Our last day in Medellin! Tomorrow, we will be starting our trip in Bogota that will be lasting a week. We just came back from a small vacation away from our vacations to a small village called Guatapé. Located about two hours from Medellin, Guatapé is famous for its beautiful lakes and especially for “La Piedra”, a gigantic 70-million years-old rock, that is over 200 meters high. We went with our friends Ivan and Rafael, by moto/scooter:

François and Ivan. Roadtrip!!

Ivan and Rafael Brujeria-style… Haha

The village itself is really nice, the houses are really colorful and the food is great. We saw many old paisa men with wrinkled skin and large hats. Check out what we woke up to, this morning:

Street of Guatapé

One of the beautiful lakes surrounding the village!

Oh, one thing we are really impressed with Colombia is the countryside. It’s absolutely surreal – there are mountains and valleys everywhere! It’s breathtaking, really. I could compare the green-ness to eastern Canada in the summer, but the mountains and steep hills make it absolutely out of this world.

Anyway, back to Guatapé. I finally ate Antioquia’s most traditional meal, the Bandeja Paisa. That meal used to be eaten by farmers twice a day; for breakfast and once the men came back home. I guess it is the equivalent of our full eggs’n’bacon breakfast, but much bigger and much more filling:

Bandeja Paisa – Beans, chicharron (fried lard – their equivalent to bacon), chorizo sausage, fried plantain, rice, egg, salad, avocado, spiced ground beef and an arepa.

François had a nice healthy plate of fish:

Robalo fish with salad, arepa, french fries and plantain fried cake thing

After this, we were ready to ascend the gigantic stone. The stone (El Peñón de Guatapé) was worshipped by the Tahamies Indians – the former inhabitants of this region. 644 stairs, 10,000,000 tons… here we go!

The stone and its staircase we are about to take… Rafael can be seen in front!

Us, right before the ascension

30 minutes later, a view of the lakes from the top!!!

And here is François enjoying a nice beer, conveniently sold from a small shack at the top of the rock. I pity the fools that have to go to work there everyday… haha

Enjoying a Pilsen – El Sabor Original de la Recompensa indeed!

But the hardest part, I think, was going down… my legs were shaking as hell – and are still hurting today. Haha. It was worth it for sure! Oh yeah, and here’s a very lame restaurant name for burgers. I think my dad will get a kick out of this:

Come on, spell burger right on your own restaurant name!

Tonight, we were given two gigantic tamales by Eduard (made by his own uncle!) They were incredibly good, and filled up every single space we had left in our stomach. Thank you so much Eddie!

Tamales, before opening and boiling

Tamales opened, paired with an arepa. They were filled with potatoes, carrots, peas, porc and stuck together with some kind of cornmeal.

Cooking arepas to go with the tamales – they turned out to be totally unnecessary, the tamales filled us up like hell! Haha

And to finish the post, here are some other things we did this week:

Taking a metro cable ride! Since Medellin is surrounded by mountains, the government had to find a way to extend its metro to all corners of the city. They thus created a metro in the air! It’s a cheap ride (less than a dollar), and you get a really killer view of the city. Check it out:

This is where you get in the metro cable.

And the metro cable itself – photo taken almost at the top of the mountain!

We went to visit a few friends, and say goodbye at the same time. We were kindly received by Diana and her husband, Tao, in their metal basement house. They made us some kind of ham, rolled in chicken, rolled in flour, then deep fried in oil and served with shrimp rice. It was amazing!

The sauce had gigantic dried raisins and pineapple… it was so good!

Diana also gave us an arepa with morcilla (blood sausage) – the most metal of all sausages! There is actually no meat in those sausages, only blood, spices and rice, stuffed in pig intestines. They were killer!!!!!!

Also, my friend Hugo (drummer of Witchtrap/Nightmare) made me a very sweet silver travel wedding ring… with a snake pattern! Thanks a million man, it’s killer!!!!!

Alright… gotta go to bed now, we are waking up very early tomorrow for our flight to Bogota. More news in a few days. Cheers!