MUNGO EATS Latin America

Tonight we are in La Pintada, a small town about 1 hour south of Medelli’n.  We thought we would have a relatively short day of driving today, but that was not the case.  The roads are actually quite good now, no more potholes, but they are busy.  The highways are full of large trucks and because of the curvy nature of the roads, you really can’t go too fast and we often get stuck behind semi trailers, that we find difficult to pass. 

Once we got into Medelli’n, we got lost, of course.  It is a strange thing, but there is really no time that a highway just goes straight through a city.  How I long for a Deerfoot Trail or a Trans-Canada Highway that just goes straight through.  It may not be the fastest way through our town, but it is brainless.  Luckily, our GPS seems to know the roads, kind of, so we just kept correcting towards where the GPS wanted us to go and eventually we found our way out of town.  In most of Central America, the GPS couldn’t even find the road it wanted us to be on.   

Once on the south side of town, the traffic was even slower.  There are places where the highway is under construction and we did pass one accident, but really I think the thing that caused the most delay is that sometimes the curves on the road are so tight that two large trucks cannot be in the curve at the same time.  The roads are incredible, just cut into the sides of mountains.  at one point today, we passed through a town that was two houses wide all the way through.  The town was located on the top of a ridge and it consisted of the road and one house on either side of the highway.  The front sides of the houses were level with the road, the backsides had to be supported by stilts, that is how quickly the land dropped away.

As I said, tonight we are in La Pintada, which is a small town in a large valley.  We are back down at about 700m.  Up, down, up, down.  It is not too bad here, a bit warm, but not anything like the coast.  We are staying at what I can only call a plantation.  It is a large property, that has a restaurant, a couple of pools, and a dozen or so rooms.  There is a DJ setting up, so I think there will likely be a party here tonight.  I think that people can “rent” places like this to have their parties at.  In any case, it is a beautiful place, up on a hill, with a gorgeous view of the river.  Pretty nice digs.