Manizales
The area the hostel is located in Manizales does not resemble South America in the slightest, modern housing right near the main restaurant and nightlife zone on the main street lined with modern apt and office buildings. Clean (except for the street level air pollution), orderly and modern all over. When you walk to the neighboring hill a couple km away where to the city centre however, this changes quite a bit with much older buildings resembling other cities in South America I’ve been in. A lot of the buildings in the centre remind me of the ones in the old town section of Montevideo, except less run down here.
The market here has more fruits than I think I’ve ever seen in one place.
We ventured in to one of the small jungle reserves just outside the city in the hills here, didn’t see anything in the way of the advertised bird life but still plenty of weird jungle plants. We also did the 180meter zipline through part of the reserve, cool stuff.
I think between taxi drivers, the people at the reserve and restaurants, plus most of the hostel staff (not English speaking) I’ve been conversing in more spanish the last couple days than at any time on the trip. More work but I haven’t had any major problems trying to do or get anything I’ve wanted so far, pretty pleased about that, I’m also using a lot less hand signals to converse than I was when I arrived on this continent.
For dinner we tried patacóns, a plátano base with cheese, mushrooms and chicken. Absolutely delicious, despite the strange thought of bananas being the base for a ‘pizza’ of sorts. I’m going to eat as many of these as I can the rest of my time here. For lunch the next day we had one of the almuerzos (set menu lunchs), one kind of meat dish,(pork tenderloin in this case) several sides and a great starter of the ajiaco soup. The food here is miles ahead of Peruvian cuisine, with the lone exception of Ceviche.
Our 2nd day in Manizales we attempted to go to the large jungle park near town, home to hundreds of bird and butterfly species, but after taking a taxi across town to the office where we needed a permission slip to enter the park the (very friendly) guy told us that the park was inaccessible for several days due to some kind of work being carried out. Bummer, especially since it was already afternoon and there wasn’t much else we could do for the rest of the day other than walk around town, not too interesting. We did visit a great juice bar near the hostel for some mid afternoon refreshments, I’m going to miss fresh tropical juice for less than a dollar when I leave here.
Tags: Colombia, Travel
Adam
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