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Published: December 30th 2008
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Feliz Navidad!!
We ended up staying at the language school in Canoa for about 10 days instead of the planned 5 as we loved it there. We stayed at the Sundown Inn and would recommend it to anyone. The family run the spanish school from there and are unbelievably welcoming. We had a double room with a balcony overlooking a private beach, three meals a day cooked for us, and had surfboards for the week . We have definitely picked up enough spanish at the school to help us over the next few months. The easy part is getting our points across and starting conversations, the impossible part is understanding the response when it just seems to be one long word. I suppose its better than us just pointing at things and saying the words progressively louder in English.
Ecuador was great for me as for once in my life I felt tall. Other reasons that its good are that the moustachiosoed man is king there (or generally a taxi driver). We have seen some absolute gems, although we are yet to catch any on camera as their driving is precarious enough without an unexpected automatic flash going off in their
faces. We will definitely try to catch some evidence before the trip is over.
As well as moustaches Ecuadorian men have a lot of bravado. Every street we walk down Nina will be getting wolf whistled, blokes winking at her etc even if we are holding hands. Most with a face for radio but a lot of confidence, which I applaud wholeheartedly.
Colombia
We finally dragged ourselves away from Canoa and after a brief overnight stay in Guayaquil we flew into Cartagena in Colombia. Our first impressions of Colombians was that the people were extremely friendly, courteous to us (and one another) and seem to generally be enjoying life. This was a stark contrast to our general experiences in Ecuador. We have now been here for a week and luckily our first impressions of the Colombians were correct, what a great country. We spent one night having a couple of cervezas in the historic centre of Cartagena, a beautiful city on the Carribean coast. It has some great architecture and fort walls which were built to defend the city from various pirate attacks (including Sir Francis Drake). We then travelled up to Taganga, a small fishing village approx 5
Canoa Surfboards
We did actually take them in water hours up the coast for Christmas. We booked a really nice room at Casa de Felipe as a bit of a treat and then headed to the beach. On Christmas eve we headed back to our hostel for a Christmas meal, the idea being that everyone made some different food and brought it for a Christmas feast. Unfortunately Nina and I found out about it quite late and there were no shops locally so in typical ´Booze Britain' fashion we just brought along a load of ale, nobody seemed to mind. After some great food and a fair few drinks a group of us headed to the local bar for a christmas night out. We stayed out until the early hours of the morning and invited a few people back to our hostel for a wee night cap of the local rum. As we were all sat on the terrace Nina strolled out of the room closing the door behind her, unfortunately locking the keys in the room. We tried waking the hostel owners but like a modern day Mary and Joseph there was no room at the inn. Luckily we didnt have to sleep with any farm animals in
a stable as a kindly couple had a spare bed in their room at another hostel so we all scaled the walls of the hostel grounds to head back to theirs. I bet they were really pleased to wake up to us in their room on Christmas morning, what a present.
Christmas day was spent on the beach eating plantain, rice and fresh fish which we picked from a tray brought to our table.
We are now back in Taganga after a few days at Tayrona National park. Tayrona is amazing. It looks like it has been put together by a Hollywood studio, with white sandy beaches flanked by green rainforest. We hired a couple of hammocks near the beach to sleep in and spent our time on the various beaches along the coastline. The Colombians´ main holiday is Christmas and they all travel up to this area of the country for a few weeks. In one way this was great as we actually get to hang around with the locals during their holidays but unfortunately it also means high season prices and lots of people. If we were to visit again it would definitely be in the
Canoa- Christmas
Nina and Lynsey putting up the Christmas tree low season and have the place to ourselves.
Our hammocks were next to a group of Colombians who are now able to travel around their own country for the first time due to the improvement in the security situation. It was nice for them to say how happy they were to see tourists in their country. We will hopefully be catching up with them in Bogota.
Tomorrow we head back to Cartagena for New Years Eve.....should be a quiet one.
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