I went to Babylon disco both Thursdays that I was in Medellin. It is Ladies’ Night, with all you can drink. 40,000 pesos admission for men, 10,000 for women. They put a pint of aguardiente on your table, along with a couple of shot cups. Other drinks are extra. Aguardiente is apparently the favored Medellin liquor. Distilled from sugar cane, it is flavored with anise or something similar and is 60 proof. I didn’t find out if the put an-other bottle on your table if you finished the one, but assume they would if you could handle it.
The disco was fun, I liked it so much I returned the next week—courtesy of a free pass from Camilo, who said he had an interest in that and another disco. It was crowded, with a lot of people having a good time—and a wilder time as the night went on. The aguardiente loosened up everyone, and girls were dancing on the tables by midnight. It was a young crowd—I was probably twice as old as the next oldest person there. There were more girls than guys, mostly in clusters—but there were plenty of couples too.
I also took a ride on the cable car, part of the Metro system joining a slum that had been previously inaccessible to the rest of Medellin. People said it was dangerous, and perhaps it would be if you got off and walked around in the slums, but there were police in the stations along the way, and I felt perfectly safe. The views were spectacular (as they are from many places around Medellin).
Near the top of the hills is a library, which was also reputed to be unsafe. Strange look-ing building!
When Angel was in for the weekend, she took us to the aquarium. We only scratched the surface there, we could have spent all day. A 3-D film on sardine ecology made incredi-ble use of underwater 3-D photography, the sharks swimming right at you were real enough to make you flinch. Although the narration was entirely in Spanish (of course), I learned about how important the sardine schools off the coast of Africa are to the food supply of humans and various fish/mammals/birds. My Spanish was good enough to rec-ognize a few of the words
. The next day, Sandman drove with us out to the reservoir that had been formed by damming a river, and supplied a third of Colombia’s electricity. It was quite a lovely setting, about a 2-3 hour drive from Medellin, over roads that were a bit scary—the edges of some of them were crumbling down hillsides. We arrived safely, and ate at a restaurant overlooking the lake.
Adjacent to the parking area for the restaurants and stores selling trinkets and various souvenirs was a huge monolith, Penon de Guatape. Its exposed vertical face is more than 650 feet high, and is accessible via a staircase with 644 steps. On the flat top of the rock, a restaurant has outdoor tables with vistas that stretch to the horizon in every direction. Above the restaurants are two gift shops, and an open-air viewing area to see the spectac-ular scenery. At least that’s what they told us, we passed on the steps.
In the nearby town of El Penon, we walked along the lake looking at the souvenir shops and food kiosks. I took the cable ride: you sit in a sling, and are towed along a cable to the top of a faraway hill. The tow connection is released, and you go sailing down the cable, across the lake, until you slam into a spring-loaded mat that stops you. It was quite the E-ticket, for 10,000 pesos. The views—and point-of-views—were incredible, the place is so beautiful. I recommend it strongly.
The weather was pretty good to us. The last couple of nights, it rained, mostly later in the evening—very heavily, too. But we were not inconvenienced by the rain at all.
(Message edited by Hunterman on October 07, 2011)