Story from Joey Le

Something about Manizales had piqued my interest. Maybe it was its appealingly niche status as “The Third City of the Colombian Coffee Region”, maybe it was because it sounded like it should be the name of a superstar Colombian midfielder from the 80's, or maybe it was my friends in Medellin saying “nobody visits Manizales, why are you going there?” so off I went.Manizales does have two notable features: the biggest cathedral in Colombia, and a bunch of thermal baths in the countryside just outside the city. I had enough time to do both, so in the morning I ventured into the city centre. What I didn’t know at the time, but would soon discover, was that Manizales also has the friendliest man in Colombia.The cathedral was pretty big, and I was about to be quite impressed when I suddenly remembered that I'm from England where we have some much, much bigger cathedrals, which actually made this one look more like the local Baptist church next to the estate at the top of my road (which does its job, don't get me wrong, but isn't a pinnacle of impressive size). Perspective, eh? As in many Colombian cities, there was also a main square with a big statue of Simon Bolivar the independence liberator, but contrary to most statues of him and indeed all reliable accounts of his appearance, this one depicted him as a giant bird.Then it was time to head out to the thermal baths. I flagged down a taxi, easy enough in the city centre next to bird-livar, and an hour later I was soaking myself blissfully in the middle of nowhere. I stayed until 7pm when the complex was closing, then noticed nobody else was around, and realised that finding a taxi back into the city was not going to happen. The only option? The local bus. I knew it existed but there was no timetable, nobody else waiting, just me standing sweatily at the side of the road for a good 20 minutes, mildly panicked that I was stuck there. Finally, through the mystical steam of the thermal environment, a bus emerged. And then I met Jorge.Jorge was a bus driver, 45 years old, pale and podgy with a thinning mop of brown hair, a sunny disposition and a lopsided smile. He was a simple guy with a simple purpose: to get people from A to B. But Jorge had another dream: Jorge had always wanted to be a tour guide!Unfortunately, Manizales gets very few tourists, so Jorge had never realised this aspiration. But when a slightly disoriented English guy got on his bus at the first stop on a balmy Tuesday evening, and asked in broken Spanish to be told when it was the right place to get off, Jorge couldn’t believe his luck. A tourist! In Manizales! Finally! Indeed, it was too good an opportunity to miss. And thus commenced Jorge and Joey's road trip.After insisting I sit literally inside the driver's cabin with him, over the next two hours Jorge treated me to a full tour of everything he felt that Manizales had to offer. Sure, he spoke extremely rapid, colloquial Spanish that I only understood about half of, and sure, he was meant to be driving a set bus route for all the other passengers he picked up, but kept going way off-piste to their bemusement, but being able to show the city to a foreign visitor was not something that happened every day. He also utilised our time together to show me pictures of his wife, kids, brothers, sisters, parents, uncles, aunties, cousins and second cousins. On his phone. Whilst driving the bus down major road at 50mph.When the final passenger left the bus and Jorge's shift was over, he decided we should go for pancakes, which I wasn't going to argue with because it was 9pm and I was starving. This entailed us stopping at a roadside pancake place, where Jorge threw the pancake lady some free bus tickets in exchange for her passing some pancakes through the window for us to eat, and we enjoyed them heartily.Jorge then informed me that he'd left the best site in Manizales until the end: his own house, where he introduced me to his teenage daughter, Lucia. She seemed far less perplexed at my presence than she ought to have been, given that her father had just made an impromptu new best friend from the UK on his evening shift, and with a sigh told me “he’s always doing things like this”. We had a cup of tea together while the bus idled on the street outside his house, while they regaled me with tales of Manizales life and I kept wondering whether he owned the bus outright or whether the company just didn’t mind him taking it for a little longer.Finally, it was time for the journey to end, and back onto the bus we went. He dropped me at my hostel, we bid each other a fond farewell, he closed the bus door, gave me a salute, and off he went. I was never to see or speak to him again, but I was filled with gratitude, pancakes, and the makings of this tale.Manizales is off the general Colombian backpacker trail for a reason, but with spontaneous travel comes unique experiences and plot twists such as this one. The pancakes were really delicious as well.