13th July, Cartagena, Colombia After falling ill with food poisoning the previous 72hours, we'd not been able to do much around the city. But after 2-3 days of nothing but ritz crackers, I thought sod it, I need some proper food! The weather in Cartagena is beautiful, its extremely humid, but theres always a breeze near the sea! Old town, where we've been staying is full of tourists. Its narrow streets, full with old locals sat drinking rum are slightly daunting to walk down alone, as the men are very forward in Colombia, so shout all sorts down the street after [View Full Entry]

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7th July, Cartagena, Colombia I woke Jake up early (at 6.30am!!!) to head out to the beach! The weather here is fantastic all morning, usually 30 degrees at 8 in the morning, and then gets cloudy about midday for a few hours, but still very high humidity. The beaches here are beautiful, there is a long stretch of them on the caribbean coast! Its absolutely boiling, but not too busy, which was a nice surprise, as alot of people we had met in Bogota said Cartagena would be packed. Our hostel, (Marlin's) is located in old town, so its only about [View Full Entry]

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6th July Cartagena, Colombia We flew from Medellin in Colombia, to Baranquilla in the north yesterday as it is cheaper to fly here if you want to be in the north, in comparison to flying to Cartagena. The flight was only an hour and 20minutes, so I was glad we didnt have to get the long bus trip through the winding roads again! From Baranquilla, which was a dump and really dirty, we, with alot of difficulty finally managed to get on a bus to Cartagena which was only 2 hours away. Cartagena was extremely humid!!!!! We drove through the poorer [View Full Entry]

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1st July, Medellin, Colombia We watched Andy Murray win this morning! People at Hostel del Sol seem quite nice. The cleaner is hilarious, she washes your clothes for 6,000 pesos (£1.80), we only found this out after walking round the city for 2 hours in the sun with all our washing like tramps, trying to find someone to wash them only to return to the hostel and get told that theres a washing machine! Problem with this though, is that the cleaner leaves all your clothes hanging all over the place getting mixed up with everyone elses! We were watching the [View Full Entry]

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29th June, Villa de Leyva a Medellin, Colombia We got up early in order to make sure we didnt miss the bus Medellin. We wanted to make the bus trip during the day as we'd read on the net that the roads werent very good and that it would be through mountains. It brought back memories of the terrible bus journeys we got through Ecuador and Peru where the drivers are doing 80m/ph round blind spots on mountain edges. It was cheaper to get the bus in comparison to flying, but obviously the journey would take longer. At Villa de Leyva [View Full Entry]

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28th June, Villa de Leyva, Colombia The town was having a festival this weekend. The cost of all the hostels went up from maybe 30,000 pesos per night to 60/70,000 pesos! But our hostel was a dump! It was under heavy construction and was really noisy all day because of the builders. There was also never any hot water, so I think the owner knew she couldnt charge us what the other hostels charge on a festival weekend, so she charged us 40,000 per night for the weekend. We visited a cafe for lunch called Teresa's cafe, just off the main [View Full Entry]

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27th June, Villa de Leyva In our neverending efforts to save money, we chose to buy breakfast from the supermarket. Colombia was alot more expensive than we thought, the cost of a hostel was basically half of our daily budget. We ended up with tasteless croissants and a yogurt each. We also stocked up on some high energy food as we going to go on a hike from the town of Villa de Leyva to a waterfall. We were going to go by ourselves to Cascada Periquera. We set off on a long and winding road which was mostly uphill, we [View Full Entry]

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26th June, Villa de Leyva I was woken up by what I thought was a storm! I thought I heard people saying there was a storrm coming and there was loads of banging, so I thought they were boarding up the windows. Terrified I woke Jake who just laughed at my crazy imagination. When I walked out of the room, I realised the 'storm' I thought I heard, and the 'boarding up of windows' was the builders working in the next few rooms. I hadnt realised the hostel was under construction! And there were hardly any clouds in the sky!! We [View Full Entry]

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25th June. Bogota a Villa de Leyva Not that impressed with Bogota and its weather, we decided to leave! We thought we'd get the Transmilenio , which is supposed to be one of the fastest and cheapest ways of getting around. A single tickets costs 1,500 pesos (about 35p), but the bus system is really difficult to understand. We kept getting on them, and the transmilenio would just zoom past our stop! So after getting lost, we finally realised it would be a better idea to just get a taxi! We arrived at Termial de Transporte with 5 minutes to go [View Full Entry]

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24th June, Bogota, Colombia Much like the previous day, we spent the morning booking some flights and planning our next few days. Back at the hostel, I couldnt believe it when a small skinny guys walked into the place, wearing what looked like a costume out of Harry Potter. He was wearing a huge cone head shaped purple hat, and a purple cloak!!!!! He was obviously a breed of hippie I have never seen before. He was selling soya bean burgers and samosas for 2,000 pesos each. We bought some and they were quite nice. He just looked surreal to me. [View Full Entry]

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