People in Jerico

Blip Monday 3 Feb

We left at 8 for a long day in the bus. After having 2 stops en route we turned off the main road to climb up lots of hair pin bends for 30 minutes to reach Jerico, a colourful small town where we had lunch of soup, avocado, chips and salad for £3 each. While some went to see a workshop making leather goods we chose to have a walk around to recover from the dizziness of the drive. Jerico is a peaceful (now) old town, surrounded by mountains and greenery with historic Spanish buildings, colourful houses, cobbled streets and many churches. We popped in to the enormous cathedral which was quite plain with the wooden rafters and a German organ. We saw a huge sign on a house which Andres said was there to advertise that the people who had owned the property before the cartels took it could reclaim it - within a month. After that would be too late. The drive was almost an hour each way from the main road to Medellin then we had about 2 hours for lunch and a walk. This meant we did not reach Medellin till 8pm, 12 hours after setting out.

It would have been preferable to us to just get a snack at a filling station for lunch and reach the hotel 4 hours earlier. We are in a Radisson hotel so our margaritas are UK prices. The view of the city lights is worth the money.

For some reason blip dates my entries from the last few days a day ahead so won’t publish on my phone app nor will it let me change the date to the correct one so I’m publishing a day late then changing the date on my iPad. I can’t do my blip photos from the iPad as it hadn’t downloaded all my photos in time!