Packed day. We had a lot on the agenda and we were heading back to Medellin today. We piled into our car and headed out to meet this tour we were doing. But wait… the road out was locked and barred. No way through. Once again we were trapped! After consulting a small child on his strategy on how to escape we raced around for awhile. The conclusion of this was that the child probably didn’t know what he was talking about. Luckily we finally found a guy who did and he was able to round down some folks to open the gate and let us out. Now we were only 30 minutes late to meet our group.

We raced over there and were met with a huge group of people and four jeeps. Hey, no problem some people can just ride on the roof or hanging off the back of the jeeps. Oh good! The real problem, though, is they aren’t coming back to the start so we have no way to get our car. A problem best dealt with later. So we pile onto this jeeps, take off down the highway and then onto windy dirt roads up onto another promontory in the lake. Naturally, the jeep we are riding in explodes and we have to leave it there. So now we only have three jeeps for everyone. No problem, pile more people onto the roof and now the bonnet.

We finally get to our destination, one of Pablo Escobar’s many mansions. This one has a tour and, more importantly, a paintball arena. So we played paintball in an arena that was comprised of the guest house, servants quarters and stables. As you can imagine, pretty awesome. Everyone sustained their share of injuries and running around at the equator with a mask, gun and overalls is hard work. After that we got a tour of the property and, thankfully, lunch.

From here we took boats back to the town of Guatape and had coffee. Since we were in a town we thought this might be a good time to retrieve our car. As we often do, we offered a random guy some cash to take us back to our car. He was happy to oblige. So we collected our car and drove to Penol de Guatape. A massive rock (second largest in South America) that overlooks the lake. 740 stairs later we were at the top. We made it in time to catch sunset so everything timed out quite nicely in the end. After a celebratory beer at the top we were on our way back to Medellin.

The drive back included only the normal amount of close calls for driving around South America and we made it unscathed. We were starving and so naturally rolled into Il Castello, a very nice Italian place. We had been, driving, hiking and running all day and to varying degrees we were still covered in paint. …they were gracious enough to let us stay for dinner.