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It took us a few days longer than expected to find the energy and ability to leave Matt´s flat in Bogota and take a bus to San Gil, the adventure capital of Columbia. But eventually the three of us made it to the bus station and headed down from the mountains and into warmer lands!
San Gil is a small town near the Venezuelan border with beautiful old plazas and a really friendly atmosphere. The highlight of our time here included days in the sunshine besides a couple of rivers, including having a picnic, a drink and swimming in the freezing cold water! We spent a day climbing through forest and rivers to visit a stunning series of waterfalls. We decided to be more adventurous and climb down the river rather on the path which went well until it started to get dark and progress became quite slow with me slipping all over the place in soaked flip flops and needing Matt and Will's help over every rock! I nearly came a cropper on several occasions!! We had the chance to test the theory about getting to the end of a rainbow when one appeared through a small part of the waterfall; so we decided to sent Will so we could take photo and see if there was any gold, but as soon as he walked under the water and soaked his clothes in the waterfall, the sun disappeared behind the hills and the rainbow vanished!! So you definitely can't get to the end!! Our other highlight was going flying (paragliding) over the amazingly beautiful Chicha Mocha Canyon (which means Mocha Girl!), Will was first to go and after posing for a while in his bee like flying suit he ran off the edge of the cliff and took to the sky. I went next, and wasn't actually as completely terrified as I thought I'd be, and Matt went up after we'd landed! The experience was amazing, we went in thermals up to 2km above the ground and circled around the beautiful canyon! The landing was a concern to me beforehand, but all of ours were actually not too bad, we did see another person come down pretty hard!
Will and I had to move on quite quickly after this, due to our plans to meet Beastie in Peru in September we had arranged flight dates with Matt for our up and coming amazon boat trip! So, leaving Matt to make his way back to Bogota, we headed on an overnight bus to Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast. Arriving first thing in the morning we jumped straight in a taxi and to the small fishing village of Taganga where we promptly slept for half the day! Taganga is a very touristy village with some of the world's cheapest diving! The village itself was a bit disappointing but most of our time was spent out of the village doing different activities. We went into Santa Marts one day with an aim to explore, however were caught out by a massive storm and had to sit eating lunch and drinking coffee in a restaurant as we watched the streets fill with water, flood and destroy the towns planned military parade, as the plastic chairs set up for people began to float away down the street! People were even setting up wooden planks across the road and making people pay to use them instead of walking through the floods!
We spent the next few days in Tayrona National Park, a beautiful jungle protected area with amazing coasts and beaches. The park has several campsite right near the sea and paths that run around the coast. To get there after a bus you have to walk about 45minutes through the jungle in which you can see huge colonies of ants carrying leaves from one tree to another and hear the amazingly loud sounds of howler monkeys in the distance! We quickly abandoned our hammock plans on arrival when we saw the tiny bit more expensive rental tents came with mattresses and we already set up! The campsite we stayed at was in a beautiful clearing of the jungle with lots of palm trees above lush green grass! By the evening the torrential rains came, with the most amazing lightning show and thunder like we've never heard before. It sounded like the cracks were hitting the floor right near were we sat in the restaurant/bar hut! The next day we had to abandon our plans to move further round the coast to another camp as the river between our tent and the path was so high and fast that we were told it was dangerous to cross. After a relaxing few hours we were able to cross just to explore the beaches nearby for the day before returning to our camp for another storm!! The following day we managed to make it all around the path to the furthest camp where it is possible to get a speed boat back round the coast to Taganga. Although this campsite seemed over touristy and much more expensive the beach was beautiful and we spent several hours swimming and sunbathing before our boat left.
Our last full day in Taganga we spent diving and were lucky to get our own dive master and go just as three people. The diving was good, not the best, but we did still have to convince ourselves that we definitely didn't have enough time or money to become qualified dive masters here!
And so the next day we headed West to Cartagena, a beautiful old colonial walled city and one of the most important towns in Spanish Latin America. We spent several days wondering through the narrow streets enjoying the old buildings, bars and shops! One of strangest experiences of our lives was a visit to the nearby mud volcano, apparently produced by rotting vegetation under the ground, the volcano is a small mound above the ground full of warm bubbling mud which they told us goes down 2km under ground. Once you enter the mud, and fight off the people trying to forcefully massage you, you have a strange weightless feeling as everyone sits at shoulder level and can't actually move your body up or down, or really in any direction. Getting out afterwards was a challenge just trying to move towards the exit steps! After this we were cleaned by local women in the river, another strange experience particularly when they undid your swim wear and took it away to wash as you sat in luckily muddy water in the nude!
We celebrated Will's birthday by going on a day boat trip to a nearby archipelago of beautiful islands and having lunch on the beautiful Playa Blanca, sadly we didn't know in advance that you could sleep the night there and had to repeat the trip a few days later to have more time on this beautiful Caribbean beach. In the evening we went to an Argentinian steak house for a massive budget blow out. Although Will was slightly disappointed by his choice of steak we had a lovely meal, and I even shared mine with him!! Our second trip to Playa Blanca was beautiful, we slept metres from the beach in hammocks, had massages, ate fresh fish, played a very long game of chess and snorkelled in the clear blue sea. The only downfalls came the next day when firstly the son of the owner of the next bar from ours stole our snorkels and masks, we eventually found them in the jungle much to our surprise and the delight of all the other locals who had been trying to prove that a spree of recent thefts had been done by this boy. They did ask us to go to the police with them to report it but unfortunately we had to run to get on a boat back to town. Thus the next downfall... on the crowded speed boat everything was going fine until the engine right behind our back row seats suddenly made a massive bang. The driver ran back to check the problem and upon removing the engine cover we realised that the engine was actually on fire. Everybody panicked and started to move towards the front of the boat, an older Columbian woman began to have a panic attack, people got ready to jump overboard and Will and I were stuck right next to the engine on fire! The men quickly put the fire out, but then continued to bodge the engine until it turned on again and use it to continue the journey, a very scary experience giving our seating position! I've never been so pleased to reach dry land!
After several days travel and staying in a couple of very non-touristy towns in which we attracted lots of stares, and a very uncomfortable boat ride, we arrived in Capurgana a tiny fishing village on the Panama border. Within minutes we had decided that this was our favourite stop so far! We were met off the boat by a man asking if we wanted to go scuba diving, taken to the local dive shop and offered accommodation in there lovely house! The people were lovely, and Jimmy, the man who met us, became our dive master for the next three days. The last days was the best diving, our first dive started in Columbia and we surfaced in Panama, where we stayed for an hour on a beautiful beach as illegal aliens! The border relations are so friendly that no passports are required or immigration procedures to explore the local area. The second dive was our best, we saw a turtle, sting ray and a huge nurse shark all within a few minutes!
We were sad to leave such a lovely place and lovely people but had to move on and so headed for a quick visit to Medellin, a very modern city, before going to the Columbian coffee district. Salento was a really lovely small town full of coffee shops and craft shops. We had a coffee farm tour from an English man who had lived here for years and had bought a organic coffee farm several years earlier. We had another great day in the Vallee de Cacoa, a National Park nearby with some walks through fields of 60m tall wax palm trees. We had to shelter with another English couple and a German man in the jungle from a brief storm, which cleared up to be sunny just as we reached the top and a beautiful view point!
One of our last stops in Columbia was Cali, the salsa capital of the world. We were very time limited here and it didn't help that the town felt very dodgy to be walking around on a Sunday. We enjoyed a few lovely hours in San Antonio park watching local children flying kites at the beginning of the Columbian kite flying season. Our last day in Cali consisted of a 4am start to get to the airport for our flights, firstly to Bogota, and then to meet Matt and Jane, who we had met in the North of Columbia and would be joining our Amazon adventure, and continue on another flight to Leticia, a town in the middle of the Amazon rainforest!
- comments
Ed You are clever Mocha, I had to google what an archepeligio was. Loving the sound of paragliding, bet the views were incredible. Trust Will to choose a "Nail" of a speedboat;-) Seriously, coudl you guys do anymore diving? Sounds like you are working so hard. Miss and love you both.