Hi all, we’re having an amazing time in Ecuador and our Spanish course is fantastic we’ve been really busy but we thought it was time we published the next post. The following is our trip to Quilotoa a lake in a collapsed Volcano high up in the Andes. It’s quite close to the Cotopaxi volcano which is currently closed due to the threat of eruption, however just before we were due to depart we checked with our Spanish school that where we were going was safe (which it was). The story starts on our first morning in Ecuador….
Quilotoa crater lake
We woke up in Quito and enjoyed a room service breakfast. Alex ordered it on the room phone in English and when she asked for juice they interpreted it as cheese. She corrected them and thought that they understood however 20 minutes later our order of waffles, coffee and two plates of cheese arrived. Since we haven’t had any similar problems when ordering in Spanish I think we’ll be sticking to it from now on!
We had a couple of nights in Bogota before the flight that we’d booked to Quito, Ecuador. We got back to our hotel and the staff were all pleased to see us. In many ways it is the closest to a homecoming that we’ll get in the next 6 months so it was nice to back somewhere that we knew. Having had a brief taste of home with our Indian food in Salento and still craving spice, we had dinner that evening at an Indian in Usaquen. Although it was not a cheap meal it was as good as a curry back home and a welcome change!
Hi all, the below happened about three weeks ago. In the intervening time we’ve made it to Ecuador, walked the Quilotoa loop and started our four week Spanish course. Unfortunately a combination of poor Internet and a lack of time have made getting things published quite difficult. I’m actually writing this now from a hammock in the middle of the Ecuadorian rainforest where the nearest internet access is a 4km walk away in the nearest town! Anyway hopefully I’ll be able to publish this soon as I have a huge post on the Quilotoa loop nearly ready to publish after this one! In the meantime the story continues with us leaving Cartagena in Colombia…
The flight to Pereira was delayed by an hour but otherwise uneventful. Once we arrived in Pereira we had to decide whether to catch a taxi straight to Salento or to get a taxi to the bus station followed by a local bus. There were only three buses a day and every source of bus times had contradicted each other so we knew that there may be a long wait for a bus. We were just debating what to do when an English couple, looking equally confused asked us if we wanted to share a taxi to the bus station. We mentioned that we were considering a direct taxi and they immediately jumped at the chance, cutting our cost in half! We’d pre-booked a hostel, El Ciudad de Segorbe, for our stay in Salento but the other guys hadn’t so once we arrived they headed off to look at the options. Twenty minutes later they arrived at our place and checked in after us. The guy who checked us in spoke perfect English and quickly gave us a full brief on what we should do in Salento.
Our journey to Cartagena was on a tourist transfer bus that picked us up from La Brisa Loca, made a couple of quick stops then headed to Cartagena. Looking out of our windows on the journey we saw our first taste of poor rural Colombia. There were miles and miles of simple, often unfinished, terracotta brick or concrete box houses with corrugated tin roofs on small, sometimes rubbish strewn, plots opening onto unpaved roads. Some of these were more elaborate, plastered and painted at the front, with additional sections, front walls and gardens, but many were basic 5m by 3m boxes that had obviously been put up purely to provide a roof over the owners heads.
The view from Castillo San Felipe de Barajas
In many ways rural Colombia reminded me of Africa, and shows that in a country that in many ways seems very developed that there is still a population living in very real poverty and a high level of wealth inequality between the cities and the countryside. At the other end of the spectrum Colombia’s cities have been a surprise, offering a similar variety of quality products and services that you would find in any European city. From the food we’ve eaten, especially in the more locally orientated restaurants in Bogota, it is clear that Colombia has a large and culturally astute middle class. On one of our first days in Bogota an old Colombian lady had told us (when we told her where we came from) that Europe was the first world and that Colombia was a third world country. We were puzzled by this comment at the time but while we still don’t necessarily agree with her, we can at least start to see where she was coming from.
We arrived in Cartagena from the east which took us past the airport and pretty much straight into the historic centre. We were dropped off at El Genoves, our hostel for the first night.
As Alex described in her previous post we went to Santa Marta with the aim of visiting the Parque Nacional Tayrona. We didn’t really go into this adventure knowing much about the park but it featured in “The Gringo Trail” by Mark Mann, one of the books I read before heading out here, so we thought we go and have a look for ourselves!
After a long sleepless night we headed over to the market to catch our bus. We did have the option of a door to door transfer with our hostel for the equivalent of £4 each but we opted to pay just over £1 for the local bus. It wasn’t really about the money though as we really wanted to see the journey from a more local perspective.
Motivation aside we wound our way through the market area looking for the intersection of Calle 11 and Carrera 11. It all started to feel just a little less salubrious around us and all of a sudden none of the streets were labelled. To cut a long story short we eventually managed to overshoot our destination by a street and by the time we got to the bus we were sweaty and exhausted. Luckily we had a 40 minute bus ride to recover so we set off and kept our eyes peeled for our stop. As it happened our stop was impossible to miss due to the obvious park entrance, the conductor shouting Parque Tayrona at us and all the other Gringos getting off the bus with us.
Hi Guys, Alex here, I (well Chris) thought it was about time that I wrote a post so I’m going to cover Santa Marta and Chris will be back to cover Tayrona National Park.
Santa Marta is a city on the Northern Caribbean coast of Colombia, it’s mostly a stop off point for travellers visiting Tayrona but is also a huge holiday destination in it’s own right for many Colombian tourists.
We arrived into the tiny Santa Marta airport right next to the sea and were met by a wall of heat and humidity when stepping off the plane. We grabbed a taxi and headed to our hostel. Along the way the streets looked far more colourful and vibrant than in Bogota with lots of people selling things on the street and a much more casual dress code!
Our first day in Colombia started slowly. There were a few things bits of admin we needed to urgently sort out that we just hadn’t had time to do in the UK. The other important thing to do was to work out what we’d be doing after Bogota. We were now three nights away from having nothing booked and having no idea what we were doing next. We did some research and came up with a draft itinerary for Columbia:
Bogota (4 nights)
Santa Marta
Tayrona National Park for a night or two exploring and sleeping in a hammock
Cartagena via another night in Santa Marta
Pereira (in the coffee growing region)
Back to Bogota
Ecuador
We have arrived in Bogota, Colombia. More about that later, I really want to use this post to document some of the fun we had in the week or so prior to our departure.
I had a nicely phased exit from work. Thanks to the Cunningham’s wedding I was able to do a three day week and then finish on a two day week. On the Tuesday night of that second to last week I had a great night out with the work team, followed by the wedding two days later. Finally we had a party in London for friends attended by some of our closest friends from work, university, London and even a few school friends. Even though it was all a bit last minute and hectic, it was a lot of fun spending a few nights surrounded by some of our favourite people. To top it all off I was presented with a huge pile of gifts from my work colleagues including some very useful items (new flip flops, awesome portable BBQ, disposable ponchos, US Dollars) as well as some amusing but slightly less useful gifts (rubber duck, fake moustache etc). That weekend we went up to Nottingham for a leaving party with the family, and to deposit my car safely on Dad’s drive. The party was a roaring success and a great way to see everyone.
After a year or so of procrastinating Alex and I have decided to take some time off work to spend 6 months travelling around South America. You are probably reading this because we’ve given you the web address so that you can keep up to date on our exploits! Since we haven’t actually gone anywhere yet I thought I’d answer a few questions that have come up when we’ve told friends and family about our plans.
Why?
This is an easy one. We’ve both loved travelling since we spent part of our gap year in Botswana. For me this was an experience that totally changed my outlook on life and made me a happier, less material person.
I live in a not especially spacious flat in London and, due to the my technical nature and a strong desire not to fill my flat with any more stuff, I try to store as much digitally as possible. As soon as I started to rely on computers to store important documents, photos, music etc. I realised that I needed some sort of resilience Mirrored disks helped to protect me from disk failure however, in 2008 I was burgled. The kids who broke in were, luckily, only interested in portable electronics so my ancient grey server case was of no interest to them. Once I realised that this grey box contained irreplaceable data I knew it was time to start some kind of backup routine.
With the best will in the world there was no chance that I would remember to perform regular backups and store them with a friend or family so I started looking at something that would be automatic, reliable, secure and offsite.
