Unexpected visit to Colombia

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As soon as we arrived to Cartagena I was amazed by Caribbean atmosphere. Cartagena is the city of romance! Old town is full of cobbled alleys, enormous balconies, massive churches and leafy plazas. It's incredible to walk around old town in the evening, sit down in the one of plazas and watch some local performances. Cartagena is full of night life, amazing restaurants with tables on the streets and live music.
Next day we made a trip to Playa de Blanca - one hour boat drive from the city. My first experience of Caribbean beach! Palm trees lined along the beach with gold sands and turquoise blue waters.

After Cartagena we made our way to Santa Marta - small colonial town. We were not very impressed with beaches so we decided instead to stay longer in Taganga - tiny fishing village 30 minutes away from town. The village is set around horse-shaped bay. The pace of life there is very slow and relaxing.
Couple days later we made a trip to Parque Nacional Natural Tayrona. This place is a winner!!
We took bus to main entrance and then hiked through the Parque. Hiking was quite easy as most of the path is made from the wooden platform. The only thing is that it's about two hours walk in the heat! Although scenery around, birds and monkeys jumping on the trees was amazing and worth the walk.
When we got the beach we booked a hammock to stay overnight. It was so beautiful! There were several amazing beaches around and so many hiking routes. I loved siting on the beach, drinking beer and watching sun going down. So peaceful and relaxing. Paradise for your mind!

Our next destination was Palomino where we were going to help someone built a tree house. It sounded like an amazing experience.
Palomino it's not more than a truck stop on the highway but we enjoyed few days of relaxing, drinking coconut water and making a fire on the empty beaches.

Few days later we met Christian who owned a project of building a tree house. We was actually not very well - down with Dengi fever ;( so we made the way to mountains with one of the other participants - Scottie. We did difficult one hour hike up to the mountains where the camp was based and where "the beautiful tree" was. Camp was amazing although there were very basic conditions. We were sleeping in the flying tent, cooking on the fire and showering under the skies. The place was so peaceful and incredible! The tree itself was so enormous and it was something about the tree that made you feel so connected with it. I had a great pleasure, first time in my life, to climb the tree! Hard work but when you find a grip, it is going easier and easier.
We stayed in the camp two weeks and although we haven't seen the finished result, we saw the base of the tree house. Alex put first bolts in the tree! It was very hard to say goodbye to the guys ;( but we had to leave to Bogota to sort out our visa to China.

First impression of Bogota - cold and high altitude sickness! We stayed in La Candeleria - historic part of the town with elegant colonial architecture. Bogota is very big and very modern in the rest of the parts of the city.
After sorting out the paper work for Chinese visa we head to outside of Bogota where we taken another workaway project. We stayed in a beautiful cottage where we helped Juan with a little bit of gardening and maintenance of his land. It was an amazing countryside and was so hard to believe that it was only 30 minutes away from enormous Bogota.

After spending two weeks in the country side we went back to Bogota to chill out for few days before making our way to China!

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