La Guajira Peninsula 19th - 25th October

We have since returned from a place that felt to me exactly like the end of the earth. And in some ways it was. With a few set backs, some determination and some luck we made it to the most tippedy top of Colombia and indeed the entirety of South America (this pleased the geek in both of us as we will now be touching the tippedy top and the bippedy bottom of the sub continent).

 We first travelled to Riohacha and stayed the night in a tiny and insanely cheap little old lady’s hotel right next to the bus station and the next morning we awoke and asked around for a car to Uribia. Uribia is the next main town inland from Riohacha in the lower part of the area we were to be travelling through, La Guajira. When we got to Uribia we were met by a frenetic Wayuu father and son who literally squeezed us onto their collectivo truck. We smiled politely as we pushed ourselves into unfeasibly small gaps in between people on the wooden bench in the back of the truck and began to take stock of our surroundings. As we looked about I started to take in the mannerisms of the Wayuu people around me. We had been told by some Colombians that they were unfriendly and strong willed people, over my time in Upper Guajira I found them strong willed but definitely not unfriendly.

 I immediately noticed the large colourful ankle length smock dresses that the women wore and their singing voices as they spoke, the pitch rising and falling. So we were made space for by a strong faced matriarch and squeezed on with every nook and cranny around us being filled with boxes, huge bags of food, bikes, kids etc etc. Twice there seemed to be about 20cms worth of a gap and the father squeezed on someone else! Their use of space defied reason.

After we eventually set off for Carbo de la Vela, staying remarkably together and travelling at some speed for just how much we had loaded on, I started to notice the colour of the landscape around us. From the incredibly long and straight road I saw how the earth was now an orange colour and that there were sparse desert shrubs interspersed with cactic of two varieties. One was made of joined lines of round pebble shaped sections and covered in spikes and the other was long tall upright thick green stalks with spikes coming out sideways. Here is a baby one...

 The journey from Uribia to Carbo de la Vela in the truck took almost three hours! We were actually very lucky as slowly we started to drop off people at their houses with their small mountains of goods they had gathered in Uribia and it was incredible to see how these Wayuu families lived absolutely in the middle of nowhere. As we drove away each time, waving, it was as if we were going to be the last people they saw until the truck came back again, unbelievable! Each time we arrived the rest of the family would come out of the houses which were surrounded by lines of upright cacti that acted as a fence.

Finally we were dropped in Carbo de la Vela which is basically a long line of empty wooden huts, a few which are restaurants at one time and a couple of tiendas selling drinks and various small items of food with the Caribbean sea on the one side and the desert stretching out into the distance on the other.

 We are in the quietest time of the low season, dead in the middle of the monsoons, so Carbo was a ghost town. We saw only about three other tourists in our two nights. This is what also made it harder for us to get to Punta Gallinas about a two hour journey by jeep and boat around the peninsula. We wanted to get there for Samly’s birthday and planned to spend two nights in Carbo and then travel to Punta Gallinas for three nights.

We stayed at Pujuru in Carbo, a hostel run by a Wayuu family and one of the only ones open! We slept in Chinchurros which are traditional hammocks of the Guajiro people woven of cotton threads or palm fiber like fishing nets, and they are the most comfortable hammocks I have ever experienced (and I am becoming quite a hammock connoisseur over all these years!) A Chinchurro is a also wide hammock with long blanket like sides that hang down and when it comes to sleeping you can wrap them around yourself to create a little cocoon.

Their family home and the hostel was built out of mud and cacti lined walls, complete with cacti lined roofing. Unfortunately for us though the sky decided that it wanted to have two of the biggest storms we have experienced yet in Colombia just as we decide to have a tentative roof above our heads and to sleep in cotton cocoons, and with hilarious consequences. As usual we had gone to bed just after the sun and had about two hours sleep when we were awoken by the biggest thunder clap right above our heads, (so loud that it made the hairs of my skin stand up and my heart skip), and a stream of water began pouring directly onto my head. I tried to wrap myself tightly in the blanket like sides of the Chinchurro but it was not good, I was getting soaked! I jumped up and out of my Chinchurro and with my torch managed to quickly find the only dry spot under our roof, a small metre squared area, and wrapped my sheet around myself. Sam felt sorry for me and joined me and we stood there getting gradually more and more wet, the splashes and rain falling on us as it pelted through the cacti and fell down the edges of the roof. Monsoooon! After about an hour of standing, waiting and with no seeming end to the storm in sight, I decided to try and break into one of the cabanas to try and get to a drier place. I checked the nearest one but it was padlocked so then checked the one next to it and it was gloriously unpadlocked! With only the thought of a dry place in my mind and my wish to avoid using my hand through the small waterfall that was falling in front of the door, I raised my foot and karate kicked the door open! Swathed in my bed sheet and flailing my torch around under pelting rain, thunder and lightning flashes must have looked quite a terrifying sight to the poor soul I startled awake inside the cabana!! Still, we laughed about it in the morning!

During our two days in Carbo we washed in bucket showers, took walks through the surrounding desert in the dangerous and unbelievable midday heat

 (the photos simply do not show just how searingly hot it was), avoiding the strange cartoon like flying langostas...

...we walked over the stinkiest fishy beach and passed fishermen and a kite surfer. The family had a lot of children who were as happy and curious as the other children I had met throughout my time so far in Colombia.

We also saw some juxtaposition of cultures evident in the landscape. We came across a huge mound with a large wooden cross on the top overlooking the sea. On its bank were small mounds of shells.

It is known that the indigenous people collect the shells for a sacred ritual called poporo. They believe that shells exist as a sort of spiritual middleman between the light of the sun and the dark of the sea, and they can tell the history of a area by interpreting the shell’s colour and markings.

 Throughout these two days we had been asking the senora whether we can get a boat to Punta Gallinas. It was looking increasingly unlikely that we would be able to as the storms had clogged all the roads with puddles (we need to get to the port which was a forty-five minute jeep ride away). After our walk around the surrounding desert we talked and decided that we weren’t going to have any luck with getting to the peninsula for Samly’s bday and that t would be better to cut and run down into Santander to make sure we were somewhere good for it. As we returned to Pujuru some Colombians we had met told us that there were two girls also trying to get to Punta Gallinas, two Aussie girls and as we spoke to them they steeled us with renewed hope that we would get there and so we decided to stay one more day, just in case. We made sure that we didn’t get our hopes up and that night there was only a mild rainy pattering and I only got a little bit wet in the night. We awoke to huge puddles remaining on the floor but the bonus was that one of the grils was fluent in Spanish (massive help!) having lived in Cali for two years and she helped us to negotiate a jeep after a few hours of sun and a boat all the way there to Punta Gallinas! It looked like we were going to make it after all!! So our determination had paid off and at about midday we were given the green light and drove in our jeep to Port Bolivar where a small speed boat was waiting for us and a one and a half hour boat journey lay ahead. Unfortunately, the Caribbean sea was not being its usual self after the storms of the previous days and was insanely choppy, completely soaking us every other second as we drove across the waves (I was still picking the dried salt out of my ears five days later!)

Mercifully after a hour and a half we pulled into a channel which held calm water and I wiped my stinging eyes to take in the view now that I could actually see. We were driving though a large channel of calm green blue sea, with lines of lush green mangroves rising intermittently from out of it, flanked on both sides by small but vivid burnt orange cliffs, all under a powder blue sky with wisps of cloud occasionally punctuating its unendingness.

We pulled into a small jetty and were met by Francisco the Director of an ecotourist agency that helps create links between the Wayuu and tourists, and some members of the Wayuu family we were going to stay with. We climbed atop the small cliff to where the family’s house is and found some small open sided huts made of mud and cacti but mercifully with corrugated iron roofs!

We set up our Chinchurros under the roof nearest the edge of the bright orange cliff which was one side of the small peninsula sticking out into and surrounded on both sides by the greeny blue of the sea. Yep! Like something on a different planet!

Lots of cute goats around and at times it sounded as if they all knew my name "cllaiiire!"

It was really difficult at times to register in my brain that what I was actually seeing was real. My eyes seemed to be taking it in but my brain had real difficulty understanding! The colours were so vivid and the landscape so seemingly fictitious! We spent three heavenly days here, over Samly’s birthday, with Maddie and Ellie and the Wayuu family, we felt so remote, literally like we had reached the end of the earth.

The sunsets at the end of each day were indescribably vivid that it was like we had just simply yet magically stepped inside a painting. We were lost in a swirling mass of colour, dotted with the purple black of tiny puffed clouds and the high up wisps of clouds that didn’t seem able to keep still in the melting sky.

On our first full day there (we arrived a hour or so before sunset on the first day) we took some bikes and one of the kids of the family Freddo helped guide us to Taroa Beach. The bike ride would be for one and a half hours across the desert to find huge swathing sand dunes that undulated and fell away into a crystal blue sea. Along our way it was so hot that it felt like I could feel my blood boiling in my bones. Luckily we had mountain bikes because nearly all the paths were rock filled, leading to both our arms and our bums feeling like pneumatic drills!

We had the entire landscape to ourselves. Massive sprawling sand dunes, the orange of the desert landscape littered with scraggily bushes the faint green of cacti and craggy rocks.

Here is the astonishing Taroa Beach…

We passed plenty of flying langosta, large herds of goats, a multitude of cacti and the occasional person on bike or horse which Freddo would stop and chat to for a bit (some of which had a recently slaughtered and folded in the thirds goat on the back of their bike/motorbike). As we were returning, the sun was mercifully slinking in the sky and Freddo was worried about making it back in time to herd the goats away for the night, a huge snake rapidly slithered across my path! I shouted “snake, snake!” and spun around but there was no one there to see it, just me. It was huge and maybe a constrictor like the baby one Freddo showed us.

We watched the sunrise on Samly’s birthday, our first sunrise in South America.

 It was a calm one, made more interesting with cloud. After the massive effort and excitement of the previous day’s bike ride we decided to take it easy this day, keep out of the sun’s glare and hang out in our Chimchurros. Although we did go for a little wander and swim in the nearby bay.

I managed to make Sam my present and secretly a card and a cake, of all things!

We bought the ingredients in Carbo and the girls made it in the coals of the family’s fire whilst I kept Sam busy. It was a delicious limon and panella cake, complete with frosting and thanks to Ellie’s culinary mastery. We ate it all up and spent the rest of the evening drinking delicious ron after another magnificent sunset. A birthday he is never likely to forget!!

The time had come for us to leave. Just as our time here had begun though, there was jeopardy. We awoke to rain (I know, in a desert!), puddles were forming and it was looking unlikely that our boat would go and even if it did, I was dreading the tumultuous waves and continual soaking similar to our journey here. We waited and we waited and we figured out that we had to go as our boat back to Port Bolivar was taking the family’s fish to sell. At about ten AM a break in the clouds came and we were hustled aboard. They must have though me strange dressed in my bikini and sarong awaiting the soaking I received on my way here! 

 The other girls were carrying on round the peninsula to try to reach a national park so we set off in our boats together and separated as we went our different ways. Out of the channel and into the sea, which was as calm as calm can be! Phew!! It was a fantastic journey, with the boat characteristically full to bursting with a variety of goods and people and because this time I could actually see the coastline as we zoomed back around the peninsula to Port Bolivar. Then Hawk eye Sam thought he saw something on the horizon, a black shape! As we were straining to see the others in the boat starting shouting and saying “delfin, delfin!” And sure enough there was a large pod of dolphins heading straight towards us! We saw tails and flippers and even whole dolphins at times jumping right out of the water! It was majestic! They must have been feeding as we saw lots of fish jumping high from the wves to try to escape their clutches. Just magical. What a magical end to a magical trip, full of wonder and the feeling of remoteness.

I wonder what our return to the mountains will bring? But before that a mammoth journey lay ahead for us…

Coolness and green and calm awaits us, just let’s negotiate our last journey along the crazy, sweating frenetic Caribbean coast. 

The Mountains, A National Park and the Beautiful Beaches Further West

Hi there, good to see your lovely faces again! It's been a good while since I last wrote and an entire age since the last place I wrote about. 


I must admit that I didn't find the overbearing heat in Cartagena that easy to deal with. I think my blood actually began to boil in my veins during the day. So when we heard about Minca from some lovely people we met on Playa Blanca the place whispered coolly in our ears with promises of fresh air and cool feeling skin. Yes please we said and set off from Cartagena.


Minca lies 650m up in the Sierra Nervada, the highest coastal mountain range in the world. It is apparently world renowned by twitchers for the many varieties of birds you can find there.


So we headed to Cartagena's bus terminal which is an infeasible seven kilometres out of town. Little did we know at the time that this bus station was to be the first scene of our being ripped off over several tens of kilometres as we travelled towards Santa Marta. We were feeling very relaxed and blissful after our stay on Playa Blanca and we were open to experimenting with types of buses. Wrong. So we wanted a bus to Santa Marta and some friendly looking people hustled us out of our taxi and onto a bus. Alright, we thought, let's go for it, it's a good price. Wrong. They made us change half way through to another bus and of course they had taken our ticket on the previous bus so they charged us again, the same price. We were charged twice. Well, I think we managed to communicate our disgust and frustration even with our limited Spanish, with me shouting 'bad person, bad person' and Sam shaking his head and saying 'very bad, very bad'. I think I even made him feel bad enough to return and give me a nominal amount of money back. The other people on the bus started giving them hell as well when we told them what had happened. Everyone got in on it, shouting at them for us, and what with things falling from the roof of the bus, water sloshing everywhere, us loosing our second ticket, the engine cutting out from time to time as we were driving and the chaos that ensued every time the bus stopped, it was a hugely fraught journey but mercifully short and definitely one for the memory banks. All the people on the bus made sure we knew where to get off (the bus didn't even stop in central Santa Marta) and to our massive relief we found our backpacks to still be under the bus, retrieved them and took stock of where we had been dropped. We were on the side of a main road that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. Luckily a taxi man appeared out of nowhere and we showed him a map, asked him where we were and how much it would be to get to Minca. This was where the hand of karma came in, we were in Mamatoco, a suburb of Santa Marta and already halfway to Minca. So the bus-nasties actually saved us a heap of cash and even with our rip off we only spent the amount we were planning to. Take that bad people!! So we chalked it up to experience as we climbed the bumpy mountain road and felt our chests relax as the air got cooler and we neared Minca.

As we got into the tiny town and took some deep breaths, a friendly Irish man came up to us. We felt a bit jaded from our experience already that day and felt a bit apprenhensive but he turned out to be really helpful and lovely. He told us about Casa Loma. House on the Hill. And what a hill. We lugged our huge backpacks up a massively steep thin mud path that led up behind a church, up and up and up and up. When we got there, sweating from every pore and completely out of breath we were met by lovely Steph and funny Lucas, given a cold glass of water and told to turn around. WOW. Behind us the mountains led down to Santa Marta and the sea far in the distance. 

Casa Loma was a lovely place. We were on our own the first night and had the pick of rooms in the tiny tree house type hostal, so of course we picked the best room with a little space that lent out over the mountain and the view down to the twinkling lights of Santa Marta as the sun was beginning to fade. We met some really lovely people in the days that followed, lazed around reading in hammocks, furthered our Spanish a smidge, ate, drank and played cards. I really loved it there. It was also a homey and friendly place to relax after having bombed it around for the last month. After four days though, the time had come to move on.


We returned to Mamatoco with plans to head to Tyrona National Park for a couple of days and then along the coast to some little places that we had been told about by the lovely people we had met. Adventures Ahoy!


We got the bus to Tyrona and began the two hour trek through the jungle to get to the beaches. As usual the undergrowth was alive with moving minibeasts, lizards, termites and a lot of scuttling made by creatures we were too slow to see. All of which were making Sam flinch and bolt every five seconds and unfortunately with good reason because as we came to the first major beach Arricefes, he got stung by a nasty wasp, twice! Once on the back and once on the head! Gritting his teeth through the pain, it was a bad portent for our experience of Tyrona. We found it to be a dirty place and badly looked after and really really expensive. I don't think the money everyone was paying was going towards anything good for the park. We saw rubbish everywhere, horses carrying tonnes of gas canisters and cool boxes filled with soft drinks for tourists, trucks entering piled high with plastic bottles, badly run by unfriendly people and the most horrendous toilets I have come across including Glastonbury! All round and general bad tourism. Not nice. It was the worst night I've spent since being away and we spent it at El Cabo de San Juan. The toilets were filthy, the hammocks were about as much as a double room, the food was expensive, the people unfriendly and the beach was not really worth it. So we awoke at dawn the next day and legged it. This was the most fun we had as it had rained really heavily the previous night (wetting all our things) and so the jungle was full of mud. It was like a two hour assault course, navigating the pits and falls and balances and all in the relative coolness of the morning time. I did fall victim to its squidgeyness however...mmm mud. 

We found lots of rocks and wood formations that looked like strange creatures. Maybe they were trying to tell us something... 

We still smiled throughout it though, it's all part of the ups and downs and adventuring after all...

We started walking from inside Tyrona at dawn and made it to the main gate by about 9am. We'd heard of a beach further west along the coast and out of the park called Costena Beach from some people we had met and it was told to us that you could surf there. I felt that it was a bit unbelievable as I couldn't imagine any surfable waves on a Caribbean beach, but I was assured it was so. A few buses went passed us on the road but none of the drivers seemed to have heard of this place. After a few drivers shrugging their heads and pointing around where we were stood, I realised that I was saying 'la costena por favor' which actually just means 'the coast please' which we were already on! So I started to ask for Playa Costena and the next driver knew what we were talking about. We drove for about ten minutes in a really friendly bus until we were dropped at a sign on the side of the road. About a twenty minute walk later we said to each other that we will definitely be staying at Costena Beach as we couldn't face the walk back and I really needed a shower. So we crossed our fingers that it would be nice. It was that and more, so beautiful and friendly and deserted. We were the only handful of people on this huge long golden sanded beach. 

There weren't many waves but we both managed to have fun on the surfboards. Sam even caught a few waves in the afternoon. So there you go, who'd've thunked it? Surfing the Caribbean sea. Sam was really happy as he got to surf for the first time in his life without a wetsuit. Sweeet.

We met some really lovely people there and stayed in such a beautiful cabana with views of the palms that led to the sea. The food was great too. I think we may be reaching our limit on rice and patacones soon though! We did enjoy macheting our own coconuts open though...

There were creatures everywhere including scorpions, poisonous red snakes and the biggest, fattest most Jeremy Fisher like toad I've ever seen in my life!! He came to visit us every night. Check him outttt...

We stayed there for two nights and on our third day we worried that we may be running out of money so we set off further west along the coast to check out the other little beach villages at the foot of the Sierra Nevada that we had heard about from the people we had met.

There is only one road so we just flagged down the friendly little pootle bus as and when we needed it and went exploring. The first village we came to was Buritaca. It happened that on this day it was the last day of a week long holiday and the entire region and their families had descended upon this place making it a hilarious mix of large neon bathing suited bodies, mountains of beer, brown sea and hotter than hell sun. We hung out a bit and had a drink in the shade watching the maddness ensue. It was like people watching on steriods. When we'd had our fill we walked back up the road and caught the pootle bus again further along to Palomino. 

As we walked down the lane towards the sea, grass started appearing outside beautifully kept gardens in front of lovely painted houses. There were butterflies fluttering all around and the air smelt of flowers. We made it to the beach and saw the familiar blue green of the Caribbean sea. Another beautiful beach with hardly anyone on it. We stopped at what looked like a restaurant on the beach to have some food. The smiley lady inside said no she didn't have a menu but what would we like to eat. I got a plate of the usual; patacones (plantain), rice and salad. Sam had one of his wishes to eat king prawns and the way he was sucking on them, it would seem that they were a hit. After this we wandered and found some lovely looking cabanas but they were full so we wandered back to the road and caught the pootle bus back towards Tyrona national park. 

We got off at another place we had been told about called Los Angeles and went to see the sea again. By now it was getting on for sunset and the sea looked a silky lilac. Sam went for a dip and then we decided to say goodbye to this part of the coast and to head back to Mamatoco and begin to sort ourselves out for our next adventure to the Guajira Peninsula. This had been one of my favourite days since being away. I loved just pootling around and getting on and off and adventuring around. We were the only gringos we saw all day! We were pooped when we got to the hostel and fell fast asleep. The next day we made our way into smelly Santa Marta.

It was good to actually be in the place we could see shimmering on the horizon from our place in Minca but this place is very dirty and smelly. I must admit I was expecting to find odours assaulting my nose long before Santa Marta but haven't so far. My oh my, what an assault. We went for a wander along South America's oldest port and saw a bank holiday service being attended at the oldest cathedral in South America which were both pretty good. As the sun was going down the light was amazing and I took lots of photos of the kids jumping in and out of the waves in front of the boats. 

We've been taking advantage of some down time to replenish the cyber stocks we need to, such as emails and blogging and photos and of course skyping loved ones. We are preparing our bags and minds for our next adventure to the Wild West like land of the Guajira people on the Guijira Peninsula, the most northernly point in South America. We are heading to a desert that turns into sand dunes and leads to a sea called Punta Gallianos for Samly's birthday. We need to get a bus, a jeep, a truck and boat before then though so wish us luck! See you on the other side when I reenter the cyber world once more. Until then take care of yourselves lovely people.

All our love as ever,

Clarence and Sam xxx

Cartagena and Playa Blanca castaways

Hey there you lot! How are you all? Glad to hear that you've had some of the hottest September and October days ever recorded. You deserve that after the wretched summer we had!

We've made it up to the Caribbean coast (warning potentially sick inducingly perfect paradise photos coming up) and so far it's lived up to it's name. Sticky blue sky days, warm breezy nights, colourful colonial buildings, white sand beaches, turquoise sea, lots of seafood, coconuts, hammocks, calypso music...

We came to Cartagena about five nights ago now on the night bus from Medellin. We spent our first two nights in Gesamani which is part of the old town but a lot more ramshackled and crazy. I think we managed to find the hottest hostels on earth to stay in as even the fans didn't cool us and it was actually cooler outside! That coupled with our wanderings always leading us to dirty, stinky parts of town, and that the place was a ghost town because it was a Sunday led to a bumpy introduction to Cartagena. So we decided to go and spend a night or two on Playa Blanca, and get away from the hustley bustleyness of city life that we have been experiencing a lot so far in Colombia.

So far my experience of Colombia has mostly not been what I was expecting at all. It seems like they've had such a violent recent history and now everything is starting to even out which is obviously really good for the country and necessary but at the same time it has given a quite sanitised feeling in most places, as a visitor. However on the one hand it's quite exciting as it seems like we are catching parts of the country before they get really touristy, in a resort kind of way which we feel lucky to be doing. But we have seen a lot of cities and it was starting to get to us. Obviously (as you can read) the Pacific coast was amazing and so was Salento but all the other places we have been so far have been large towns or cities, and an effort to get around.

Our experiences after our first two days in Cartagena made us wonder what the fuss was all about as we weren't really liking it (being so citied out). So we went to stay on a beautiful Caribbean islandy place Playa Blanca. Deciding that we wanted to stay on the beach meant that we had to find our own way there, not on one of tourist machine boats which get to spend only two hours there for tonnes of money. So we got a taxi and ventured down to where the locals get boats over there from at the back of this crazy, filthy, labyrinthine outdoor market. It literally felt like we had jumped into a combination of Isengaard, Labyrinth and The Black Crystal. Absolutely fascinating place! We stayed there for two and half hours waiting for the boat to fill up and what an experience. We saw so many characters and I took hundreds of photos. When the three boats were full we raced the other two out of the bay and around the headland. It was a jolty and exciting ride. We arrived and wandered the beach to find some hammocks.

Just as it's name suggests Playa Blanca is a white sand beach and turquoise sea. Your typical paradise! I felt like we had stepped into a postcard. We slept in hammocks and ate tasty food and swam in the sea, wandered the beach and didn't wash for three days, it felt like we were cast aways! We did some unbelievable snorkelling too. I saw corals of blue, yellow, red, orange, and colourful fish, some as big as my hand! I also saw a puffer fish and a leopard skin sea snake! I swear I also saw Dory (?) from Nemo. It felt like I had slipped into a Disney film! We stayed at quite a place also. Sleeping under a big thatched open sided hut in a hammock right next to the sea.

At night I saw a really long meteor and the stars were all so unfamiliar I started making up my own constellations. The clouds during the day were unbelievable as well, really beautiful. Our place was run by a properly crazy lady. She talked to herself and rambled on at you for ages about strange things and made us all laugh. We couldn't work out whether she was drunk or mad or a bit of both. Still, she was amusing and despite making filthy jokes, she was quite sweet really.They cooked us a meal on the first night and Samly's introduction to Caribbean coast fish was a bumpy one!

After that though we found a hut restaurant owned by a lovely lady who cooked us amazingly tasty food and Sam ate lobster and fried fish and I had really tasty and fresh vegetable meals - her soup was so tasty!

After three days we really didn't want to leave but we had met some lovely people who told us about lots of beautiful sounding places to seek out, and the salt was pulling on our skin so after lunch on our third day we jumped on one of the tour boats taking the daily tourist machine back to Cartagena, and I felt a smile all over. I turned to look at the beach as we left and saw a rainbow right over where we had been staying. I could feel myself starting to relax into this being away life!

We returned to Cartagena and decided to stay in the beautiful part of the Old Town called El Centro. It is an interesting and mercifully breezy part of town, with all the colonial buildings of different colours and the wooden balconies jutting out. We though it would be more expensive to stay here but we ended up paying almost the same as Gesamani on our first night but we have a huge room with a balcony that overlooks the university square (lots going on and to look at) and it has air con! It seems like the city has a completely different personality now. I really like it. It is getting nearer the weekend and my mindset has changed after being castaway somewhat so maybe that's had an effect. I think overall though we will stay away from big places from now on.

As the city had started to talk to us and we have such a lovely place to stay, we have decided to stay in Cartagena for one more night. Samly's reading Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and it's set all around this region. A few Colombians have come up and said 'one of his best'. I'm really looking forwards to reading it after him and knowing the places where the story is set. Tomorrow we will be getting the bus to Santa Marta and then straight out to either Tanganga to get to Tyrona and then further to the Sierra Nervada or Minca further back into the mountains.

Hope my words find you well and happy,
sending you Caribbean kisses and hugs as ever,
clara y samuel xxx