Popayan

We set off for Popayan at 6am.  We were back on the dodgy road which, despite being the Panamerican, the main road through the north and south Americas, was often very badly made, so it was a long and bumpy drive.  But the police were out in force again, so no problems with hijackings today either.


popayan main square

Popayan is a nice city.  It isn't as cosmopolitan as Ariquipa or Cuenca, but it has a good colonial feel to it.  We spent our time there just wandering around, visiting the churches and relaxing.  Interestingly, in many of the streets the shops or businesses are set back into the buildings, or are within an internal courtyard, so if you don't know when they are it can be difficult to find them.  But the advantage is that the city looks far more unspoiled and less commercial than normal.


narrow Popayan streets





For our first night, after dinner we, and Annelies and Sien, went along to a bar where we had been told that there was a local music competition going on.  There were four acts doing four songs each, and they were generally pretty good.  The first was probably the most interesting, being entirely instrumental, with an excellent flute player. The music had a jazzy feel to it, and was quite impressive.  The second was a female singer with a kind of pop/soul feel to it.  She was good, but seemed to lack confidence in a couple of the songs and so the quality of her voice dropped off a bit at times.  The third was another female singer who did a few tango classics.  Her voice was excellent and very powerful but controlled.  The last was a male singer who did a kind of hip hop music.  Good, but not really for me.  We don't know who was going to make it though as there were another four to go some other time, but from the audience reaction, my money was on the tango singer.

People in Popayan seemed very friendly. We had been told that Colombians would be happy to see tourists here and it appeared that they were.  As we sat in a cafe in the afternoon, the woman on the table next to us started talking to us, asking where we were from and what we were doing. She told us that she was really happy that we were visiting her country, and offered to take us to a place close to town that she thought we would like.  We weren't able to take her up on it as we had arranged to meet others soon, but we felt it was a genuine and honest offer, unlike some places where an such offer would be met with a little distrust in case we were being taken off to be robbed, or there would be a request for money at the end.
Our second evening, we headed to the bar that the rest of the group had gone to the previous night.  It was a small place and we couldn't get in to start with, so we had a quick drink in another bar that turned out to be a salsa bar.  They were playing salsa tunes and people were dancing, but while we were there they put on Hotel California by the Eagles.  It seemed totally out of place, and we had the impression that they may well have played it for our benefit; we showed our appreciation by singing along with gusto!  Thankfully the music was loud, so they won't have regretted their decision.


El Sotareño



After that we got into the other bar.  It was a great little place called El Sotareño.  It is tiny, and has huge rows of vinyl records (and some more recently added CDs) behind the bar, with someone playing popular south American music all through the evening.  The owner has run the place for forty years, and has a formidable but lovely woman as his chief employee.  She has been there for seventeen years and is in complete control of her customers.

When we arrived, we were treated like special guests all evening.   She had people move over to create a space for us, brought on extra chairs, and looked after us brilliantly.  When I went to the loo, she dashed in ahead of me to make sure it was clean and ready to be used, and she hurried people out of our way even though we were quite happy already.  We mostly stuck to the beers, but decided to try the local spirit of Aguardientes, which is an aniseed spirit.  We bought a small bottle for the six of us and did a few rounds of throat warming shots.
Towards the end of the evening, people were getting up and dancing.  They were generally very good.  Annelies was chatting at the bar, talking about what we were doing and where we were going, invludingbthat we were planning to go t Cali the next day to spend the evening Salsa dancing ( or attempting to) in one of the local bars, when they dropped the bombshell.  It was election time again, and not only would we not be allowed to buy any alcohol after 6pm tomorrow or all day Sunday, we would also find that the bars would be closed in Cali, so no dancing either.

Well we knew that we could deal with the alcohol by buying some in advance and putting it in the newly fixed fridge on the truck, but the lack of going out was a bigger problem.  However, the person that we were talking to just happened to be a salsa teacher who lives in Cali, and she told us that if we contact her tomorrow she may be able to give us a private salsa lesson in her home.   Another example of people genuinely being happy to see tourists here and wanting to make them welcome.

The bar tab was kept in the most simple form; all the empty bottles were lined up on the table and at the end of the evening she simply counted up what we'd had.  We finally left at around 3am when they were putting the chairs on the tables.