder of today, the constant stream of small pods going up and down a hillside encrusted with red brick-and-tile constructions. We stepped into a car and were off, suspended over thousands of homes and shops and so on. As with all slums of this kind, it didn’t look uniformly poor, though I am sure there is a lot of poverty and crime. As we went higher it became clearly poorer, with the tiled roofs replaced with tin, some with a few tiles to weigh down the tin.
It was odd to be suspended like this over places where I would be reluctant to walk by myself, taken, as I am, by the dangers I have been told about. Are they that dangerous? Perhaps, but I feel great reluctance to characterise any place of people like that and dislike how it separates them off.
One of the odd things about these cable cars is that they feel so separated from the world, yet are not so. As one goes high the sound of the wind dominates as though one is in a bubble, yet the narrow windows are open, so we could hear the cries of bird and the laughter of children from below.
At the top of the metrocable, at Santo Domingo, we switched to the dedicated cable car that goes all the way up to Arvi park. This went over the city to begin with, and the houses quickly because very poor indeed and then became small rural shacks and then disappeared and there was nothing beneath but forest. The valley spread below us. It is easy to forget in the city that this is a place in foothills of the Andes, now I was reminded of it.
There were lovely parasitic plants on some of the trees, high in the branches and with bright red leaves.
The Arvi entrance is the other side of the large park so we went over the forest for a good long while till arriving.
Then a quick and very mediocre lunch, followed by going off to find ourself a path. The information desk gave us a map and directed us towards a walk, however this seemed to be a standard sort of walk along a road so I consulted the map and took us off on a path that seemed to loop through the forest. About half an hour in we encountered the signage for the path, and I realised that actually I had not taken us the correct way at all so it was lucky indeed that we intersected. Anyway, it was a pleasant stroll through pine forests, soft and dry underfoot and clean, fresh air. It was much cooler than in Medellin. The signposts had little descriptions of the plantlife, but seemed not to be obviously pointing toward specific plants, so though I was interested, I ended up ignoring them.
We came out of the path and along a road with many uniformed men in big boots and carrying guns, but nothing too fierce so we kept walking and at last reached the cable car again. So we returned to the valley floor and took the metro to Poblado, the gringo capital, and had a nice coffee and a mediocre meal. I am very glad that we are in Laureles rather than there. It is not to my taste.