Heels, Himalayas and Hilarity!!

It’s now been 3 weeks since my last update – the longest period of time I’ve gone without writing, and my posts have been epic in size before this. I will attempt to not go into minute detail and actually get this done or I risk writing a novel! So to set the scene I am currently in Salento, a beautiful little town in the midst of coffee region in the middle of Colombia. I am meant to be visiting a coffee farm today, but alas it is raining, hence my finally having time to update you on all my adventures! Right, here goes…

So at the end of my last post I was just on my way to Mancora, a small beach town in the very North of Peru, stopping off for a couple of days but very much on a mission to get to the north of Colombia – a wee way away one might say, considering an entire country the size of NZ was in my way – Ecuador!

I had a lovely couple of days there, my first day basically spent doing admin trying to plan my trip to Colombia and avoid days on end on buses (which after many frustrated hours on my laptop and NOT at the beach I didn’t actually end up achieving!). That evening I went for a stroll to check the place out, and ended up speaking to a few locals, whom over the hours more and more of their friends joined us. There was guitar playing and singing and multiple beers, and it was a great night indeed, not to mention the best cerviche (raw fish meal) that I’ve had on the trip to date!

The following day feeling slightly worse for wear I met a couple of Argentinian guys, Luis and Matthieus, who I ended up breakfasting with, and then spending the rest of the day and night drinking and partying with. Mancora has a great party vibe at night, similar but not as large to full moon party in Thailand, where there are bars lined up on the beach and you spend the night and well into the wee hours drinking and dancing on the sand outside the bars. There were after parties, and more after parties, and about 8am we staggered back to the hostal, needing to check out at 10am! Thankfully the boys decided to pay for their hostal room for one more night, despite the fact they were leaving later that evening, so we had a place to chill and leave our stuff and try and sleep that day.

That evening, very, very tired, I boarded a bus to Quito in Ecuador, where I hoped to change yet again and push right on through into Colombia. At this point I think I’d been on a bus over 30 hours, and sadly I was unable to get to Colombia that evening, so I ended up having a very chilled evening in Quito.

So the following day in Quito I left for the bus which was meant to be leaving at midday, which ended up leaving at 4pm (welcome to South America!), where I headed straight to Cali in Colombia on an overnight bus, and managed to switch straight onto a bus up to Medellin. Finally a city that I actually wanted to spend a few days! We didn’t end up getting there until about 10pm, where I had a couple of beers and a quick stroll around with an Irish guy Gerry that I met on the bus, and then gratefully hopped into a real bed for some well-earned zzzz’s. The next morning it was time to check out Medellin, so Gerry and I hopped on a city bus tour to get an overview of the city. Medellin has a great city with a lovely vibe, very colourful, lots of people bustling about, and a few pretty cool sites to see. We had been chatting to the tour guide on the bus, John, and he offered to take us out that night to show us some of the local scene – a very random experience to say the least!! He took us away from the tourist area, where we ended up at a very ‘local’ bar where they had horses, that’s right horses, trotting up and down the walkway beside where we were drinking! Such a bizarre experience!!

The following evening I felt very extravagant as I had managed to find a flight up to the north of Colombia where all the beaches are that was actually cheaper than the bus would have been! And it would have been another 24 hour bus ride, so to say I was super-stoked totally under-estimates it! I had the day to kill, so I ended up going to a high-end shopping mall to see if they had anything in the way of fashion or retail worth taking back for the business (sorry Dad, there wasn’t, I tried). So I arrived at Santa Marta airport at about 10pm, and jumped in a small bus to get to a hostel. The bus driver had said that he would let me know when I was to get off, and what seemed way too long later I tapped him on the shoulder and saw the ‘oh sh!t’ look pass across his face. He had forgotten about me, and had gone way past where I was meant to get off! He managed to yell out the window at a bus going the other way and told him where I needed to go, so I did eventually make it to the hostel where I promptly passed out (asleep, I didn’t faint!). The next morning I had a stroll around Santa Marta to check out the town, but I had been told by Liz not to spend too much time there so jumped in the short taxi ride across to Taganga, a very cool little fishing and tourist village on the coast, full of beaches, bars and an awesome festive vibe.

The next few days were spent there relatively relaxed, not really doing much but hanging by the hostal pool, drinking beers, chatting to other tourists, and partying by night – a tough gig to be sure! After that I spent 2 days in Tayrona National Park, an absolutely stunning destination that is jungle, mountains and beaches all in one. We had to trek for an hour into the park and had been told that we had to take all our food and water there as the prices were astronomical, so whilst I didn’t have my full pack, what I was lugging was pretty heavy. I met a lovely couple on the walk there whom I ended up spending the rest of the night with, having found our ‘accommodation’ – tents next to the beach. The following 2 days were just spent laying on the beach, reading, trekking around a little bit, and really not doing much more, but the pictures speak for themselves, it really was gorgeous!

Two days later and it was back to Taganga to have a quiet night as I was to go scuba diving the next day! I was very excited, but also very nervous as I hadn’t dived in about 5 years. I was very lucky being the only one in a group of about 10 that didn’t speak Spanish (my language ignorance finally had a benefit!), as it meant that I ended up with an instructor all to myself! He kept trying to console me that it was ‘just like riding a bike’, which I was not in the least convinced about, but once I got in the water I was absolutely fine and loved every second. He had an under-water camera that I was super-excited about, but sadly the photos were less than amazing, you’ll see a few below, and that’s the best of them. The clarity wasn’t amazing, but there was plenty to see, it was awesome!

That night was my final night in Taganga and it was party night! We ended up out again til the wee hours, dancing and drinking til dawn. The following morning, 2 hours sleep later, and it was on a 6 hour bus ride to Cartagena which was pretty painful! I got dropped off at my intended hostel to be told they were full, and a sense of dread passed over me as the last thing in the world I felt like doing at that point was walking around in the boiling heat with all my stuff looking for a place to stay. Luckily I saw a wee place across the road, stumbled across, and was very thankful to be told that they had one remaining bed that I could have! Thank god!! I slumped down on a lounger next to a guy with my computer and a beer intent on watching a movie and speaking to no-one. I was literally praying he didn’t speak English or didn’t try to speak to me, but out came an Irish accent in a chatty mood. One beer and story led to another led to another, and somehow it was 5am and we having a final roadie and staggered into our dorm! So much for a quiet night!!

Having done that 2 nights running, it was fair to say the following day was pretty tough! I did manage to finally book my flight from Bogota to Rio for Carnival, something that I had attempted to do about 4 times over many hours, for various reasons not succeeding, and also managed to plan the next few days of my travels. But it was painful, very, very painful! That night was a very early night, and the following morning bright and sparkling early I was down to the port off to what everyone thought was an island that turned out to be peninsula actually attached to Cartagena for 2 days lying on the beach in Playa Blanca. To say the trip was choppy would be a huge understatement, the boat was actually getting air which was awesome fun! Not so much for the 3 Dutch people I met on the boat all of whom got sea-sickness, but all of whom managed to not throw up which considering the journey was a pretty massive effort! Once we eventually got there – our ‘direct’ boat having dropped us at an aquarium for 2 hours that we didn’t want to go to yet had no choice – it was all about eating, drinking, swimming and sun-bathing – another tough gig! Dinner time was lobster – 2 reasonably sized scrumptiousnesses (good word ay?!) for under US$15!! Definitely more than my budget allows for eating for one meal, but then how often do you get fresh lobster for that price?! And it was delicious!! A few more beers and the plan then became cards and drinking games with a ‘bottle’ of Colombian spirits that mildly tasted like Sambuca. I have quote marks around ‘bottle’, as it came in a container that looked like a 1 litre box of juice. A few hours later and night swimming was the call of the night, the water was so warm and calm and swimming under the moon – great fun!!

The following morning somehow not suffering for my sins the night before, and I was off on a snorkelling trip for a couple of hours which was pretty cool! And then the rest of the afternoon again lazing on the sand, drinking beers and cocktails, swimming and chatting and eating more great seafood! After a bit of a mission back to Cartagena with one very drunk guy from Bogota whom we had been hanging out with, which involved a taxi, a boat, another taxi and then 2 buses, I had my fingers crossed that I would find a place to stay as Cartagena was pretty full and I as always had nothing booked. And again, as lady-luck would have it, at the same hostel as before I was fortunate enough to get the very last bed in the place. So after a quick shower, once again it was party time for my last night in Cartagena, and once again it was the wee hours when my bed was finally my destination!

The following day again was a pretty tired and slow one, basically waiting for my ’10 hour’ overnight bus ride to Medellin, where I going to be able to transfer directly onto a 3 hour bus to take me straight to Salento, my intended destination where I currently sit. The reality was that it took 13 hours to get to Medellin, then 6 and a half hours to a place called Armenia because you couldn’t go straight to Salento, and then another hour from there, so what was meant to be a relatively easy 13 hour total journey ended up just over 24 hours! I got to the hostel about 8pm last night, again hoping they would have space for me which they thankfully did, and didn’t even have dinner and headed straight to bed – the highest bunk bed you have ever seen!

Today was meant to be a coffee tour around a plantation, but unfortunately it’s been raining all day, hence my finally having time to update my blog! So it’s now 5.30pm, and I’ve been at it since 7.30am this morning with only a wee walk around the town this morning to check it out. And now I am very pleased to once again be up to date, with people and wine awaiting my attention! So it’s been a whirl-wind tour of the past 3 weeks, with many a detail and story skipped for brevities sake, but for now it’s adios from me!! I hope everyone is happy and well! Salud!!

xxx

Mancora Photos