Lazy in the Amazon ... Loco in Colombia

Where was I..... somewhere halfway down the Amazon, I think. So.... I've already tried four times to update about the time I spent in the jungle from Manaus and each time lost all my work (yes, I know, I should've saved!). Suffice to say it was an incredible and unforgettable experience, involving camping with our hammocks deep in the jungle, spear fishing in the dead of night, breakfast with a local family (we even tasted a type of large rat they were preparing.. and FYI, it was quite nice), piranha fishing, silently canoeing through the dense jungle looking for monkeys, jaguars, sloths and anything else of interest. One night we stayed in a local house, where the family all crowd round the 3 inch battery powered TV each night to watch the brazilian soaps and the nice cockrel keeps you awake all night long crowing underneath the house... it might as well have been in the hammock with me it was so loud! Had it not been the cockrel keeping me awake, I'm sure the hundreds - and I mean literally hundreds - of mosquito bites would´ve done the trick anyway. The funniest thing was the toilet.. a wooden pier out the back with two missing planks at the end and a ten foot drop to the ground. On our last day we met an 83 year old rubber man. This guy makes things out of rubber from the trees in his garden and has lived his whole life in the jungle and frail as he is, still goes out spear fishing in his canoe and hunting in the jungle. The farthest he has ever been in his life is Manaus once or twice and has never once been in hospital. Fascinating man... shame his rubber wallets were the ugliest things I´ve ever seen and the condoms... lets not even go there!

We returned to normal civilization and hopped on another cargo boat from Manaus equipped with our trusty hammocks and German buddy whom we met in the jungle, to finish our Brazilian leg of the tour. This boat we expected to take 6 days but we ended up arriving in border town Tabatinga, on the 8th day... typical South America - however, we are learning to give or take a day or two when calculating arrival times!! The boat was a lot more tedious than the last one as there were a lot less stops - we went three days without stopping once - however, some of the stops we did have were long enough for everyone to get off an sample the jungle town nightlife which spiced things up a bit. We eventually arrived Tabatinga which is bordered with Leticia, Columbia. The two towns are pretty much merged into one, half Brazilian and half Columbian, so you have people on one side of the street speaking Portuguese and the other side speaking Spanish and interestingly not many speak both. No need to stay in Tabatinga other than to freshen up after the boat and get right on to Bogota next, which because of the 2600m altitude, turned out to be a massive climate shock for us after having lapped up the Amazonian and Brazilian sunshine for the past two months - to us, arriving in Bogota was like arriving in Aberdeen!! Sunsick, we dumped all our winter clothes at the hostel and headed North for Santa Marta, on the Caribbean coast, saying we´d be back in a few weeks.

On the way there, we jumped off the bus to visit the Catedral de Sal, which is an entirely salt cathedral built into a mountain salt mine. Hugely impressive, the most impressive cathedral I've ever seen and also, an excellent venue for a party!! We hopped back on a bus to pretty Villa de Leyva but not without the usual bus drama. Our bus driver told us, en route, that he wouldn't be taking us to where we wanted but would drop us nearish. Not really understanding, we argued for a bit, then conceded to just see where we end up. And where we ended up, appeared to be a deserted junction in the middle of nowhere!!! We were told to stand at the junction and flag down a car which would take us the rest of the way... ie hitch! So, hitch we did and eventually, safely, got to our destination. You're probably under the impression that Columbia is a bit dangerous for this sort of behaviour with constant dangers round every corner what with guerrillas and paramilitaries, shootings, kidnappings and drug barons, and goodness knows what else. Although there are obviously dangers, the guerrilla activity tends to be concentrated outwith the touristy areas and as in any country, you generally take care anyway by not walking alone at night etc etc. Columbia is actually an incredibly beautiful and diverse country with an amazing culture of friendly, helpful, cool and interesting people... obviously not newsworthy information there, but just to let you know that this country is highly mispresented by the media and is, in many places, a lot safer than most people think. So, our lift welcomed us to his country, gave us all the information we needed to get to our out-of-town hostel, dropped us off in a safe place and went home to his wife and family. The village itself, one of the oldest surviving colonial towns in Columbia, is completely cobbled with whitewashed buildings and is safe enough to walk around by yourself at night, unlike the larger cities, where you wouldn't even consider it. We did some cycling around the valley visiting a 120 million year old fossil of a chronosaurus, an ancient Muisca ruins site consisting of lots of stone penises, a cute house being built entirely out of mud, beautiful waterfalls as well as pottering around in the village itself. The countryside there was so beautiful and green and hilly that when the sky clouded over, it felt a bit like being home in Scotland (providing we didn't look at the locals and the colonial architecture!).

We eventually got to Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast but promptly decided to get out of the hot city and move to nearby fishing village Taganga, where I spent the first few days doing my Open Water Scuba course for very, very, very cheap - in fact one of the cheapest (let alone most beautiful) places in the world for diving. We stayed in such a great hostel there that we got reeeeally lazya and even found it hard to even leave the hostel - they are cabins overlooking Taganga bay, beach and village, with terraces of hammocks for lazing around in or sunbathing - easy to see why we stayed here much longer than planned!! If Taganga wasn´t lazy enough for us, we took the two hour bumpy boat ride to the incredibly beautiful Tayrona Park to relax even more. The boat ride was more like a rollercoaster and definitely not for the seasick, but it was worth it when we arrived. Rainforest, stunning beaches, clear water and again... hammocks!! Paradise - I hardly moved a muscle for days!!

It would´ve been a lot more clever to leave Tayrona till last instead of a 6 day trek, which is what we did. So, equipped with the bare essentials to carry on my back for the next few days, we set off for the Cuidad Perdida (Lost City), which was only discovered by accident in 1975 by robbers looking for gold. That hike certainly balanced the scales on the laziness of late! Cuidad Perdida is without a doubt the most beautiful and most enjoyable trek I´ve done so far in South America. It was no piece of cake, some of it is traipsing uphill in the searing Caribbean sunshine, other parts up muddy, rocky hills and other parts are shimmying along a cliff with a 30 meter sheer drop into white water. We encountered an indian village on the way, the Kogi people, who are direct descendants of the builders of the lost city, and who live as basic as they ever have, with only one sack cloth each to wear and they all huddle together on dirt floors to sleep. The men all in sleep one house and the women and children in separate houses. The men have two wives, one old who already has children from a previous husband, and one young to have his children with. The girls have to get married as soon as they start their periods and we met a tiny 17 year old girl who already had three children. They are slowly getting used to tourists coming through to visit the site and profit from them by selling their handicrafts, and also some get left over food from the camps. But, even still, you can´t help but think it is a shame to see their tiny culture being trampled through by curious gringos.

The final hurdle to the Lost City itself is the thousand+ steps up, which are a bit tricky as they are steep, wet, mossy and tiny. The builders of the lost city were clearly a wee lot. At one point we had to run up about a hundred steps as they were crawling with big biting ants that love to get into your shoes - no mean feat after our three day hike! Reaching the Lost City is so breathtaking it's hard to put into words... WOW will do for now though. Here we camped for the night, getting attacked by the mosquitoes, and the next day wandered around the city getting the story of the people who built it and how it was discovered.

So, what goes up must come down and thus we retraced our three day route starting with the slippy stairs... our poor knees!!! Going down was so much harder than going up. Our superguide's team never failed to impress us with the way they ran ahead carrying all our food and supplies on their back and being there for all of us every step of the way, guiding us through the tricky bits, making sure we walked at the right times to avoid the daily afternoon rain, going to bed early to get up hours before us to cook us breakfast and coffee - Wilson's team: best guides by far, highly recommended. On eventually getting back to civilization I managed to almost knock our hostel lady out when I handed her my laundry - you´re wearing the same wet clothes every day since, if everything doesn't get soaked in the many river crossings, it definitely gets soaked in your own sweat within minutes of walking... imagine the smell of 14 trekkers after 6 days in the same clothes!!!

Taking a couple of days 'hammock time' to recover we then forced ourselves to move on and returned to Bogota. This time round the climate was slightly less of a shock and anyway, Bogota´s party time was just beginning (ie Wednesday, like every week). I had no idea what to expect from Bogota, but I didn´t think it would be such a cool city. The people are friendly, trendy and love to party and there´s no shortage of places for that... we went to Cha Cha´s which is on the top floor of an old Hilton hotel - popular with the posh - and gives you panoramic views of the sprawling city; Escobar, our local, plays salsa one night and house and trance the next, as well as all the cool surrounding bars where the staff would let us take over the whole place even letting us DJ; Gothika is a great nightclub playing in the more upmarket Zona Rosa in the north, and is the place to be seen for the coolest of the cool, even though they didn´t seem to be enjoying themselves all that much .... not to mention the bus parties and BBQs and card nights in the hostels. There are also plenty of museums well worth a look at - even a second look (which due to chronic hangovers I regrettably didn´t manage, though promised myself everty day) - including my favourite, the collection of Fernando Botero, Columbia´s most famous artist - he likes things FAT!!

We had been enjoying the Columbian culture, impressive art collections, markets and of course the wild nightlife for about a week but found that it just isn´t enough - a week, I mean. Last Sunday we checked out of the hostel, backpacks all packed and ready and bus leaving in two hours, when we suddenly find we are checking into another hostel and making plans for the next night out!! So, one more week of trendy nights in the expensive Zona Rosa, cheap nights in the crazy local bars, poker nights and party nights in the hostel, general Columbian craziness and of course lots of lazy days... and here we are back in the same situation as last week: all packed, checked out and ready to move on.... all we need to do now is physically get on a bus.... watch this space!!!

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