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Published: October 7th 2009
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On the 15th we left Caracas for Santa Marta, Colombia. Of course the bus left an hour late, took about 10 hours longer than the ticket lady had told us it would and broke down for a good hour when we were nearly there. But this should have been expected given that the transport fairy hates me. All in all it took about 24 hours and was pretty straight forward. On the approach to the Colombian boarder the bus was stopped about 5 times by armed police who came on board to check our documents and search the Venezuelan men. Italo, by way of being a hot Brazilian, was left alone. One lady was causing a problem at every check point, always being taken off the bus and then let back on. I'm not sure what the deal was but the bus driver was pissed off with her, yelling ¨its always you, always with the same problem¨. Later she went around collecting money off people. She asked Italo for some, saying that it was for the police, so that they wouldn't check our bags. I told him to tell her that we wouldn't be giving her anything because the police would
be more than welcome to search our bags (a pro like me knows that you have to hide your drugs up your bum in a condom). Ohhh she didn't look happy.
At the boarder we got stamped out of Venezuela and then into Colombia about a mile further down the road, where we also changed the bus. We had just settled down to a big bowl of stew in the car park cafe when our bus started driving off! We were not the only ones who had had our lunch interrupted because the entire cafe suddenly jumped to their feet and started shouting and running. As i started to run i yelled to Italo ¨get the stew, i´ll hold the bus¨. Well the bus driver didn't seem to be having any of it, he kept motioning for me to get on and started driving again. As i jumped in through the door i yelled out as loud as i could ¨IIITAAALLLOOOOO¨ much to the amusement of the crowd of men by the bus. Italo started sprinting through the car park, with the stew in boxes as all of the men were screeching ¨Italooo, Italooo¨ and laughing. What
i hadn't realised was that the bus driver had said that he was just going to go through the carpark gate and park up on the road out of the way! When Italo arrived, looking more than a little bit panicked, the bus driver smiled at him and said ¨Ahhhhh, iiiitallloooo¨ and gave him a cheeky wink.
Posh Rach´s brother Richard (who really isn't posh at all) was in Columbia a few months ago and sent me a ridiculously detailed email listing all of the things he did. To make life easier, and a bit more humorous we ditched the guidebook for Colombia and just went on whatever Richard said! And to be honest, when we did look in the book we found Richard's comments to be far more insightful. So when we arrived in Santa Marta we headed straight for Richards recommended hostel which was very cool and even had a swimming pool.
Santa Marta, according to the guide book is Colombia's third largest Caribbean port, lies on a deep bay with high shelving cliffs and is where Simon Bolivar (who is credited with gaining the Independence of Latin America from Spain) came
to die. Richard said Santa Marta is ¨a complete shithole¨ which, in my view is a far more useful comment and should be added to every guidebook. Like Richard we had a nice time in Santa Marta because, as he said, ¨the hostel was superb¨. After lounging around recovering from all of the travelling we went to Tayrona National Park. Of course we got on the wrong bus and ended up in Taganga, a beach town about 20 minutes away, and then had to go back to Santa Marta and start again. When we did finally make it to the National Park we chummed up with a crazy American guy (wearing jeans in 35 degree heat!?) and his sister, a little Mexican guy that looked like a mini Borat and a cheeky Londoner. Together we set off an hour long trek through the forest for the beach. We spotted a lot of cool things on our little adventure, monkeys, lizards, giant red ants and blue crabs. Thousands of blue crabs. The ground was like emmental cheese, holes everywhere, and in every hole was a bright blue crab. It was very surreal.
After squeezing down a little crevice
full of giant killer red ants, which attacked the English guys feet much to my amusement, we found ourselves back at the same place we had been 10 minutes earlier! Or at least we thought that it was the same place. It definitely looked the same. Then again we were in the middle of a forest and it all looks the same! ¨This is how horror films start¨ I said. ¨I should be OK though because its always the Mexican that gets killed first, then the American. The dippy English girl always survives¨.
Turns out we all survived and 20 minutes later we had arrived at the first beach. The beaches in Tayrona Park are stunning, especially at Cabo (where we slept). A hidden paradise. Huge rocks are scattered along the shore line, giving the land the appearance of a lost city from Jurassic Park. Very cool. Very very cool. Ah I think I must have said ¨very cool¨ at least a hundred times whilst i was there! We slept in hammocks under a thatched roof just off the beach, sleeping early and rising early.
We spent 3 days at Tayrona before heading back to Santa
Marta and then on to Cartagena, another coastal town 3 or 4 hours further west. Cartagena is beautiful. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The streets are tiny, the buildings are painted in rainbow colours and balconies overflow with flowers. We spent two and a half days just wondering around, enjoying the city, drinking juice in the little parks, going for coffee. We lived by Richards bible, staying in the recommend hostel and going for a drink at Café del Mar, an elegant bar situated on top of the walls to the old town with spectacular views over the city at dusk. As Richard said, it was ¨disgustingley expensive, but worth it¨. We pottered around the emerald shops, pretending that i was interested in buying so that i could try on all of the jewels. We went to the Hard Rock Cafe where Italo took more photo´s than he had in the past 2 weeks put together! We bought oysters on the city walls. Actually we were kind of coned into buying oysters on the city walls. Our so called new best friend who seemed to be offering us a free taster force fed us half a dozen and
then demanded 20,000 pesos (about 7 quid), which is a lot of money in Colombia. This pissed me and Italo off no end and we all got into a bit of an argument. In the end Italo gave him 6,000 pesos, which i thought was still too much, but as he said, there were 3 of them, nobody else was in sight and they had a knife!
Our original plan had been to head to Bogota (the capital city) after the north coast and then further south to the coffee region and other big cities. When it came to it though we just wanted to hang out, go to the cinema, watch DVDs, do normal first date stuff, so we decided to head to Italo´s house in Manaus, Brazil instead. So from Cartagena we took a flight to Leticia, a tiny jungle city in the far south of Columbia on the boarder to Brazil. Of course this is another story though...
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Juliane Schmid
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so tell me, how is it going with the hot brazilian?