Colombia - North Bound

Colombia has to be one of South America's best kept secrets. Still deemed dangerous by a lot of backpackers, its not yet on everyone's radar, although I have no doubt that will change in a very short space of time. When I first landed in Bogota, after waving goodbye to Abi in the airport of San Jose, I was a mix of emotions. Although thrilled to be testing out my independence I was also incredibly nervous. These nerves were soon eased when I discovered that Colombians are the friendliest people on the planet. I managed to land myself in what has to be the best hostel in the country, with the most hospitable staff I've ever come across. Not only did they humour my pigeon Spanish but they provided me with a glass of wine, endless cups of tea and even a hot water bottle to go to bed with! Throughout the three weeks I spent exploring the country I was bowled over by peoples enthusiasm to help me, their generosity and there constant upbeat temperament, not to mention how stunning most of them are... I want to be Colombian! This is a country I cannot recommend visiting enough.

I started this leg of the trip with two brief days on my lonesome which were spent happily meandering the old colonial streets of the capital, sipping coffee in various hideaways and generally soaking up the Latin American culture that I wish we had a little more of at home. Bogota is overflowing with museums and galleries, the most well known of which is The National Gold Museum which left me day dreaming of all the pretty things I'd have owned if I'd been an Mayan princess in the 15th century. After two brief days by myself, Joel, a friend from home, came out to join me for 3 weeks. Our first excursion together was to the Police Museum which boasts a scary array of weapons and has an entire floor dedicated to the 190 day search for Pablo Escobar. For those of you who don't know Mr. Escobar was the head of the Medellin Cartel in the 80s. Its no secret that Colombia is the largest producer of cocaine, controlling 80 to 90 per cent of the world market. During the peek of Escobar's reign he lived in pretty much total freedom and luxury, and get this, he even founded a political party, held congressional seats and established 2 newspapers! Most astonishing all is that when the government launched a campaign against the drug trade the Cartels responded with offering to invest their capital in paying off Colombia's 13 billion dollar foreign debt in return for immunity from persecution and extradition! How cheeky! The Museum was made all the more interesting by our very enthusiastic guide, a 19 year old boy half way through his compulsory year of military service. It seems he was most put out at being placed in a museum instead of somewhere a little more dangerous and spoke with a little too much zeal about his favorite gun and his favorite type of torture in the room entitled 'Punishment'. Even more disturbing still was that whilst looking at a photo of Pablo Escobar's corpse a troop of school kids traipsed passed. So while our eight year old's are examining plastic dinosaurs at the natural history museum their Colombian pen pals are learning about the underworld of narcotics.

The day after Joel arrived I threw him into the deep end of travelling by meeting up with Carolina, a Colombian girl that a mutual friend had introduced me to via email. We spent the night checking out Bogota's bar scene in a rather swanky district and I quizzed Carolina half to death about Colombian culture. Its no surprise that Colombia has had a rather treacherous past when it comes to civil wars and crime rates, however what is largely unknown is that these rates have been dropping rapidly in the last decade. Its worth noting that since Uribe took office in August 2002 homicides went down by 40 per cent, acts of terror by 66 per cent and extortive kidnappings by 79 per cent. Another interesting fact, although quite unrelated but I'll throw it in all the same, is that way back in 1717 under the revolutionary leader Simon Bolivar, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador and Venezuela made up a single country, Gran Colombia; there you go, you learn something new everyday!

From Bogota we headed north to a little town by the name of San Gil. Here we had our first taste of white water rafting, which provided me with my latest adrenalin fix. This was made all the more thrilling by the fact that a) all the instructions were given in Spanish and b) that our instructor fell in within the first 30 seconds of hitting our first set of rapids!

From San Gil we spent a brief night in Barichara, a beautiful little colonial town replete with white washed houses, cobbled streets and 18th century churches. The Lonely Planet describes this town as 'something out of a film set', which turned out wasn't so far from the truth. Upon our arrival we noticed a film crew setting up in the main square and come the evening the centre of the town was alive with people. It turned out we'd walked into an award ceremony for one of Colombians most famed soap operas. There was great hype amongst the crowd, as we later found out, the soaps main stair, Carla Giraldo, was making a guest appearance. Quite oblivious to what exactly was going on we still managed to get quite caught up in the fight to get a picture with Carla. Little did we know this would be the first of three claims to fame Colombia would provide us with as over the course of the next week we also saw two music videos being filmed!

Our next stop was Santa Marta which sits at the very north of the country on the Caribbean cost. This was actually the first town founded by the Spanish in 1525. Despite its age and location Santa Marta was a surprisingly stark and rather ugly city with little within its confines to see or do. Sometimes however just when you give up on finding any action, action finds you. After a rather hellish journey via night bus to get to the town Joel and I were in desperate need of a caffeine fix. We found what appeared to be a rather tranquil little coffee shop and took refuge from the suns rays under the shade of a tree. Within minutes of purchasing our beverages about 50 motorbikes all started to circle the building adjacent to us. My curiosity never waning, I decided to get a closer look at what was going down, only to be greeted by a dozen heavily armed riot police protecting the building. It wasn't until I saw one guy bend down, pick up a brick and hand it to his girlfriend on the back of his bike that I considered that perhaps I shouldn't be standing quite so close to the 'action'. Just as I skipped back to the table to report to Joel what I'd seen the whole patio emptied with people abandoning their coffees while covering their faces with their sleeves and making a swift exit out the back entrance. It was then that I realised the police had dispensed tear gas. Now this all sounds very dramatic but I can assure you it was more amusing than anything else! Rather disappointingly the whole fiasco died down rather abruptly, although later that day we saw several police with machine guns patrolling the streets. Unfortunately what the protest was actually in response to we never found out but it made a good bit of drama all the same.

Our main reason for travelling so far north was actually to visit Tyrona National Park. Tyrona's landscape is like something out of Lost, where luscious green jungle shrouded in mystery meets with perfect white sand beaches. The camp site in the park is only accessible by a forty minute hike through the jungle which makes the place feel even more remote. Within minutes of arriving at the parks entrance we'd seen two snakes having sexo, an iguana sunning himself, numerous colourful little lizards and a blue butterfly with a wingspan the size of both my hands put together! Whilst staying in the park we enjoyed the simple things in life, we swam in the sea, slept in hammocks and hiked up to Pueblito, an old Mayan town where we found ourselves bouncing from bolder to bolder on the steep incline up and sliding pretty much the whole way down.

Next stop was Cartagena, probably Colombia's most touristic and well known city. Here we spent a few days wandering around the old walled part of the town, eating fresh fruit off street stalls for breakfast and enjoying an afternoon beer whilst partaking in 'Spanish club', which involved us rather unsuccessfully trying to learn 5 new words a day; not a great combination with 40 degree heat and alcohol but our intentions were good! The incentive behind 'Spanish club' was in response to several blunders Abi and I had made throughout the previous four months, which were quite amusing when there were two of us, but were the sort of mistakes I'd really rather not be making on my own. The first biggy was that we managed to tell our host mother in Mexico that we were very horny instead of hot, although she never actually had the heart to correct us on that one and instead resorted to smiling at us in a rather concerned manor. I will remind you that she was a very strict Jehovah's Whiteness which made the situation especially inappropriate. The second was when I asked a Guatemalan if he drove a pig, and the third was when Abigail managed to ask a tour agent how much it was to ride a gentleman as opposed to a horse.