Rumba

It is Monday morning and I am preparing to leave Cali after a weekend here in the Colombian capital of salsa.



I arrived on Thursday, moved to a new hostel on Friday, went out on Friday night. On Saturday I went to the zoo with a girl from the hostel and later met up with Juan Pablo and Andrea. Juan Pablo was unfortunate enough to have been my student in London for a couple of months before Christmas but he seems to have forgiven me enough to take me out and show me Cali. And Andrea is his adorable girlfriend.

But first, the zoo. Cali Zoo is pretty sweet if you happen to like zoos, which I do. I know, they were not PC for so long but then people discovered that they weren´t actually poking the lions with sticks and painting extra stripes on the zebras and were, in fact, a handy way of people getting close to animals that they would never see walking down the streets of Essex.

Cali Zoo concentrates mainly on Colombian species which makes it more interesting. Admittedly if London Zoo did this then you would be faced with cages of grumpy looking badgers and pissed off foxes. But here that means monkeys and parrots galore (don´t forget the Amazon region of the country) and more butterflies than it would be wise to shake a stick at.





The zoo straddles the river and it is a pretty cool place to hang out for a couple of hours. It was a hot day and typically we arrived at siesta time. The tiger was sitting in its pool, up to its neck in water, strange rodents that I didn´t know the name of in English were doing likewise.

In fact it was only the tortoises moving and they seemed to be involved in a pretty slow act of shagging the shell off each other.

After the zoo we went back to the hostel and awaited the arrival of Juan Pablo and Andrea.



They took me to a salsa club and, bless them, didn´t even try very hard to make me dance. The club, Rumbavana, was full of youngsters but there is something about dancing salsa which makes people seem very grown up to me.





The club shut at three but undeterred we followed the typical caleño party style of simply finding another place to go. The next place, Eliptica, was an open air dance floor playing house music to the stars. Located on the top of a hill it gave some great views over the city too.



We stayed there until the lights turned on sometime after four. I made it to bed at quarter to five.

Sunday saw me hitting the mall with two girls from my dorm, in search of shoes. I love being a girl sometimes! None of us bought shoes though I was pretty damn close. I love new shoes and the idea of having a pair that I bought in Colombia (though the same are for sale in the UK) so that I could look down at my feet and sigh wistfully about my days in deepest darkest South America was pretty alluring. Instead we went to the cinema.

Hum, we selected an American movie, Babel, on the understanding that it hadn´t been dubbed into Spanish. What we didn´t know was that, given that a third of the movie is set in Mexico and a third in Tokyo (with Spanish subtitles) there was no need to have dubbed it. Tested my Spanish to the max it has to be said and the three of us still don´t really agree on the ending of the Tokyo story.

After the movie, Juan Pablo and Andrea picked me up again and we had a bite to eat and saw the cats of Cali.

The original cat, El Gato del Rio, sits next to the river with a smart look on his face. And no wonder since he is currently surrended by a feline harem decorated by Colombian artists in a best kitty competition. Good stuff.











All too soon it was time to go back to the hostel. Poor Juan Pablo had to work today so no late night dancing for us. It was great to have my tour guides in Cali and good to see that a month away from England hasn´t affected their English.

I have only one regret in Cali and that is that I hardly saw any big fake boobs at all. I don´t know if this is because it was too hot here (22 degrees at three am for starters) so the owners of the boobs have to stay home with them packed in ice to stop them melting or what. But I did see more than enough in Medellin and the occassional pair here.

As for the debate about which city has the most beautiful women, Cali or Medellin, I have to admit that I am still just looking at the fellas...