Caribbean Colombia

As mentioned at the end of our last blog post, we recently treated ourselves to a short break from the Santiago winter and jet-setted up to Colombia for a little over a week. There was an excuse, i.e. a meeting that needed attending, and Colombia was sort of on the way.

We travelled to Cartagena de Indias on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, where a friend and colleague of ours happened to get married around that time and we managed to join some of the activities involved, and of course also went exploring on our own.

Cartagena has a beautiful historic city centre surrounded by a virtually intact city wall and with lots of nicely restored colonial buildings. We made it our base for a few days. It is a colourful but also touristy place, which seems a little removed from the hustle and bustle in the rest of the city.

One of the fruit ladies selling fruit to tourists

We really liked how many of the buildings in the narrow lanes are covered by fairly large plants that seem to grow out of a tiny hole in the concrete.

Check out the "pot" this tree comes from!

Apart from sightseeing we also went with our friend on a boat trip to the Corales del Rosario y de San Bernardo National Park for a day of snorkeling and admiring corals and beautifully coloured fish and other underwater creatures. With water temperatures around 30°C that managed to entertain us for hours!

Flollopping in the sea for hours...

The water is literally too hot to be refreshing, but given that outside it's the same temperature and very humid, one may as well stay in the sea for most of the day (...even lunch).

Lunch was served on a table placed underneath a palm leafed roof in the sea

After a few days in Cartagena we went to visit another National Park, Tayrona, which again has warm and clear waters, fish and corals to offer, but also dense, green jungle. We stayed in a jungle lodge type of hostel from where we left just after sunrise for a walk. There is a trail which follows the coast, sometimes along the beach, sometimes through the forest. Along the way we bumped into a few White-lipped peccaries, a troop of Capuchin monkeys, some massive trees, crabs, and various types of creepy crawlers.

The walk into the Park was followed by a few hours of relaxing on a nice beach, more snorkeling and swimming, before heading back to our accommodation in the late afternoon. With hindsight, we were glad to have chosen accommodation just inside the Park boundary, this way one can make use of the early morning hours when it's easier to spot animals and when it's generally less busy. The Park otherwise only opens to visitors at 8am.

The following day, on the way back to Cartagena, we stopped at another sight we had read about, a "mud volcano" (...there are some hilarious reviews on Tripadvisor). This is a mountain of clay which a bunch of local people have piled up next to a lake and where one can take mud baths. First you have to climb to the top, then climb down into the mud "crater", down there one gets a little massage, and once you had enough you can wash the grey sauce off in the nearby lake.

To get in you pay about 2 Euros per person (but one is also expected to give everyone a tip in the end, the boy who give the massage, the boy who guards your camera and takes your photos, the ladies who help you to wash off the mud... you get the idea). Sounds less fun than it was but have a look at below slide show to get a better impression of this somewhat surreal experience... (high-res version here).

On our last day in Cartagena - we were on our way to the beach one last time - we sort of got lost on our way out of the city. We had a decent map but we must have missed a turn somewhere. There were people and cars and buses everywhere, motorcycles squeezing through, in brief... a proper mess.

We stopped and Patricia asked for directions. Of course nobody could really read a map, but they had a better idea, which was to hire a motor cycle taxi for a bit more than 1 Euro to guide you out of this mess back to the highway you wanted to be on... who says you need a Sat-Nav these days...?!

That's actually an observation we made several times during our brief visit to the North of Colombia: people were generally very friendly and genuinely happy to help (it was almost awkward not to buy stuff from the different sales people as they were also so polite and lovely!! ;o))

A few more pictures below (and in higher resolution here):