Santa Fe de Antioquia

Santa Fe de Antioquia is about 53km away from Medellin. We set out from Medellin with our trusty GPS and yet somehow I still kept JUST missing the turnoff, seeing a half second too late that I needed to veer right instead of going straight. A good 45 minutes later we still had 53km to go. We definitely took the unscenic route through and out of Medellin. We finally got far enough out of town that I felt pretty sure we'd get to Santa Fe. The roads were mountainous, sinuous, steep. Plenty of big trucks too, and tight hairpin curves, so we spent a lot of time stuck behind a big old truck, unable to get around. There was one long tunnel, and a few more kilometers, and then we were there.

So far our hotels in Colombia have had one uniform feature: No windows. No windows in the room, so dark, closed-in spaces. Our hotel in Santa Fe was no exception. It was pretty gross, actually, and so we headed out to walk around the tiny little town.

I felt pretty harrowed. Driving in Medellin will do that to me.

I sat at a little table in the main square to have a beer, while Marc returned to the hotel to get some papers. While I was sitting there, an old drunk guy came up to me and started talking to me. I tried my (also true) line, no habla espanol. As always, he was undeterred and just launched into a Spanish monologue. He also kept standing closer and closer to me. He started to sit down at my small table and I finally shouted NO, and he ambled off. I wasn't threatened, but it also didn't feel very good. Marc returned, and we had a mid-afternoon lunch at a restaurant ranked #2 out of the 12 available in Santa Fe. Those rankings are relative, obviously, and this #2 was not very good at all. The setting was charming, at least.

The courtyard in the restaurant -- our view, which we preferred to the view of our food. Meh.

Still not wanting to go back to our dark, dank little room -- with crumbling, dirty walls painted a dingy institutional green -- we wandered around the town. It would be almost impossible not to be able to buy meat in Santa Fe. Every block seemed to have at least one butcher shop. Colombians love their beef.

the square

the view out the back of our hotel

We returned to our room for a little nap; we're still sunburned and it seems to be making us tired. Marc always brings instant coffee and makes a short cup after a nap, but he saw that there were no glasses of any kind in our room so he went to the desk/restaurant, assuming it was a simple oversight. Nope! He nearly got into a screaming match with a woman, who finally agreed to give him two plastic cups. We also had to partially make our bed; the fitted sheet was on the bed, and the spread on top, but the flat sheet was folded and placed on top of the spare bed. It was just a crappy room all the way around.

We went back for one more walk through town, enjoying the evening feeling. It's a charming little town, with at least three giant churches.

sunset starting to happen behind the big church

the quiet of a weeknight in Santa Fe, which apparently gets crazy busy on the weekend, with people from Medellin

another church

After a strange night of sleep in the pitch-black room (but with a green laser light in my eyes from the air conditioner mounted up at the ceiling), we had breakfast in the hotel and hit the road for San Jeronimo. Now THAT was quite a story.