To the coast

It´s been a while since the last update, and now I am in an internet cafe made for people with no knees.

After a long bus trip with new friend Sara from Switzerland we finally got to Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast, we stayed a night The Dreamer hostel where the only beds left were in an 8 bed dorm. The dreamer is full of typical backpackers lazing about next to the pool in hammocks, it´s OK but not my cup of tea these days so we headed over to nearby Taganga to check out scuba diving places and accommodation for the next few days, we found both at Tayrona Dive Center where the very friendly but forgetful reception lady Sofia made us feel welcome. Sara wanted to do her open water diving course and I wanted to continue with rescue diver course, for taking a course we got the accommodation 33% cheaper. Santa Marta´s a dump, the best thing about it is the Bueno Vista shopping mal as it has a proper coffee at Juan Valdez, which is also 5 mins walk from The Dreamer.

Taganga in contrast is a nice little fishing village just over the hill from Santa Marta, everything is walking distance and there are lots of nice restaurants on the beach with the days catch on the menu. Our room at Tayrona Dive Center was very nice, big and clean plus en-suite  My friend Emma from Bogota was coming down also at the weekend to do some diving and on our first days diving we met Ruben from Belgium also doing his Open Water and staying at the dive center, so it was shaping up to be an enjoyable week with lots of new friends. The dive center has no training pool, so Sara´s first ever diving experience was in the open water with minimal instruction, I also has not been diving for quite a while and had asked for a refresher course, but it was more a case of looking how the equipment went together and then straight into the water. Ok, this is diving Colombian style. Emma had booked a different dive center - Posieden, as we had originally looked into that one but when myself and Sara checked it out in person the girl on the counter didn´t seem to know much about diving. Later though it would appear they were a bit more professional than Tayrona and they did have a training pool but the accommodation was a bit basic.
Still there was a lovely restaurant right upstairs from our accommodation that was rather like an Asterix hut and very nicely made for something in Colombia.
Emma did a night dive and some fun dives and after 3 days Sara and Ruben had their open water certifications and I had my Rescue Diver certification. The Rescue course is not fun as such as its mostly about techniques for helping other divers in trouble in the surface or during a dive, so lots of drills and not much actual diving and one whole day in the classroom doing an EFR, which is a first aid course.
It was sad to see Emma go back to Bogota and Ruben go as well, but also so nice to have Sara to travel with for a while.

After Taganga we went to Tayrona NP, which is a nice beach area, and the place on the front of the guide book for Colombia my Mum got out from the library. It´s a nice unspoiled place, the beaches are nice but the currents are strong and some beaches are dangerous for swimming due to steep drop offs and waves. The accommodation inside the park is either cheap hammocks or camping, or expensive Cabanas for hundreds of dollars a night. The thing is after 5.30pm its dark and there are a million mosquitoes  plus its very hot and everyone wants a shower at the same time. So we didn´t stay in the park but visited for a day and stayed just outside in a very nice Cabana called Yuluka hostel with a pool and restaurant for a fraction of the equivilant inside the park, the owner was very helpful and drove us to the park entrance after we had eaten lunch. Plus that evening there was a massive thunder storm so I think our Cabana with AC and en-suite was much better than a hammock and 10 other people.

The next day we took the bus to Cartegena, a pretty walled city, where we wanted to do some more diving. Diving is much more expensive in Cartegena, a third to half as much as you´d pay in Taganga. The place the guide books all talk about is Isla Rosario, but apparently you can´t dive there anymore because it´s been spoilt, but its actually part of a chain of islands just of the coast, we were taken to one called Isla Baru which was fantastic. The first dive was a wreck dive with 2 wrecks, the first wreck you descended into the bowels of the ship and up into an air pocket, where you took your regulator out and breathed air 15 m below the surface, you then continued to the next wreck, where we went into the wreck and then through a dark narrow corridor before coming out of the other end of the wreck.

Unfortunately some time that afternoon I ate something that didn´t agree with me and had food poisoning which lasted all the night and the next day, of course we had to travel the next day and I couldn´t eat anything, I eventually managed to eat some dry crackers before we caught our flight to Cali where Sara had convinced me to go Kite Surfing on Calima lake. I was pathetically weak like one is after a bout of food poisoning  but was very thankful to have a friend with me to carry my bag and generally look after me. At the Airport Sara went to get some cash out and found both her cards didn´t work, verdammta toeff!!! We arrived in Cali and had to stay one night in a shitty hostel and than had to argue over the price and the room was one bed less than the booking, but I did manage to book a flight out of Colombia to Lima. Sara leaves on the 27th, I will be so sad without my Swiss travel buddy, still at least I have a new friend in Europe I can go skiing with.

Notes:

• More information on Tayrona Dive Center and Posieden in Taganga, and Cartegena Divers.
• The Spanish word for scuba diving is Buceo.
• We had Kite Surfing lessons at Calima Kitesurf School.

San Gil

About 4 hours further north from Villa De Leyva is San Gil, a nice small town in the Colombian highlands packed with adventure activites, and a big backpacker draw because of this. I had booked 2 nights at the Macondo hostel as I had it had a very helpful Australian owner who knew all about the local activities but when I first arrived I spoke to the Colombian staff about the activites and they said, yes you can do most of these activities everyday...but you need 4 people for that and 5 for this, etc, to which I thought it was going to be another dull couple of days. I was just looking at fights out of Colombia to somewhere interesting when the owner, Sean, came by to ask if there was anything I needed to know, so I asked about the activites again, in particular an all day bike ride that went through the picturesque town of Barichara and he straight away phoned up ´Gringo Mikes´- to verify how many people were going, they had 3 other people so I signed up for the 55km ride for the next day. I spent the rest of the evening watching Andy Murrey win the US open on TV.
I put the fact it was 55ks to the back of my mind, and offroad on full suspension mountain bikes, we started off with a delicious and very large breakfast at Gringo Mike´s resturant, and then a fairly short drive to the start in the nearby hills with the first 15ks all downhill, the tour wasn´t cheap but we had 2 guides, new Kona bikes and the 4x4 support landrover following at a distance behind in case we couldn´t make it all the way. The bikes were set up to each persons height and weight, and then we set off, I´ve never bicyled down anything so fast with so much confidence and now I know the joy of a good quality full suspension bike and what a difference it makes.We went through Barichara which is actually a really rich town, a place where celebs buy property, in fact it would appear Colombia is far from being one of the cheapest south American countries, its actually now one of the most expensive, so all those people who travelled in Colombia several years ago probably found it quite cheap, but now it is not the case. It is the 3rd most expensive country, they even have great cycle lanes like I saw in America and Canada so they can´t be too hard up.After a rest stop we carried on up through the town and descended on the only bit of actual road into another valley, a superb 4km of winding tarmac, a two wheeled dream. From there the landrover took us up to the lunch location where we had the delicious pack lunch prepared by Gringo Mikes resturant overlooking Suarez Canyon. We still weren´t even half way through the distance and the next bit involved about 15kms of up hill and down dale, but mostly up hill, which became a gruelling battle of mind over matter and came very close to getting into the back up vehicle but didn´t and pushed on through to the end for a reward of cold beers as the sun went down. A long day, an tiring day but an excellent day and four new friends.

That evening the biking group met up for dinner and three of them were also getting the same bus to Santa Marta/ Taganga the next night. The next day I went to some nearby waterfalls with Sarah from the bike tour and that evening got the night bus to Santa Marta. It was certainly nice to eat out with other people in a proper resturants and not feel like a loney no friends loser.

Santa Marta sounds nice but it´s just a dirty boring town but has a nice shopping mall where I had a Colombian version of an Irish coffee.

Notes:

Gringo Mike's bike tours is one of the best activities I did on the whole trip.

Villa De Leyva

Is a little cobbled quaint place 4 hours north of Bogota. Supposedly a relaxed dreamy place with nothing doing kind of atmosphere with a big plaza with steps outside the church where one can admire the sheer cobbledness of it all.
Except for the weekend I arrived, there was an international film festival going on with cameras and green screens set up in the plaza and people posing about, and I thought it was some random casting, but it was just being being filmed in a very wobbly mannor in front of a green screen. The next day was a kite flying festival which went on all day, with people showing off their nice colourful kites, I enjoyed this for a while whilst eating what might have been a nice dish in another country. That evening more hulabaloo with dancing and some band in the plaza, it all happens here it seems, or at least for this weekend. I was trying to get away from hustle and bustle, I must have walked around the town 10 times and then got bored.
The next day I got the bus to San Gil, what is reported to be an adventure hotspot, the journey was typical ´minibus style stuff as many people and more into´ and that was OK, up until the little boy travelling with his Grandmother next to me was silently sick and then sick a bit more into a bag. A while later I thought to pick my day bag up from the floor and of course it had been absorbing the little fellows chunder. Luckily it didnt smell much, but I will have to give it a sponge bath none the less.

Ps; There are a number of symbols on these Spanish keyboards that I have no idea who to access, some I need to Google like the @ (I just pasted that from Google) so please forgive all the bad spelling and lack of punctuation marks.

Bogota

Some people like Bogota, 8 million like it enough to live here all the time, but I suppose some of those don´t have much choice. Even more strangely some people from nice places like England choose to live here too, personally there are a couple of 4 letter words I can think of to describe it.

The Candelaria is the old town area which generally gets the hype and has cobbled roads in some areas and old buildings in spanish colonial style and lots of musuems and churches.

I thought it was over rated as an area but the musuems and churches are very good, I first went to the Carmen Church, actually I found several names for it but it´s a stripey church in maroon and white inside and out and one of the loveliest churches ever, it was light and colourful inside which made it nice to be in, I was just enjoying the peace and quite sitting on one of the pews when midday mass started, so I stayed, thankfully I didn´t get a migraine*.
The next day I visited the Gold Museum which has lots of Gold things in it, mostly flattened bits of Gold to make jewellery for fancy chiefs people and very finely made small objects and now they have a musuem full of it. Also the Botero Museum, named after an artist who likes to paint things fatter and rounder than they actually are, the Botero is set in a lovely colonial building with courtyard gardens but has the effect of an MC Esher drawing in terms of navigating. The best room for me was the Impressionists room, in which I spent most of the time.
Bogota also has modern bus system for some routes which works more like a subway in the way you buy a ticket and go through a turnstile and catch one that goes in the direction you want and generally find they never actually stop at the place you want to get off, and have to get another bus back in the other direction and so on until you get close enough to your destination, a bit like Mornington Crescent** only with buses. There is of course the older constrasting ramshackle busettas mini bus things that wizz about going God knows where.

*Situations in which I am most likely to experience a migraine; churches, planes, biology lessons. Which makes me a bit wary of churches, planes and biology lessons.
**An improv game on BBC radio 4, in which the panelists try to get to Mornington Crescent (an underground station) by announcing other tube stations and landmarks, they discuss each players choice which regards to various ´rules´ but there are in fact no rules and the game is completely incomprehensible and eventually somebody says "Mornington Crescent" and the rest of panel groan and then they all go off to have a cup of tea.

It´s a long way to Bogota

Just when I thought I´d managed to get an international flight out of the UK without having to go to Heathrow, Lufthansa´s flight attendants went on strike so my flight was cancelled and had to go to Heathrow anyway, bother. The first thing I knew about this was whilst waiting in the check-in queue, a Lufthansa check in assitant was going down the line saying ´as you know, the flights been cancelled, hmmm´.
She asked where I was going and gave a sort of grimace when I said I was going to Bogota. Each person required about 10 minutes to be sorted out as everyone had to be rerouted with other airlines, most people were just going to Europe, but me and one other family were heading to Bogota. When it was finally my turn, the poor check in guy was quite stressed as he was having to deal with a useless person on the end of the phone, I then had to get the National Express coach to Heathrow anyway ASAP and fly to Milan and then Bogota with two airlines I had never heard of. I´m pretty sure one was on the ´avoid´ list of Spanish carriers I´d researched. Still I did get a £4 ´dinner´!?´voucher, wow! I very much doubted I´d have time to use that, I had 3 hours to get to Heathrow and it rush hour on a week day, on the M25. People in the UK will know what that can mean, but some miracle the coach did get to Terminal 5 in time and I was checked in and through security in 10 minutes, which must be a record. Further joy and happiness I was able to use my £4 voucher, so I bought a Boots meal deal. T5 dispite being the new terminal at Heathrow is just as crowded and cramped as all the other terminals.
My new Milan* flight was then delayed half an hour or so and then further delayed before landing because of Spaniards playing tiddlywinks or something, the next flight was also delayed a further 30 mins or so before finally getting on a plane that was to take me to Bogota, of course everyone was Spanish, and the only menu item I could understand was chicken and rice, which was exactly what I didn´t want but took it out of ease.
I got to Bogota 2 hours later than intinally planned, got a taxi which went up a number of streets backwards before finally reaching La Pinta, my accomodation, which was I was most relieved to see, a nice place.

*The best bit about this whole thing was the airport internal bus ride from the first flight into Milan to the next departures area, it went underneath the whole airport which was rather unusal, the sort of place Mr Bond might have a high speed chase in.

Bye Bye England

I'm off to South America now where I plan to do as little travelling as possible, mainly because it seems like a nice place to sit on a beach and go diving and drink nice fruity yogurty drinks. Arriving into Bogota in Colombia first and then planning to going to the Carribean coast.

A tale of Two Teas

I got a groupon deal  whilst still in New York for high tea* for two at the Thistle Hotel in Brighton for less than half price, so I bought it. Almost a month later I wanted to book the tea but I had forgotten what site I bought it from, so I checked all my bank statements and found it was Groupon, but not before forgetting my mastercard login details and having to jump through a few hoops to reset those, that was fairly straightforward. I tried to log in to Groupon but none of my emails were accepted, I phoned them up and found I had logged in with Facebook when I made the order, I still couldn't log in, then remembered I had since changed my Facebook login email. I finally logged in a got my voucher and then tried to print the PDF which said it was corrupted, after a combined 3 hours of pissing around and then reading a review saying it was rubbish anyway, I finally had the tea booked and down we went to Brighton.
It was a splendid afternoon tea in fact, even after all the palaver, the Thistle hotel is on the waterfront across from the pier, there was hardly anyone else there and the edibles were very nice.

*High Tea is a cream tea with the addition of sandwiches and small cakes as well served on a three tiered silver tray with a choice of tea or coffee served in a pot enough for several cups.