The road to Cali from Popayan is about 2 hours. I only remember 30 minutes of it…
I sat down next to a nice, 50 something year old guy. We chatted a bit about Cali and Colombia in general. He offered me a wafer cookie and that´s all I remember. Im pretty sure the drug was Scopolamine and its fairly common here as an aid in robbing people. My next memory plays out like a horror film..waking up in a vaguely familiar place and puking into the sink of an entirely white, tiled bathroom. Apparently, the police had to remove me from the bus and I must have told them the name of the hostel I wanted to go to or they found the list on me while looking through my stuff. I should have been taken to a hospital but that would be bad for tourism so instead they called a hostel to collect me and let me sleep it off. Whatever the case, Mike and Diana from Casa Blanca in Cali came to my rescue and brought me home with them.
After two days of rest, I still felt a bit naseous and had a massive headache but I came to Cali for one reason and that is to dance in the self-proclaimed salsa capital of the world. I was expecting a slighty modernized Cuba. A sexy, steamy, tropical town full of great street food and salsa blasting from every door. What I got instead was a pretty cheesy, late 90´s South Beach kind of place with an overabundance of Chinese take out joints. To be fair, I slept through Friday and Saturday nights and had to make do with a Sunday while being sober and over dressed in my jeans and tank top (the ladies wear borderline figure skating costumes but with 5 inch heels in lieu of ice skates). The dancing partners were slim pickins as well, with most guys averaging 5´8´´ and shrouded in clouds of hair gel and cologne. I made the effort though but didn´t have the experience I had gone there for. There´s always Medellin and Bogota….
Salento on the other hand…ahh…belisima! In the heart of the Zona Cafetera where Colombian coffee comes from. I´m happy to report, I´m finally getting decent grounds! I´m staying in a slightly too rustic plantation house overlooking the town and happy to be out of a big city. Last night, I met up with two Irish girls I met in San Agustin and an English girl from Cali and we went to the pool hall in town. By the looks of the guys in the place, women had never a) entered the establishment and b) attempted to play billiards there. A real dive full of bad lighting and old men that have probably been hanging out there their whole lives, it definitely had character. The scatchy, old standards that played on the speakers was muffled by the younger generation playing their drums in the plaza but no one seemed to mind. We played two terrible games, had some brandy in coffee and called in a night. Walking back up the hill, through the beautiful colonial town gave me an enormous sense of well being. This is the kind of town you come to Colombia for.
