They say pride comes before a fall and I´ve got to admit, they have a point. I spent my 3rd morning in Cartagena doing the sights.It´s a beautiful colonial colourful city and they´ve going to great efforts to smarten it up and restore the buildings with dark wooden balustrade fronts on the windows and repainting them with fabulous vivid traditional colours. Mornings are cruise tour time and I kept bumping into bunches of octogenarian Americans crowding around tour guides spouting history and lore in such thick Hispanic accents I´m not too sure if any of the tourists could decipher what they were saying. However they oohed & aahed in the appropriate pauses and took pictures of antique coins in the cases at the Gold museum - those will be exciting for the slideshow for the folks back home. By the way I do know sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, but I´m afraid I can´t train myself out of it -sorry! Touts dogged the tourists wherever they went.I took a break in a shady square and gladly snapped the first diet coke I´d seen on sale since arriving. I watched as group after group stood in front of the Simon Bolivar statue and looked like the heat and exhaustion were going to do them in for good. The peddlers seeing their prey in distress pounced, bandying necklaces, hats, mock statues etc… and these poor oldies were no match. They resisted but entered into conversation, a fatal mistake, and all too soon they were handing over hard US$ for a bunch of plastic beads on string that they´d repeatedly said they didn´t want just to get rid of them. I wanted to give them advice.Eyes down, shake head.Forget politeness, it doesn´t work here, I know it´s hard, I´m British for goodness sake, politeness is a national trait, but here when it comes to people hassling there´s no place for it. I was smug, I was starting to get things sussed, gleaning local knowledge to not get ripped off, and striding confidently down the streets without batting a eyelid at the cat calls.

See I´d thought I´d got it sussed but I hadn´t yet encountered the breed of peddlers on Playa Blanca. Cartagena´s rich in culture, atmosphere and history but Bocagrande, where the beaches are sucks. Picture Benidorm or the Gold coast but with rubbish beaches and dirty sea, well that´s Bocagrande. I´d read about Playa Blanca, a remote beach 1-2 hours launch away where you can hire a hammock on the beach and chill out. That sounded more like it.I arrived and it was all true, beautiful sandy beach with palm trees bending over the water, lovely blue water and timber and palm shelters lining the shore. I settled in the shade of a palm to start my few days of peace and relaxation then THEY descended. They hovered, they wouldn´t take no for an answer they pestered, they sat by my head and just waited…One girl was determined to last the distance,she was selling massages and sat for over 2 hours every 10 mins, poking me to tell me how tense I was (I was with her sitting on top of me). She told me that she walks for 2 hours to get there (I thought probably a better commute than sitting on the M25). I told her I was a traveller who only had money for food and lodgings and to hit up the rich tourists along the beach, where I knew she´d find a someone who would gladly pay twice my daily budget for a massage. We both were not buying each others sob stories, and who could blame her.I relented eventually and got the worst 5 min sandy massage, I could have imagined she probably took off her stalking time from the massage duration!

However after the first day, they knew not to mess with me anymore, o.k they knew I was really was skint and I settled into life on the beach, waking up to the sunrise, doing some yoga, having a dip then a breakfast of Jose´s (my hosts) delicious scrambled eggs with onion & tomato & toast.Lazing the day away, reading, napping, chatting with the few other travellers, then late lunch of fried fish and plantain, some more dips, naps, swim a couple of laps of the bay, then watching the sunset over the Pacific with a nice cold beer and finally rocking to sleep in the hammock to the sounds of the waves and the rhythms of Jose´s latino favourites.Paradise?Almost, the sand bugs almost ate me alive, but hey nowhere´s perfect and it was a wonderful few days.

Travelling in my experience is ups and downs, the unexpected which is often so thrilling can also be the opposite. I got off the ferry back in Caragena, the streets were madness, it had been a fiesta and everyone was hammered, lary drunks swayed in my path I was hassled by street kids covered in oil who would hug me if I didn´t give them any money. My hotel despite me having paid for the night not having a room and referring me to another hotel with a room smelling of pee with a mattress filled with straw. My new place advised me that it was very dangerous to be out that night so I was left sweating in the flourescently lit room, with attempting to not scratch my bites the only thing to occupy me.

I´d got over my tanty about everything that I thought was going wrong from accommodation to flights to the possibility of JA and anne not making it here, I got onto email and was so cheered up with messages, also had a skype video call with my parents (I LOVE TECHNOLOGY) was out at 6am with my camera, bought a book (had run out of reading material -agh) and got back into my old hotel - yes the one that I´d originally viewed with distain, hey it´s all relative.

My grumbles from the previous few days are now well and truly put in perspective. Last night we were sitting on the balcony when dozens of police descended. A body, a US backpacker called Aaron had been found. He´d left a 5 page suicide note and killed himself in his room. The shock left us overwhelmed. When the police interviewed us, it turned out that noone had even met him, or seen him in the 2 days he´d been checked in, but just being part of the travelling community identified us with him. So far from home. It brought up a lot of things for people who had been through loved ones committing suicide in the past and the jovial travelling bantering turned to discussing some really personal things. In the midst of the tragedy it was really comforting to be around people and even if we had been strangers before, what happened really bonded us. Yes travelling like life is full of the unexpected and I am learning from the tough times as well as the good.