Blogs from Taganga, Colombia, South America - page 3

We have finally arrived in Colombia! I must admit that there were some minor hiccups along the way (getting sick and throwing up into a recycling bin at Pearson Ariport is definitely something that I will try and avoid in the future), however, we made all our flights and arrived in Cartagena yesterday evening. The city is very charming, with it´s colourful architecture, and definitely has a colonial feel to it. Cartagena itself is surrounded by a fortress that was built to protect it from sieges by pirates and others in the 1700´s. It is said that it took the Spanish over 200 years to build it, but only 25 years after it was completed Cartagena declared it´s independence...so I´m not quite sure that their investment paid off! The highlight of my first night in Cartagena ... read more

It is pouring down rain in Cartagena this morning. The same big black clouds are hovering over the city now. I sat on the balcony this morning & just watched it pour. The streets were flooding over & it was wet. I walked out to get some coffee once the rain subsided for a minute. Of course it started to pour again so I stood there on the sidewalk & watched it rain while drinking my mini cup of coffee. I got another for the walk back & returned to the hostel. Once Geoff woke up we packed up & made breakfast. Eggs & leftover fried rice & headed out into the old town, again, to change our remaining US dollars. Once that was done we headed back to our hostel, grabbed our bags & headed ... read more

Day 96 Arrive in Taganga at 8am to start our diving course and head to our hostel. A po-faced woman greets us at Casa Unfriendly, and we are slightly peeved to be told to leave our bags outside the office, (where there is access to the street), under a sign which states the hostel do not accept liability for any stolen property... grumpily we haul our bags to the dive school. At the school we sit through 3.5 hours of the world’s most dull video on diving. Em struggles to stay awake and keeps downing shots of free coffee. With 90 minutes before diving in the real (not virtual) world we head back to the hostel to see if our room is ready. It isn’t but the staff begrudgingly put our bags in their locked storage ... read more

After 4 days with no shower, sleeping vertically in a half reclining bus seat on a bus full of noisy but funny Peruvians (due to their ignorance of what classifies as being rude i.e. if you want to put a movie on you just shout out Pelicula at the top of your lungs until the bus driver gets the message), hitting a cow and eating nothing but fried chicken and rice at various service staions accross the Peru, Ecuador and Columbia we made it to the Carribean Coast of Columbia - first stop Santa Marta. We had a quick two nights at a local hostel (La Brisa Loca) run by a lovely American guy, managed to celebrate the end of our 4 day journey a little too hard on the night we arrived (this involved Nicole ... read more

We came to South America without Colombia particularly in our sights, although we were planning to come here. All the stories over the years of kidnapping and the drug war had made us a little apprehensive of Colombia like most of us in the west. However, the more people we spoke to who had been through Colombia, the more we were looking forward to it. So we got to the border of Colombia with Ecuador, again all ready for the bag searches for drugs and weapons that we had been told to expect. However, this turned out to be the simplest crossing we had done so far. We literally strolled into Colombia and were in the country before we knew it. Only becuase of experience of previous crossings we knew that we would have to go ... read more