If you ever visited me when i was a student you would have noticed the many posters on my walls from places in the world i would love to visit at somepoint in my life. One of these places was Colombia, the poster was long and thin with a picture of a pristine white sandy beach and turquoise ocean down the centre with all manner of flora and fauna around the outside showing of the incredibly bio diversity of this wonderful country. The words "Colombia; The only risk is wanting to stay" were scrwaled across the middle.
Well this year Amanda and myself decided it was time for a adventure so we hopped on a plane and ended up in Colombia.
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| The in flight entertainment had our flight from Miami to Medellin going way off course, as it was programmed to have us heading to Los Angeles, it was funny that the further into the flight we got, the longer the time to arrival also became! |
I will admit that the holiday did not have the very best of starts, after all the stress that is involved in going away, packing, waking up early and getting through American security the last thing Amanda wanted was for me to kindly deposit the entire contents of her water bottle over her seat to be endured for the rest of the long (3hour) flight down there! Oh well we thought, soon we will arrive and shall have a lovely well deserved long sleep! Well, Medellin had other ideas. The airport is a good hour away from the city (situated on the only bit of flat land large enough for an airport) and the journey to town consists of a almost non stop descent on very winding roads with mind blowing views down the valley to the city below (Not so great if you have a tendency to get travel sick!). Medellin comes alive at night time, it seems there is no nook and cranny that can avoid the Salsa on a Saturday night! So after a wonderful nights sleep consisting of booming music and the typical sounds of revellers all around us we woke up the next morning in an extremely bad mood and wondering what we had let ourselves in for. Not to worry though, there was another flight to catch, this time to the Carribean coast and the city of Cartagena!
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| A Fernando Botero sculpture, I'll tell you more about this artist in part 2! |
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| Colombia is a very colourful place! |
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| Me enjoying a nice cup of coffee, do you like my mustouche? |
On our way back up the hill to Medellins airport, I startled by the suprising amount of cyclists that seem to be out on the road, this despite the fact they were climbing up what appeared to be Mt Blanc and despite the fact that it was chilly and bucketing down with rain in the city of the eternal spring - the city with the perfect climate. Colombians absolutely love cycling, in fact I think I saw more cyclists on this 45 minute taxi ride than I have seen in America in the last year!! I found it to be a very refreshing change :) Here is a picture of one of the cyclists thoroughly enjoying himself in the rain!
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| Nice day for a bicycle ride |
Cartagena is the Colombian jewel in the crown, a key trading post on the Carribean it was first founded by the Spanish back in 1533 and by strolling on top of the old city walls or through the myriad of streets inside the old quarter you feel like you have been transported back to this time. The old city is almost perfectly preserved, while the city has sprawled out way beyond it's origional walls inside the old city you feel like you are in a time warp, with very few vehicles and just some street sellers jostling for your attention. Unless of course it is a cruise ship day, when thousands of bewildered tourists find themselves thrust away from the safety of the cruise ship into the hectic and terrifying country of Colombia. You would not believe the amount of street sellers that come out of the woodwork on these days, maybe they have their own boats stocked with millions of straw hats that simply follow the cruise ships around the carribean?!
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| Enjoying a stroll on the walls of Cartagena de Indias |
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| Amanda enjoying the view |
The first few nights we decided to splurge out ($50 a night) and spent our time in the paradise that is the Casa India Catalina, a old Spanish colonial building turned hotel complete with hammocks , a swimming pool and a magnificent breakfast where you were joined by a couple od cute little parakeets who wouldnt stop chirping away... And of course all the freshfruit you could possibly dream of! Our hotel was slap bang in the of the hustle and bustle of the old quarter. This was the perfect base for us to go exploring and go exploring we did! We visited everything the old quarter had to offer including the museum of gold, the seat of the Spanish inquisition, the KGB russian pub and a multitude of little coffee shops nestled in sleepy squares dotted throughout the old town. We must have walked over a thousand miles in Cartagena including a daily stroll at sunset atop the old city walls. It was very romantic!
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| This is a picture i took of our hotel, it was so hot and humid my camera lense fogged up! |
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| Please note the straw hat peeking into the picture! |
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| Cute little birds that wouldnt stop singing to us at breakfast time |
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| A pot full of gold at the gold museum. |
We had been told that in Cartagena you have to experience Playa Blanca, one of Colombias best and apparently most accessible beach. We woke up super early in order to get to the port for 9am in order to catch the boat over to the beach. Sounds siple right? Things started to go pear shaped almost immediately as it turns out for some inexplicable reason (except possibly the confusion of tourists) there are approximately one million boats that all depart for the same beach at the same time and it is up to you to make sure you get on the right one, it is absolute pandomium!! Pandamoniom continued as the order of the day on board the boat as I had to put my hand behind Amandas head to stop her getting whipped by a rope every time the sailors yanked it back in an attempt to get one of the engines started. But when they finally did get the engines started... WOW! this little boat was powered by two gigantic V6 engines and to say it went like a rocket would be an understatement, it positively flew across the sea, exceeding the speed of sound and leaving us with startling views into the ocean on our left and right as the boat was moving at such a rate and the front so high up above the waves that we werte actually below the waterline! This roller coaster of a ride continues for about an hour before arriving at the beach oops sorry I mean aquarium! It seems before going to the beach the boat first stops at the aquarium where you can part with 50'000 of your precious pesos to walk around for an hour. Needless to say this didn't appeal as we just wanted to go to the dam beach, we were happy when the engines again roared into life and we presumed at last we were on our way to playa blanca. Alas this was not the case, it was decided that while we were waiting fo rthe people in the aquarium we could instead go snorkling in the crystal clear waters of the Carribean, obviously this comes with the added cost of renting the snorkel, which in our rudimentary Spanish we believed to be $6000 pesos but yup you guessed it, the guy in fact was asking for 60,000 pesos! about 20 dollars to go snorking for half an hour! Needless to say we rejected this proposal also and as a punishment it seemed we were dumped in this marshy, mosquito infected bay with many other disgruntled tourists (Natives as well as foreigners) to wait for everyone to finish up in the stupid aquarium before finally arriving at the beach at about 1pm!
That gave us just 3 hours to enjoy what was a beautiful beach before the boat came back to pick us up at 4pm! I loved the fact we were seated right next to the guy selling cold beers, where I could just raise my hand a bottle of beer would magically appear in front of me for the magically price of about 30 cents! Amanda enjoyed the fact that if she raised her hand a bowl of fresh fruit would also magically appear in front of her, although she didn't enjoy the fact that the said bowl of fresh fruit was accompanied by Colombias entire population of flies!
The street vendors are not only good for beer on the beach, any time you get a little peckish you simply need to find to turn round 360 degrees and you are sure to see a arepa cart! Arepas are basically corn bread pattys which have been fried and have a little pocket cut into them in which anything can be added, different regions have their own take on the arepa but the ones in Cartagena were my favourite because they used to stuff them full of cheese! The most I paid for an arepa was one dollar so they are really great to keep your motor running. We really enjoyed eating out every night, especially the fact that we could walk into any restuarant with complete confidence that we'd still have some money in our pockets even after a couple of beers and bottles of wine! Actually I think we grossly overestimated the value of the peso, on the last night we really splurged on a 3 course bonanza at Crepe and waffles which is a national chain that Amanda said reminded her of the cheesecake factory in the USA and reminded me of Nandos. You get a crepe for yyour dinner which you can basicaly fill up with anything that you like and then afterwards you can finish it off with a tasty nutella waffle, yum! We each had a dinney dessert and much wine and beer but as we had no pesos left I used my card, they only charges me $21.40 which was substantially less than we expected and means we could have spent even more money while we were away!!
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| Your typical arepa street vendor. |
There are mango trees everywhere in Colombia, and as a result another one of the street vendors specialties is fresh mango juice, they have a cart with a great big box full of mangoes which I suspect they just pick up as they roam the city as the mangoes are literally falling off the trees by the thousand. They juice it for you in front of your very eyes and will charge you anything from 2 dollars on a cruise ship day in cartagena to 20 cents in a residential suburb of Medellin, you can barter for your goods from the street vedors in Colombia, but not when it comes to food as this is seen as disrespectful.
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| Amanda getting pooped on in plaza Bolivar |
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| Relaxing in Plaza Bolivar |
Here is a picture of me and Amanda relaxing in plaza Bolivar. Throughout Latin America you will find many squares, statues and whatnot commemorating Simon Bolivar. I suppose you could say he led a rather hectic life, and certainly not many people coud match his CV. During his 47 years he played a influencial role in liberating and forming the independent countries of Venezuala, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama and Peru and then assumed the presidency of each of these nations AND did I mention he also had the country of Bolivia named after him and assumed the presidency there as well! Incredible!I am sure he was extremely popular in Spain at the time!
Many Colombias LOVE the Miss Colombia competition, it is a very prestigious event and previous winners have gone on to lead exciting lives, ranging form the classic movie star and pop star to landing high level government positions, One winner even the defence minister!
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| A nice view of Cartagena from Castillo San Felipe, you often see canons upright in the ground like this, the Spanish used to use them as winches in order to shift heavy items. |
We enjoyed a brilliant week in Cartagena, however it was extremely hot and we were both very excited at the end of the week when it came time to head back to Medellin and spend a week cooling off in the mountains! I'll tell you all about it in part 2!
