So one of the best daytrips out from Medellin is to go to Santa Fe de Antioquia, a small town about 40 miles/65 kms northwest of the city. It was another one of those situations where you can find numerous places printing brochures and advertising their trips online, but if they don't have enough people the trips aren’t going. Despite all the hype, I couldn’t find anyone who was actually running a daytrip from Medellin while I was there. So, I just went for the cheaper, more adventurous option and took the public bus. That’s all easy enough, although not necessarily very comfortable.

I read about Santa Fe de Antioquia as an old colonial town somewhat left back in time, a historic place of great charm . So with not being able to get to many of Colombia’s other colonial gems, I thought Santa Fe de Antioquia would be a great choice for a day trip. The bus pulled out of the terminal and took the expressway probably several thousand vertical feet up to a tunnel, said to be recently built and the longest one in the Colombian Andes. After a few miles in the tunnel, the descent was one of those spectacularly long ones that you almost only get in the Andes. I’ve lived in Colorado for a long time, but even our mountain passes are nothing compared to the vertical distances between mountain and valley in South America.

I envisioned Santa Fe de Antioquia as a cool, salubrious mountain town. It couldn’t be farther from the reality. The old capital of the Antioquia region is deep down in the Cauca River Valley at an elevation of only about 500 meters/1,600 feet. That means it’s very hot and quite dry between the western and central ranges of the Andes.

So, once I got off the bus I set out to explore town . The helpful lady I spoke with at the tourist office suggested it would be best to go out to visit the Puente de Occidente early before it got too, too hot. So for after breakfast I arranged with her a "moto", which I’d be inclined to call a tuk-tuk from my time in Asia, a three wheeler taxi essentially attached to a motorbike to take me out there for a roundtrip from town. This would cost me 15,000 pesos (about $5), a rate I feel almost guilty about paying because it seems so cheap relative to what I’m getting. My driver was named Rolando and was a perfect guide and gentleman, who explained everything to me (in Spanish), and insisted I even use the ropes to help climb up to the best viewpoint of the bridge and river valley at the end of the tour. He even stopped afterwards for some pictures with his gold-panning friends on the way back. Anyway, completed in the 1890s across the Cauca River, the Puente de Occidente is considered a particular engineering feat for its length as a suspension bridge built at the time, as well as being very scenic. The lead engineer is particularly revered in Colombia but also worked on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York about a decade earlier.

Santa Fe de Antioquia is quite a nice town architecturally, giving a sense of a real Old Colombia you can’t get in bigger cities, and also not really in well-preserved but super touristy Cartagena. What is notable about the town is that it was the capital of Antioquia province in the olden days before Medellin took the lead, and back in 1813 the province declared its own independence from Spain under dictator Juan de Corral somewhat before Simon Bolivar successfully led Greater Colombia and much of South America to independence . Anyway, the town was a pleasant enough daytrip out on my last day in Medellin.

So, if you look at it on a map Medellin and Bogota really aren’t that far apart. Thus, I wasn’t in a particular rush to get on the first morning bus out of town because I somehow estimated the trip might take about six hours or so and get me to Bogota before dusk. I even drew myself a little map of how to get to the hostel I booked in expectation of taking public transport from the bus terminal to the center to town. Oh, how I was mistaken! When I got to the bus station I was told the trip was a not unreasonable eight hours, but the reality is that it took eleven.

Why? Well, this has something to do with Colombia’s geography. There are three main ranges of the Andes is the country, separated by two major north-south river valleys, the Cauca and Magdalena Rivers, which meet and then enter the Caribbean Sea. So, that means vast ups and downs over the mountains between Medellin in the central Cordillera and Bogota in the eastern Cordillera, and there are lots of ridges along the way too. So maybe you’d think (or maybe you wouldn’t, but I thought) there’d be a major expressway between the two major cities in the nation, cities with populations of about three million and ten million, respectively. But that would be mistaken. Almost the entire distance is on heavy traffic, two-lane roads with lots of slow trucks and no passing lanes that seems especially dangerous as vehicles try to overtake others against oncoming traffic. I’d be hard-pressed to find a country in the world besides India that has as inadequate a physical infrastructure relative to its level of development as Colombia.

Anyway, my bus that left Medellin at 10:00 A.M. didn’t arrive at the terminal in Bogota until after 9:00 P.M. Then I had to wait in line for about 45 minutes for a taxi through heavy traffic to the hostel booked in the center of town where I didn’t arrive much before midnight. Ugh!