Day Trip to Armenia (The Colombian City)

Monday, Sept. 11, 2017--Pereira to Armenia and Back

I took a bus to Armenia early this morning.  It's another city here in the "Cafeteria" District of Colombia where coffee is grown.  It is known for being higher up in the mountains and has beautiful, tall mountains behind it.  It is also known as a city that was greatly destroyed by an earthquake in 1988.

The trip there is considered to be a road through the nicest countryside of the Cafeteria District, and it truly is pretty with mostly rolling rather than peaked mountains.  It is densely populated with homes scattered everywhere along the way--not just along the road but in the hills beyond it.  The trip takes just about an hour.

Armenia is not a very good destination.  I think the guidebooks like it because of the views of the mountains and because it is more active in terms of business and entertainment than Pereira or Manizales, the other two cities in the district.  But there is little character to the city.  Almost everything is new because of the earthquake.  Even the Cathedral is an ultra-modern A-frame structure that is distinguished only by its pretty, contemporary stained-glass windows.  (The other, older church you see in some of the images is also in Armenia and apparently survived the earthquake, but it isn't the Cathedral.)  The fact that everything is new in the city, however, makes it a clean downtown.

After wandering around the city, viewing two exhibits (one of photographs of the city in the early 1900s and one of women of the region), and enjoying the view of the mountains, I stopped for lunch at a small place and had the usual kind of plate--soup (potato today), meat (pork today), brown beans, salad (lettuce and tomato today), fried plantain bananas, and juice (watermelon/lime today).  Then I caught a bus back to Pereira.

Our bus (a large van) didn't get far, though.  A man stopped it to get off at the edge of town and the automatic side door didn't close properly.  The driver pushed the button about 3 times having it go back and forth until it stuck there.  After manually pulling it partially open, I could see the problem, a pin that held a two-pronged bar that connected to the automatic sliding device had come loose at one end causing the pronged piece to slip out of place, hit and frame of the door, and bend the pin.  Anyway, we sat there for about 15 minutes or so until they could get another bus to us to continue our journey.

The rest of the day was spent in the apartment.  It had been hot, and my face feels a bit sunburned.  I bought a Coke Sin Azucar (formerly known as Coke Zero) at the nearby supermarket and enjoyed drinking it while relaxing and reading.  Then in the evening I watched two episodes of Narcos on Netflix.  I've been watching the series while I am here in Colombia and am now about 2/3 of the way through the second season.