The People We Met in Medellín

One of my favorite things about travelling is how often the best stories start with something completely random. You don’t really plan them and you don’t know they are going to happen. Sometimes you don’t even realize in the moment that something important just happened. That is exactly what happened to us in Medellín.

We had decided to go up to Cerro El Picacho one afternoon because we had seen the views and wanted to experience the city from above. What we hadn’t really thought about was how we were going to get back down again. As the sun started going down and we realized that getting an Uber from the top wasn’t going to be as easy as we had imagined, we started asking people around us if they were heading back down and whether there was any chance we could go with them. And that is how we met a couple from Puerto Rico.

At the time, it was just one of those random travel situations. They helped us get back down and we ended up driving through Medellín together before they eventually dropped us off at Parque Lleras. We talked a lot, laughed and got to know each other a little, but I don’t think any of us thought much about it afterwards. They were just two people we had met while travelling. Then, around two weeks later, they contacted us again.

At some point after Medellín, we ended up doing a volunteer opportunity with them. I won’t go into too much detail about that here because that deserves its own story, but it was already pretty crazy to think about how all of this had started. We had gone up a mountain for the view, had no idea how we were getting back down and ended up staying in contact with people we had met there.

While we were travelling through Colombia, Puerto Rico suddenly became a possibility. It wasn’t part of our original route at all. The plan was actually to keep moving south towards Ecuador, but we started talking about whether we should just go to Puerto Rico instead. And then we did.

We ended up spending two weeks there. It definitely wasn’t the best decision for our travel budget because we had already planned how much we wanted to spend on our trip, and adding another two weeks obviously didn’t help. But at the time, I didn’t really care. I knew Jay loves Puerto Rico, so I thought, why not now?

Looking back, I still find it funny how much came from that one afternoon in Medellín. We weren’t looking for new travel plans and we definitely weren’t expecting to meet people who would somehow become part of the rest of our journey. We just needed a way down the mountain.

And then, a little later, we found ourselves in Puerto Rico.

But that is a story for another post.

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Written by Fabienne, Medellin