The city that Pablo built

Arriving in Medellin on Saturday we decided to head out and see some of the famed nightlife and we certainly weren’t disappointed as the nightlife here is both varied and extremely popular. I took in a fair amount of the nightlife owing to the time I spent there and is certainly interesting but almost impossible to do without girls. Any club that you want to visit even as early as 10pm requires you to not only pay a cover charge but also have some girls with you completely ignoring the realization that single guys are the ones that actually spend the money in these places. The other frustrating thing is that there is no way around this and no amount of money your willing to pay will get you inside. Still I did manage to get into a few places and the night clubs are certainly worth going to here with the highlight being the after party of the Medellin fashion show!

The next day we headed out to the popular lunchtime area around Park Lleras and had a good lunch made affordable by the discounts on offer but the best thing was the entertainment. We had the opportunity to watch a reggaeton music clip getting filmed which is certainly not something you see every day! The video was basically a lot of lip synching by one guy pretending to look tough as leaves were dropped over and around him. It was amusing though and also to see the entourage that he brought with him along with the trademark ridiculous amount of jewellery!

Next was the main item on my Medellin itinerary the so called Pablo Escobar tour of his “town”. With a man this influential, once being considered the most famous criminal in the world there is bound to be conflicting opinions, however I wasn’t quite expecting conflicting tours! With the tour being popular we were unable to go as one group and thus had to split up with some of us doing the more expensive tour through Tiger Paw hostel and the rest doing it through Casa Kiwi. The two tours are apparently completely different if the discussion afterwards is to be believed as those of us on the Tiger Paw tour got the “Disney” version of events, with some of the bad things thrown in but also focusing on the good things he had done for Medellin. We also had one of his mules as a driver for the day and got to meet his brother. The other tour focused a lot more on the negative side of both the man and the city that he created and unfortunately did not get to meet his brother which was probably the highlight of the tour. Which version of events you want to believe is up to the individual to decide but there is no doubt that the man polarized people and that his legacy both good and bad still lies within the suburbs of Medellin. Regardless of the tour there are definitely some amusing stories from Escobars reign which are definitely worth hearing.

The tour itself took us firstly to the inner city 5 floor mansion that he built for himself that whilst not the most attractive is certainly impressive given that it still remains intact and dwarfs the buildings around it. After this it was time to visit the cemetery and see his final resting place and to get a few stories from our driver on some of the other graves around him. After this we went off to see the rooftop where he was eventually executed/committed suicide depending on which story you want to believe. Then we headed off to one of his safe houses in the neighbourhood to meet his brother who is amazingly enough an electrical engineer and a world class cyclist who gave up this to help his brother out in the family business. The house is slowly being turned into a museum and includes some of the secret rooms that they used to hide the money as well as the first car they used and Pablo's custom made bulletproof car. Amazingly when he made it onto Forbes richest people list with a net wealth of somewhere near $25 billion they estimated that he had lost about $3 billion to lost money and regularly wrote off 10% of their yearly income to money eaten by rodents! His brother also claims that at times they were spending $1000 a week just on rubber bands to bundle the money and that Pablo once burnt $2 million just to keep himself warm when he was on the run. The flip side to the drug smuggling was that he apparently guaranteed all money that was invested with him and used some of his funds to build a housing project for homeless people.

With the celebration for the bicentenary over the attention moved to the next big festival on the Colombian calendar, the feria de las flores (festival of the flowers) held in Medellin. With this coming up I decided to stay the extra week and enjoy the festival. During the week I sampled a lot more of the Medellin nightlife that seems to go on all night and every night especially over the festival week. It is hard to write a blog without mentioning the girls of Medellin so I will do so here and say they are some of the most attractive girls in the world. The other thing that you cannot help but notice is the amazing amount of plastic surgery undertaken by some of the girls here with fake breasts and fake butts being ever present in the city. It is really quite incredible and a girl without surgery is almost a novelty here and some of the girls take it to quite the extreme! The reason I put this here is that the opening of the festival is marked by a giant parade of people riding horses through the centre. This goes on for about 6 hours but becomes a bit boring after about half an hour! The amusing thing however was going with a bunch of girls and having them continually commenting on the bouncing – definitely the best entertainment on offer! After this it was off to sample some of the other festival activities including the free concert which whilst more lively than that in Cali was still not as good as I would have expected. The festivals here have turned out to not be quite as good as I would have hoped but sometimes that’s the way it goes.