Monday, August 28th
The morning had us awake early and making use of our complementary breakfast at the hotel we got ready and took a taxi to the bus terminal. We wanted to get on the 8AM bus to Cali and it was 7:30AM so we needed to rush. Soon after crossing the whole city we got there with just a few minutes to spare. This was enough for us to call Mauricio from the terminal to thank him for showing us his city (given that we did not see him yesterday), getting a few snacks for the road, and buying some pills for my motion sickness. We were now on our way to Cali.
The bus ride was full of a weird and different scenery. There were gorges with small rivers running on them. The vegetation was dry but intriguing. We fell asleep for a little while and woke up at a rest stop. There were some nice fish on display which were swimming on what must have been 2 inches of water. Some of them had to swim sideways to stay under water! Here we had lunch and continued our trip a few minutes later. The remaining of the trip brought us a change in landscape with more sights of the major coffee plantation regions, sugar cane and cotton.
At arrival into the Cali bus terminal we were to contact Margarita who is the aunt of a good friend of mine from undergrad. We called her and she picked us up in about 10 minutes. Margarita is a wonderful young mother of two teenagers who was gracious enough to be our host in Cali. We got to her house located near the EXITO super market in the north of the city and met Felipe, her son.
We got cleaned up now from the trip and got ready to go out on a quick night tour of the city. At this point, I am really excited because this is a city that is highly talked about in Ecuador for its proximity, the happiness of its people and the beauty of its girls. The four of us got on the car and drove around downtown by the river Cali, eyed the Chipichape mall, saw the affluent areas of town and even went up a mountain nearby to get an aerial view of the city at night. It was all pretty cool but we were getting hungry. We decided to go for a very typical place to sample some of their delicacies.
The chosen place for eating was small but very nice. We ordered a platter for 4 people containing colombian empanadas, almojabanas, etc. The perfect accompanyment for this feast was a drink called lulada which is made with the lulo (aka naranjilla) fruit. Very delicious! I also had another drink made in the same way but with corn in it.. it was very vietnamese in style but latin in flavor. The name of this drink was Champus.
After the meal we were so tired that decided to go back home and relax a little so we can go and explore Cali during the day. We are so close to Ecuador now but need to get a good feel for this southern Colombian city before crossing the border.
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