Cali turned out to be a tad underwhelming, but that's probably not the city's fault either. Plenty of people we have met hyped it up to be a great town, but we picked the wrong days to be there. We arrived on a Sunday, which is always bad, because everything is closed, except in Cali's case there is a mall (called Chipichape) which was open. That was pretty much the only thing we had to do all day, so we went there to catch the Copa America final, in which Uruguay beat Parguay 3-0. The hostel owner, Gunther, is more than aware of this Sunday boredom, so he hosts a barbeque every week which was the highlight of the day.

Monday was a day of exploring. Unfortunately, the exploring was done between the hours of 12 and 2 - not a good time of the day to be walking around! That night we hit a salsa club - no excuse when you're in the so called salsa capital of the world! Being a Monday there wasn't much going on, but we still got to experience some salsa. Or at least watch some salsa - five guys are going to have a hard time dancing a form of dance primarily for couples!

Next stop - Salento, a quiet town on the edge of coffee country, the Valle del Cocora. We stayed at a hostel called Plantation House, which has its own coffee farm, and is running by an enterprising Englishman called Tom and his Colombian wife. We got a tour of the farm, learning about how coffee is grown, picked, washed, dried, roasted and drank. The photo above is the valley itself - a nice view.

From there we moved onto Medellin, the city famous for being the birthplace of druglord Pablo Escobar. For this party city, we timed it right, arriving on Thursday and staying until Sunday. It also coincided with the flower festival, Feria de las Flores, which didn't really interest us, but as it's the highlight of the Medellin calendar it did mean there would be plenty of people around and the place would be busy.

Friday was spent exploring the city. Thinking that a cable car up a mountain would be like Ruca Pichincha in Quito (which gave us nice views of the city), we ventured up. The cable car itself passes over a poorer area of the city, and you're only about 20m from the tops of people's houses. Unfortunately, when you hit the top of the mountain, you keep going, and going, and going, until the city is well out of sight, and you find yourself at a national park. No thanks! Clubbing that night was good fun, another salsa club, although not the "traditional" salsa of Cali, so this time we could actually join in.

Saturday is a big day in the Medellin calendar, probably the biggest - the horse parade. Its a big deal locally, so the entire hostel ventured out. I don't know what we were expecting, but the horse parade is exactly as it sounds. About 10,000 horses (that's not an exaggeration) are rode down a road, and it takes about four or five hours. People set up gazebos from nine or ten in the morning for this. Some you have to pay into - one place wanted COP$40,000. There aren't costumes or anything, just cowboys and cowgirls riding horses. Pretty exciting stuff! Needless to say, we were bored of the horses after two minutes. Luckily there are thousands of people lining this one road to keep us entertained. The town was packed that night, and the beer was cheap (but the rum wasn't).

So now its Monday again, and we're in Bogota, the capital, but with not much going on. Maybe we should have planned this trip better...