Last Christmas I took a trip from Medellin, Colombia to Santa Fe de Antioquia, the oldest municipality in Colombia. It is a small, hot town that conjures images from the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The main square is filled with vendors and restaurant/bars where people sit on the street drinking and dancing late into the night. The architecture is Spanish Colonial and the people are friendly and talkative. A must see for any trip to this region of Colombia.

I thought that I'd share some of the photos from that trip with ScribeCentral.com.

The road to Antioquia is lined with small restaurants and tiendas, but at one particular spot there is a string of Ranchos selling fruit and baked goods. Goods made from tamarindo (or tamarind) are the classics in these stores. My favourite is this candy made from tamarindo and wound into a stick. It actually looks like some kind of hardened animal dropping, but tastes great. The photo itself, I snapped while we were stopped by the police, a regular occurrence along the Colombian highways.

Last June, as I was making the same trip. My friends took a bus, but my girlfriend and I decided to take her car. She got tired of driving, so I took over for a while. Of course, I managed to get pulled over at one of these stops and had a brief conversation with the cop who was wearing fatigues and carrying a big heavy-looking automatic rifle. He informed me that I had been in the country so long that I needed a Colombian licence (here in Latin America they don’t recognize any form of international driver’s permit). I got out of the car to change seats with my girlfriend so she could drive the rest of the way, only to find her immersed in conversation with the police officer. A few minutes, and twenty thousand pesos later, we drove away avoiding the formal hundred thousand peso fine. The cop, my girlfriend said, was pretty adamant at first about not accepting this “roadside fee” because I, being a gringo, would tell on him. She convinced him that of course I wouldn’t, and I haven’t until today.

Antioquia, like every Spanish colonial town is laid out around a central square with the main church on one side and the town hall with the jail and courthouse on another. The square is the social center of the town, usually filled with merchants offering wares unique to that area. The three photos I have here shows two stands selling food similar to what I described above. You can see bottles of tamarindo mixed with water designed for making juices, tamarindo candies, sweetened grapefruit preserves, jars of honey, sweet desserts, and many other flavourful goodies. The third photo depicts a staple in any Latin American marketplace: the black-market CD centre. What the First World record companies just don’t get is that CDs are so overpriced in Latin America (and the rest of the world for that matter) where many people live on ridiculously low wages that many people have no alternative but to buy bootlegged copies of their favourite music. These copies, in addition usually get transferred to enough cassettes so as to service an entire community.

I also made my third trip to the “bus terminal” which has a more traditional style market on its second floor. The first time I was there back in August of 2001, I ran into a group of men coming out of the mountains with donkeys laden with packs of red coffee beans. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a camera to capture the “Juan Valdez” scene and have gone back two times hoping to catch the site again. No luck of course.

This is a picture I found of beans, corn, and rice being sold at one of the stalls. A true collection of the natural staples of Colombia.

I found this poster left over from the Presidential elections five months earlier. It depicts the current and popular President Alvaro Uribe. In the past few months, Uribe has increased security along the highways and in the cities, making his use of a Colombian version of Marshal Law. His efforts to put an end to the decades long civil war which has left the country at the mercy of the terrorists groups of the FARC and right-wing ParaMilitary have been met with mixed success. These last two weeks, for example have been filled with bombs exploding in some of the major urban centers.

This final picture is one of a butcher’s store in the market. After I asked the owner if I could take his photo, I was told that he made some quick efforts to fix his hair when my back was turned. So here's a photo of the handsome guy.

The rest of the trip was devoted to enjoying the warmth and sun and sipping beer in the main square. In the future, I'll share some of those photos with the ScribeCentral.com community.

Sincerely,

The "Ex" Patriot