Month: January 2024

Well, what a five weeks it has been. This has been the longest we’ve spent in any country so far, but it’s felt like multiple different countries in one. The cool climate of the coffee-plantations in Eje Cafetero, the chaotic but distinctive cities of Medellin and Bogotá, the historic and also sky-scraper laden Cartagena, the paradise beaches of the Caribbean coast, and the indigenous communities within the Lost City, it’s been hugely varied and also a massive shift from the arid and cold of the Andes to the now constantly sweltering heat of the Caribbean.

It’s only now that I realise our unfortunate experience of Medellin (and spending too much time heeding warnings on blogs and tourist-hate on Reddit) really did a number on my anxiety. But I’m glad that we’ve had so many lovely encounters that by the end my mind has tipped the scales back to our own experience of largely feeling welcome and safe.

Of the two expectations I had for Colombia, for better or worse, Colombia didn’t match them. I expected an easy Gringo-trail-esque ride covering well laid tracks of backpackers gone before us, and that just wasn’t the case for us. Which is totally fine. I think I see Colombia now as more in its infancy with backpacking tourism, like Bolivia was a decade ago.

My other expectation was at just how unwelcome and liable to petty crime we would be. ‘Trust no-one’ was ostensibly the word online, which is just a really sad kind of world to live in, especially in one where the Colombian people are so friendly and kind. Outside of the couple of areas of Medellin we felt very uneasy, we’ve only had good encounters. So, to instead remember all those wonderful people, here they are:

• To our taxi driver from Armenia to Salento, who wasn’t scamming us at all, and gave us an audio-visual tour of Colombian music, “what do you mean you’ve never heard of Karol G?!”
• To the women joyfully singing along to the songs in the Willy jeep
• To all the wait and service staff we’ve had along the way
• To the taxi driver to Las Mangas and the other person in the car who chatted to us about what to do in the area
• To Luisa who gave us ample fresh fruit, helped us out with the mosquitos, and showed us all the wonderful animals with true love and care
• To all the people who tried to help us find the bus to Medellin airport (even if we never did, at least they tried)
• To everyone in Comuna 13, who seemed to welcome us (and our money) with open arms
• To our guides, Milo and Andreas who did amazing jobs of educating us about the history of their city and country
• To the guys in GruStation that, in any other setting, you would think were going to rob you, but did everything to make sure we got the best dinner
• To the mototaxis outside Santa Marta bus terminal reassuring us we were safe as we waited at the side of the road in the dead of night
• To Goyo, our taxi driver in Minca/Santa Marta, who sorted us out (and then some), in getting Lottie some new shoes and us to where we needed to be without losing the limited time we had. He was so friendly and kind and clearly a very proud parent, as he well should be.
• To the staff at Minca Glamping who stayed up to let us into our rooms in the middle of the night when their check-in policy was actually until 3pm. And then getting up early to let us out before their usual check-out time.
• To young Carlos on our Lost City Trek who reminded me how complicated the English language is!
• To Helena and Santiago and all the staff at Quetzal Dorado who made sure we had an amazing time over Christmas and recovering from the trek
• To my leg waxer who was friendly and sweet and took real time and pride in her work
• To the guys in the park who helped us find the wildlife
• To all the people who tried to find us somewhere to buy a carabiner
• To all the touts and vendors we came across who took “no gracias” as the answer once and left us alone
• To the tour guide who accompanied us on one of our walks home and told us a bit about the city with a recommendation for lunch (that we sadly couldn’t afford lol).

And of the touts in Cartagena, who you’ll find every blog complaining about, once you see the lives of the people outside the Walled City, once you recognise they are toiling away through the heat of the day, grafting and grinding, trying to just sell people things they need or a service they may want, bringing goods and services straight to you, it’s hard to begrudge their offers of drinks, sunglasses, lunch, dinner, cigars, tours, paintings, jewellery, hats, snacks, or anything else you can think of (including some less than legal substances, but always offered with humour and a wink as we laugh at the audacity of it!). So, yes, there were touts, but no, they were not pushy or aggressive or con artists or thieves, they were working hard to make a few bucks, and they deserve whatever sale they get.

The overwhelming feeling (for me at least) from this country is of gratitude. There’s something about the poverty here that has really hit harder than elsewhere (and there’s definitely poverty in the rest of South America). We’ve been reminded regularly of not just how fortunate we are to be on this trip at all, but of how fortunate we are to have the lives we do at home. Being four months into our trip, and experiencing a very different kind of Christmas, it’s also really made us appreciate what we have at home. There is so much we take for granted, and this country and this time of year has made us really appreciate all that we have.

So, whilst I’m really glad to finally make it here after so many years, and to have done so without issue, I do worry about how well the huge influx of tourists (from the USA in Cartagena to the digital nomads of Medellin), refugees from Venezuela, and the growing poverty of a widening wealth gap seen across the world can be managed.

Time will tell.

Now, onto the chacana with a special guest addition…

Highlights (Alex): Las Mangas farm-stay, feeling finally at ease in Cartagena, finding paradise at Tayrona Park floating in glorious seas with sparkling sand (special mention: blissful outdoor massage at the Christmas lodge).

Highlights (James): The beautiful streets of Cartagena, feeling safe and relaxed in the Walled City area especially (plus La Mulata). Relaxing over Xmas with Lottie and Alex in the wonderful Quetzal lodge. The coffee tour in Salento, I haven’t been that engaged with a tour before and Tim was fantastic.

Highlights (Lottie): Completing the Lost City Trek, swimming in the river and going in real jungle rapids, seeing monkeys for the first time in the wild, motorbike down the mountain, Christmas day massage, Goyo joining us for shoe shopping

Lowlights (Alex): Feeling on edge everywhere (where it was only really justified in Medellin), missing out on all the glorious food and drink at our Christmas lodge because of my belly, trying to get the uber from Armenia

Lowlights (James): Feeling on edge in Medellin, it wasn’t the nicest city but the fear far outweighed the reality. The delayed and slow bus to Santa Marta, thinking we’d miss a night in the jungle glamping made my heart sink. Having to say goodbye to Lottie at the airport (though Hawaii is not far away!)

Lowlights (Lottie): The Bad Belly Club, shoes breaking the day before the trek

Takeaways (Alex): It’s hard to recognise the anxiety cloud when you’re in it, I’m still fitter than I think, there’s just so much poverty in the world and we’re so incredibly privileged with the lives we have

Takeaways (James): Colombia is worth the plunge! There might be the fear and the odd scary moment but as long as you don’t go looking for trouble you’re unlikely to find it. The majority of people we met we’re genuinely happy to see us and wanted to ensure we had a good time, true throughout most of our trip but especially in Colombia. The country wants to move on from the drug reputation and the infamous criminal, fair play to them, Colombia has so much more to offer!

Takeaways (Lottie): I can still do adventurous things, Colombian people are super friendly and warm, my Spanish is terrible and I need to do better, I didn’t expect Colombia to have such different climates within (i.e. mountainous Bogotá vs tropical Cartagena)

How to Describe Colombia (Alex): Varied landscapes and opportunities, hot, not as tourist-friendly/ready as you may think, but also not as dangerous either

How to Describe Colombia (James): Be brave and sensible and you’ll enjoy it. Loads to do, Salento (coffee axis) and the North coast (Cartagena, Santa Marta, Tayrona, Minca) are my favourites. Not as cheap as you might expect.

How to Describe your trip (Lottie): A mix of holiday and adventure which you can do both of in Colombia. I would highly recommend Cartagena to people and a trip into the jungle and do at least one night of camping/glamping. There are cats and dogs everywhere, and I’m delighted the ratio was 100 dogs to 2 spiders.

Entertainment

TV & Film: A Muppets Christmas Carol, The Stranger, Elemental, Slow Horses, Final Space, National Parks of the USA

Books: A Christmas Carol, The Dark Tower (I should not have waited so long to read this – James)

Podcasts: Science Vs, People Fixing the World, Criminal, This Is Love, More or Less, Adam Buxton, Talk of the Devils

Photos from the Disposable Cameras

The Lost City Trek:

Our only photo together from Christmas, doh!

Parque Tayrona:

Absolutely gross, would not recommend:

Back to Cartagena (James enjoying(?) an arepa):

Lottie trying out the mosquito bite zapper:

From the Cutting Room Floor

• Plantations like Animal Crossing.
• Giant eucalyptus.
• Begonias are back.
• Collapsed Road between Salento and Cocora making us realise we are especially lucky to be able to get there as the whole road could have collapsed!
• Serenades on the Willy from my seatmates.
• Specially designed tollbooth.
• Beautiful pink roses blooming in the middle of the road on the way from Salento to Medellin Serious bikers going up and down the ridiculously steep hills!
• Mystery fruit juices made from all the freshly picked fruit from the farm (found out one was called Nispero!). Another made with passionfruit, papaya and pink guava.
• Cheese finger containing not just cheese, but dulce de leche, an actual horrible combination. We found the only thing you can’t put dulce de leche on to make it better.
• Buses and cars being left running, presumably for the aircon, chugging out fumes, for one of our buses, a good 45 minutes!
• Colombians don’t have a specific History lesson, History is taught as part of a combined Social Studies class at school.
• Seeing two guys struggle to push their heavily laden cart along the road with wheels that weren’t round in the middle of the heat of the day
• You don’t need a toastie maker or butter to make good toasties. Just a frying pan, cheap bread, nice cheese and ham. Added bonus: fried egg

After a spectacular bit of R&R near Tayrona Park thanks to the Collins clan, our time in Colombia is coming to an end for all of us. After an early start and a bus that’s (only) one hour late in leaving, and two and a half hours in arriving, we’re back in Cartagena where we’ll sadly part ways. James has found us an amazing apartment, with sea-view balcony sporting a hammock, and huge master bedroom.

The block also has its own pool, two Jacuzzis, steam-room, sauna and gym! Jackpot! It’s our last bit of ‘holiday’ with Lottie before we go back to ‘back-packing’.

We grab some beers, an arepa stuffed with butter and cheese, and enjoy the sunset sitting on the beach and having a paddle in the warm Caribbean sea.

It’s Lottie’s last night in Cartagena, and James and I’s last night with her, so we decide to stick with what we know and enjoy another wonderful dinner at La Mulata. My belly seems to finally be over the latest bug and so I’m really happy to be able to enjoy real food again! We enjoy some happy hour cocktails at a bar down the road before calling it a night.

The next day we’re up relatively early to squeeze a last bit of Cartagena in for Lottie. James and Lottie go for a wander around the Walled City and Getsemani.

I run some errands, that include going to yet another Claro store to try and register my phone so it doesn’t get blocked (and be told once more I have to go somewhere else), and shopping for a replacement bikini. Despite usually hating shopping in the UK, wandering around the air-conditioned shopping mall, doing something so mundane as shopping, actually feels nice. A bit like I’m a normal human being again and not just a grotty, penny-counting, backpacker. I end up treating myself to two bikinis as I justify I’ll be using them a lot in the coming months of Central America and SE Asia (sorry savings!).

I also notice that I’m feeling a lot less on-edge and anxious than I was before walking around this city, especially on my own, and realise just how anxious I was when we were here last. It seems our experience in Medellin and the many, many warnings on Reddit and travel blogs had really seeped into my psyche, to an extent I couldn’t recognise until it had gone. With my unclouded mind, I mentally skip my way through town to meet Lottie and James for lunch, truly enjoying the sights, sounds, colours and culture on the way for the first time free of worry. No-one even cat-calls or tries to sell me anything! Bliss.

James and Lottie have had less of a liberating experience, as they finally experienced the constant mithering (‘bothering’/’hassling’ for the southeners!) from the local hawkers we’d been warned about. “Sombrero/agua/cerveza/taxi amigo/taxi/agua/cerveza” every few seconds! Nothing a pizza and some iced tea can’t fix though, so with some food in our bellies, we make our final trip back through town with Lottie to the flat of dreams to say goodbye. Lottie is kind enough to let us offload some of our winter gear into any spare bit of space we can find in her backpack, as we see her off to get a flight back to Bogota, where she’ll start her return to the UK. The flat we’re staying in is near the airport, and I realise we should be able to see her plane take off. We sit nervously on the balcony watching and waiting, and then wave her off as we see the plane fly out into the sky above. It’s been so great having Lottie with us for these past two weeks and has really made this Christmas stint so special for us both.

We have one more night in the flat of dreams, which we enjoy by checking out all the facilities, finishing watching The Muppets Christmas Carol, eating popcorn and carrots, and playing the Andover Fist Christmas Quiz on YouTube (highly recommend, a new one released every month). James wins by one point, as is tradition. Oddly enough, the quiz sets off our homesickness as we are reminded of all things Christmas at home, there really is nothing like it (no matter how many tinsel snowmen you may adorn a place with in 32 degree heat!).

The next day we move to our third Airbnb of Cartagena, but we’re lucky enough to be able to keep using the facilities until our 3pm check-in at the next place. We snag some loungers, and eke out the last of the terrace sunshine, as the blustering wind cools us down so we don’t feel the 40 degree real feel heat around us. A few more swims and Jacuzzis and sauna sessions and sadly, we have to say goodbye to ‘holiday’ accommodation and return back to ‘backpacking’ accommodation.

After an erratic (even by Colombian standards) taxi ride, we’re welcomed to our new Airbnb by Alejandro. We’ll be here now until we leave Colombia on the 3rd, and because of New Year’s Eve, we’ve had to go with a room in a property instead of having a place to ourselves (turns out Cartagena is the place to be for NYE, we had no idea). However, rather than share the flat with a host, it’s actually comprised of three separate Airbnb’d rooms, so it’s more like a hostel without a host. We get ourselves settled, and hit the local supermarket to stock up on food, as we try and mitigate the hit of the overpriced room, by eating in for every meal. Cupboards stocked, dinner made, bags unpacked, I’m out like a light.

The next few days involve another Claro store (where I’m finally successful), checking out the exlusive Boca Grande beach (that really had nothing to brag about other than the huge buildings and hotels that line it), enjoying wandering the streets of the Walled City and Getsemani, eating in, chilling out in hammocks, cooling off in cold showers and the aircon, researching and planning for Central America.

New Year’s Eve itself is spent enjoying a beer at a microbrewery before meeting up with Polly and Simon who we did The Lost City Trek with. We wander Getsemani, enjoying the bustling (but not crowded) streets, cocktail vendors on the streets, and tunes played out by a street-DJ. Despite concerns of crowding and chaos, it’s actually fine. We find a spot to sit down by the church as we sip cocktails, before making our way up to the coastal wall to see in the countdown.

We decide to go via the main square to see what’s happening, and are bemused to find the plaza full of people sitting at plastic tables and chairs, with bottles of booze and street food between them. This sounds like a fun affair, but honestly, most people look bored out of their minds! After seeing all the goings on at Christmas, and finding it impossible to find accommodation, we imagined the streets alive with music, dancing and crowds. What we found was actually a lot of people looking bored and fed up to have to spend their evening with their families, counting down the minutes until they would be allowed home.

We meander our way through the sea of boredom and plastic, and find a nice little spot on the wall to sit and continue chatting as we await the inevitable midnight fireworks. Around us are more families and plastic furniture. A hand-held firework shooter seems the hit of the night, as people all around shoot off their own fireworks around us in the lead-up, including a woman holding a toddler on her hip with one arm, and the firework shooter in the other. We all laugh at how, conversely, it’s been ingrained in us since kids to not even hold a sparkler without a glove, to see Colombians wave around these projectiles without a care in the world.

We all shout out our own countdown, as the sky illuminates around us. There’s a good 10 minutes of effects that go off along the coastal road, not in sync or the same, so we get to see a good few shows at once from where we’re sitting. It’s been really great sharing the evening with Polly and Simon, again having some extra company to make the moment more special. We part ways as we head back to our respective accommodations, and we make our way through the plaza again, where nothing has changed, except some clubs are now luring people in. You’d have no idea the clocks had even turned midnight by this lot! But we’ve had a wonderful evening, far better than we expected, and can’t believe the incredible year we’ve had in 2023.

Our last days in Cartagena and Colombia are spent doing much of the same before, as housemates come and go, and we sort out a few last bits and pieces and finalise plans for the next leg, Central America.

A highlight is finding ample wildlife in the nearby park that we’ve walk through possible 10 times. Thanks to some helpful street vendors we see a sleeping sloth, an iguana, and tiny monkeys. The iguana seems to want the tiny monkey, but has no chance of out-maneuvering the agile mono. It reminds me of watching the magpies taunt the local cat outside the window of our flat in London! Thanks to a group of tourists all looking up with their cameras, we see a sloth hanging precariously off a tree, then making its way across branches and trees pretty rapidly. We see more monkeys and another iguana and can’t believe we didn’t realise how much wildlife was just hanging around here all this time!

Despite a good effort in trying to find a different, good, fish restaurant that was reasonably priced, we come up with nothing and end up back at La Mulata for our third time!

For whatever reason, the streets of Cartagena now are full and alive and busy with people. Perhaps everyone spends NYE bored with families and then parties hard the days before and after. I join James with his favourite Mojarra fish, as we count our coins and notes to spend our last Colombian Pesos before leaving. We leave from where we started, and no regrets for spending our money in this wonderful establishment three times.

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Adventure – trying to register my phone with Claro 3 days before we leave, finding somewhere to eat on New Year’s Day

Entertainment – feeling finally at ease with Colombia and walking around, wandering around the fancy shopping mall pretending like we had money for a few minutes, being able to eat and drink again, aircon turning our rooms into fridges, James suggesting we buy a carrot cake (I’ve converted him to a cake fan! Sorry Dave!), finding out you can make toasties without a toastie maker (game changer!)

Trauma – the heat