Cali: Salsa capital of the world

September 1-4, 2015
*Note: though Cali is the salsa capital, we only went out dancing one night.  It was fun, and a slightly different kind of salsa than in other parts of South America.  But since we only went once, this post doesn't actually talk about about salsa at all. It was just a good title.

So Cali is hot. We learned that right off the bat. Like 86 plus humidity minus a breeze and it doesn't cool down too much at night. There is a lot of ick going on with the weather.

After about 4pm it gets marginally more bearable though, so we ventured out with Jose, the owner of our hostel.

Cali has this awesome boulevard where one of the biggest streets in town used to be, right be next to the river. They stuck the street in a tunnel and turned the street into a walking and biking path. It had some pretty sweet cat statues along it, akin to the Pigs on Parade for you Seattleites that remember them from some years ago.

We walked around the historic district next to our hostel, this is one of the cool churches.

Speaking of hostels, we stayed at Kingbird (shoutout, stay there of you're ever in Cali) which had some of the most beautiful paintings on the walls.

Painted on the walls, outlets and light switch for scale

Paintings on canvas hanging by the TV

It also had sweet furniture made from recycled pallets and a nice lights and wine bottles setup at the end of the dining room.

Also one of the most flopped out cats I've seen.

Out walking one night we found posters for the circus. So we went, and it was worth every penny. Please excuse the picture quality, its tough to take photos in an extremely dark room of moving objects.

Kind of dark circus selfie

Cyr wheel act, feathers falling from the ceiling

Balancing act.  Dude on the bottom was their clown, and he was actually funny.  Had a lovely moment where he ended up dancing with one of the guys in the audience who obviously had no idea what to do in that situation

This guy

Do you think he knows he's riding the bicycle the wrong way?

Climbing up, flipping down, jumping over people coming up...

Its super blurry, but this was the top guy holding on with his feet, holding the hands of the gal, and she was walking down the pole as he slid down.  I will probably never be as ripped as they are.

The whole 18 person cast, including the fantastic live band that was playing for the whole show

So Cali had a hot and kind of icky climate, but was filled with things to do if you only know where to look. I intend to go back and find more of them.  Also there is a salsa festival.

We left for Santa Marta where I learned how to scuba dive, but that post will be very out of order since I'm still trying to compile photos from different places for it.