Colombia Diary: Medellín and Guatape

Not so distant, but worlds away from the modern buildings and hotels in Medellin, is the well-off northern “village” of Acevedo (long ago absorbed by the city’s urban sprawl), where I spent my final night in town with expats keen to photograph some of the impressive holiday-fever light displays adorning the parks and private homes.

A random Acevedo street
We moved through the neighborhood at typical Colombian walking pace, which is to say barely maintaining forward motion. Friends and families roamed and lingered freely with their neighbors, many of them with their home stereos pointed out the windows, playing at music festival levels, and sharing shots of aguardiente (“fire water”), an anise-flavored, 45% (or higher) alcohol content by volume, liqueur derived from sugar cane which, despite its name, I found very smooth and dangerously drinkable.
Along with glimmering, seizure-caliber electric light displays and alarmingly powerful amateur fireworks, many homes had been decked out with candles, which were frequently enclosed in flimsy, colored, decorative boxes. This was all very beautiful, however, as the naturally cautious might assume, all that unattended, open-flamed in-close proximity to paper and light cardboard is bound to end in a close-call or two and we witnessed one such episode less than an hour into our walk.
While amiably chatting with the matriarch of a home with an especially photogenic light display, a flaming cardboard candle box crashed to the ground just a few feet away. Everyone looked up to see that the garland decorating the woman’s second balcony was ablaze in three places where candle boxes had bizarrely all burst into flame simultaneously. One blaze, the one that had dislodged the candle box, was well on its way to jeopardizing the entire house. Fortunately, a nimble daughter raced up and extinguished the flames. I shiver to think what might have happened if that box had not fallen and caught our attention when it had.

Moments later, that second balcony was ablaze.
We closed the evening in the village square, grazing on street food and attempting to do justice to the nighttime light displays with, in my case, an uncooperative camera.

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Colombians, like many Latin cultures have, what we light sleepers consider a highly-coveted immunity to noise. Sustained racket from close-quartered vehicle traffic doesn’t even register. A quarter stick of dynamite, detonated a block away, barely elicits a flinch.
In a related daring generalization, I’ve formed a fairly solid theory that Colombians need music around them more or less constantly. Apart from a few private moments, and possibly while sleeping, they appear to become visibly agitated if music isn’t within earshot, even for just a few moments. My theory gained traction as I stood atop La Piedra, a substantial monolith and popular tourist attraction just outside the pueblo (village) of Guatape.
Guatape, a two hour bus ride outside Medellín, is a well-to-do village that has almost completely given itself over to tourism. It’s undeniably comely. Large parts of the village have been transformed into a living pueblo cultural museum of sorts, with decorative, brightly-painted homes lining narrow streets and a modest town square featuring a similarly modest church.

Guatape street.
Three kilometers outside the village, the blackened La Piedra monolith sits on a hillside, looking like the world’s largest, thrice-baked potato. One must alert the driver on their bus from Medellín that they’d like to alight at La Piedra and not continue on to the village, though if you look like a mildly-lost tourist, the stop is implied.

La Piedra.
You can trudge up the rather steep 600-meter long hill or ride up on horseback for the bargain price of 4,000 pesos (about US$2), which will drop to 2,000 pesos if you keep walking past the persistent cowboy and mumble something about needing the exercise. This walk is only mildly taxing, though save your strength because you still have to conquer the surprisingly strenuous 644-step, near-vertical staircase to the peak of La Piedra. At the summit there’s another short, spiral staircase inside the lookout center to contend with, before you finally reach the summit.
Harking back to my Colombians-shrivel-without-music theory, the utter stillness and mind-bending 360 degree view from this lookout proved to be just a little too subtle and calm for at least one Colombian. After nearly a minute of insufferable silence, with a nervous sweat collecting on his brow, he shakily punched up a song on his cell phone, cranked the volume until its tiny speaker was offering little more than static with a backing beat and the assembly of Colombians visibly relaxed. Of course, this had the opposite effect on me, but alas, I was hopelessly outnumbered.