Ok, so I actually stayed in Panama City for a few more days. And I went for a walk along another thing and took some pictures of it. It had a lot of water, and yachts, and pelicans, and a view of the city. There are some little islands in “Panama Bay” or something. It has a little wildlife reserve too.

Along the walk I found the other Panama sign. It’s also colorful. There weren’t any people at this one, so I got a better picture.

Here’s a picture of some expensive boats with expensive buildings in the background.

Here’s a picture of some different expensive boats a little later without expensive buildings in the background.

And then I was off to Colombia. After a layover in Bogota, I arrived in Medellin where I’ll be setting up camp for a couple months. A little consistency is a good thing, but the first week I spent between a hostel and private room in a hostel, then the second week I had a short-term furnished apartment. After that, I’ve 6 week weeks to live a bit posh in a different apartment.

There’s a vibrant gringo area in Medellin with a lot of coffee shops and things hipster like. Since this is a bit of a “digital nomad” capital, you see a lot of people (Americans) working in coffee shops. I’ll cover those more next time, I guess, but some are really nice to work from. But I do feel bad sitting in there all day every day.

So I went to the main square in the center of the city and wandered around with my friend I met in Guatemala last year. Plaza Botero, to be exact, which has a ton of Fernando Botero’s statues littered about. They’re weird looking.

There is an art museum there as well, so we walked around there. This picture of Jesus is one of my favorite pieces of artwork ever.

There was also a very old church with a lot of people in it. It was feels a bit strange, walking around those places as a tourist. I stick to the sides (although my friend didn’t), and there is a lot of nice sculptures and it’s a beautiful basilica.

My friend was staying with a Colombia couple she met while traveling, so I went out to dinner with them one night and then to a little food truck area another night. It tired me out trying to understand Spanish, so I didn’t do anything with them after that. But they were nice people and the food trucks were cool (basically like Austin/Portland).

Instead, I did a metro cable journey on my own the next weekend. They have cable cars that connect the outskirts of the city (it has a population of 3 million) to the main part, and these are really the most efficient way to do it. So for $2, you get a pretty awesome ride.

And then after you get off the main cable car, you can then get on the “tourist” cable car to go up to the park. It’s another interesting ride, past most of the homes and then into the forest and jungle.

The actual park was fine. I wandered around it for a couple hours. It rained a bit, which it does here often. Nothing much to write home about, but it’s a nice escape from the city for a little bit.

I did another quick trip on the weekend to Cerro Nutibara, which is an old traditional town of some kind in a park on a hill in the city. This was the view from it.

The actual preserved town up here has nice architecture and a church you can go to.

A few hours away is the little town of Guatape. It sits on a lake, or series of lakes, or small inlets, or something. Basically a hodgepodge of connected water and islands. Pretty cool actually.

It wouldn’t be a bad place to hang out for a couple days, but it is a bit touristy (a lot of local tourists too). Here’s some pictures of what the town looked like.

From the town, it’s a couple kilometer walk to La Piedra Del Peño (The rock of Guatape). “The top of the rock” nature edition. Some fun stairs to climb to get to the top of it.

As you climb up it, you can look down and see things. That’s generally how climbing up things works. Maybe the sky was moody or a weird color, but none of my pictures really turned out that well. Still, you can get an idea of what it looked like.

Those were landings before climbing those stairs I think. Here are actual pictures from the top.

On the way back, we hit traffic and the bus was packed. So I got to stand up on the bus for like 4 hours, and at one point I just sat in the aisle. Got a good ab workout though, and didn’t throw up, so the trip was a success.

Here was the view from the apartment I had for a week. Pretty nice place to work from.

And now I’ve moved into my posh apartment a little further south, but I’ll save that for a next post, since I’m here another month and I probably won’t be able to get away with radio silence for that long.

But first, I’d like to celebrate that I have a nice kitchen and am able to cook for myself. I’ve gone a couple weeks without having much of a conversation with anyone, and with this apartment I might not even need to go outside anymore. Anyways, I made an awesome veggie burger from scratch made out of kidney beans, lentils, red peppers, onions, eggplant, and tofu. It held together really well, so I’m impressed with myself.