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Bienvenidos a Sur America!!
Well we made it.... we are finally in Colombia, South America!! It's been an eventful few weeks....
During our time in Panama City we went to the Panama Canal, pretty impressive and we saw some very big ships going through paying around $200,000 each...and apparently that's not that much! There was also weird theme park style commentary while we watched, like 'shout out to everyone from Argentina, wooooooo!!' Very weird.
But, after Panama there was the decision of how to get down to Colombia. While in Honduras we met a girl who had taken a cargo ship from Colombia to Panama on the cheap and raved about it... Most people pay $200 for a one hour flight, or around $400-500 to take a yacht, which also means sailing through the San Blas Islands, which some are apparently some of the last unbuilt on, unpopulated paradise islands left...so when we met someone with a telephone number for a cargo boat captain we jumped at the chance! and arranged to spend the week on his boat for only $80 including food...hmm perhaps one of our more rash decisions...definitely 'off the beaten track'!
Before we got on the boat we got to spend a couple of days on the beach one of the San Blas Islands which was awesome, but then the boat journey began. The boat was not that big actually considering the amount of crew and the amount of stuff they'd managed to pack on there - we could hardly move! The cargo boat was more of a floating shop that stopped at each island inhabited by a group of people called The Kuna Yana and sold them food and, mainly beer actually. One tiny island bought about 600 crates of beer!
We generally got woken up before 6 every morning by an orchestra of farts from the crew. Me, Sar, and Mark (another English guy doing the trip) then usually talked about how much we hadn't slept. A couple of nights me and Sar shared a one person hammock (not fun), or we slept on the roof of the boat until it started to rain, we even shared the top of a freezer one night.
There were no real bathrooms, just holes in the floor (or wall!) sometimes in outhouses with a door, sometimes not and showers were a bucket of cold water.
There were good things about the trip though, we got to visit all the Kuna islands and see their culture...which judging by what they bought from our boat appears to revolve around beer! The women have very colourful clothing and paint their noses with black lines, very pretty. The children were amazing, so friendly and inquisitive. Unfortunately their rubbish bin appears to be the sea and we saw many people just emptying bags of rubbish into it daily, very sad. Remarkably however the water was still unbelievably clear and blue.... One funny thing was that we saw loads of Kuna men wearing England shirts, our captain had one too! Strange, especially seeing as they thought England was in America...
So it was an interesting journey to say the least! Maybe in a year we'll tell you it was the best experience of our lives, but at the moment we're still recovering!
When we arrived at the Colombian border, the fun and games continued... After emptying the contents of all our bags to prove we weren't smuggling drugs, we remembered it was Semana Santa (Easter), a huge holiday in Latin America, and therefore there was very reduced transport and accommodation... What should have taken a day, took 3 and was maybe the worst journey of our trip so far! After 3 hours of hell on a speedboat in very rough seas, we then got a 6 hour chicken bus on dirt roads with potholes galore before arriving battered and bruised in a dodgy city called Monteria where we had to spend the night as there were no buses. We did meet a nice Colombian guy at the border though who was doing the same journey and he looked after us and gave us some good Spanish practice which was fun!
We finally arrived in Cartagena and spent the day enjoying being back in civilisation... We wandered around the old city, a beautiul colonial area with amazing buildings and a great buzzy atmosphere...lots of salsa music and friendly Colombian people, lovely city!
From there we took a bus North up the coast to a beach town called Taganga where we took another horrendous speed boat trip to Parque Nacional Tayrona to do a one day diving course! It was a beautiful beach and we got to hang out there for a few hours in between dives. Lots of fish, very fun!
Today we are flying to Bogotá, the capital for a few days...
So far Colombia seems to be a very friendly and beautiul country and
we are looking forward to seeing some more of it...
Hasta luego!
Sar & Davy
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