A mud volcano and a stunning beach - Cartagena!

Lying in my hammock, looking out over the golden sand and into the glistening turquoise Caribbean sea, with a light breeze in my hair and a cocktail in my hand, I wonder whether this is the most beautiful place I've ever visited....

I had a lot of time to think about it too, life on the Caribbean beach of Playa Blanca is slow and relaxed.  In the end I rank it second after Hat Ranti beach on Phi Phi Island, Thailand.

 

As with many of these places, half the fun was getting there!  The normal way is on a direct boat from Cartagena for $35k. Myself, Kev & Lou (from Scotland) and Tamara (from Holland) chose the other option.  We hopped on a bus which dropped us off on the side of the main road about 4km out of Cartagena.  From there it was a brief walk down a hill through a small village to the side of a large river, where a fisherman agreed to take us to the other side.

The next step was to find someone on a motorbike willing to transport us to the beach. It wasn't hard, they had heard that four gringos were on their way so there were several bikes waiting to take us the remaining 17km.  The road was terrible but this just made the ride more fun!  $11.5k all up and got there just as the sun was going down - the money saved was put into a piña colada fund.

We found a place where we could sleep in hammocks right on the beach.  We'd planned to stay one night but immediately decided to stay two as the place was so beautiful.  The days were spent snorkeling, eating fresh fish, walking along the beach...the evenings were spent drinking rum....

There was only one thing that wasn't ideal - sleeping in a hammock might sound relaxing but it isn't!  It's quite hard to drop off when your legs are higher than your head.  I was also befriended by some puppies who only seemed to have energy at night and kept trying to get in the hammock with me.  This resulted in less sleep than I would have liked, but my only daytime task was to make sandcastles so I just about coped :-)

We'd gone to the beach from Cartagena, a large colonial city which has always been one of the main shipping ports in Colombia.  Over the years, it was sacked by Sir Francis Drake, attacked by pirates and suffered epidemics of diseases such as Yellow Fever - yet it was always rebuilt and restored to its former glory.  It was soooo hot and humid that after walking around for a day I had probably lost about 20% of my body weight.  The town has some nice buildings (of course), huge defense walls and people dance in the main squares during the evenings.

I spent one day wandering around and one day trying to apply for a new passport.  I have to say that the requirements for replacing a stolen British passport are excessive.  I technically need to provide the following:
 - a copy of my old passport
 - a scan of my emergency passport
 - my original birth certificate
 - my mother's original birth certificate
 - a scan of my driving license
 - two pictures certified by someone who has known me for two years
 - a crime report
 - a completed seven page application form

I think you can tell from my use of bold lettering which items I am least impressed with.  As if anyone carries birth certificates around with them!  Anyway, the people at the embassy seem to think that they will make an exception as I'm traveling.  The application is processed in the US so I am less than hopeful.  Also, not only did it cost about £130 to apply for the passport, but it cost £40 just to post the fekking thing!!

After all that I was in the need of some therapy.  Luckily there is the perfect natural phenomenon just outside Cartagena.  Volcán del Totumo is a small volcano that is mostly underground, the top 15m protruding from the ground.  Instead of containing lava, it hilariously contains a load of warm mud!

You can jump in the crater and cover yourself in the stuff, which apparently has healing properties.  The bottom is over 1,000 meters below you but it is so dense that you float about chest deep and it is almost impossible to sink much lower than that.  Every few seconds some sulphur bubbles up through the mud and pops on the surface - it's great fun!

I'm now in Taganga, one of the cheapest places to dive in the world.  It is also on the edge of Tyrone National Park, which is supposed to have some great beaches.  Should be good!  Here are a few more pics from the last week or so.

Puerta del Reloj, the Clock Door, the entrance to the old quarter of Cartagena.

You can buy these traditional sweets from underneath it.  They taste a bit like fudge but come in the shape of a small spooky baby, which is a bit freaky.

I was waiting ages to play the winner of this game.

Lovely colourful things made by people on the streets.  Allegedly.

My favourite fruit, the extremely tasty grenadilla.  I am going to become rich importing these to England.

Want a coconut? This guy just pops up the tree and picks you a fresh one for £2.  I asked him if he wanted to go climbing with me.  He said he'd ask his wife.

A large fort in Cartagena - no one could tell me what it was for.  I think there is a casino inside. 

Another great sunset from the walls surrounding the old town of Cartagena.

Someone offered to sell me this boat for $400k (about £160).  I was seriously tempted but it was debatable whether it could float...

This small spit of land is completely covered in high-rise apartments.  It is only about 50 meters wide and looks like it will sink if one more is built!

I was only slightly cleaner than this before I got into the mud volcano.

Colombia! Popayan to be exact...

I've made it in life - I am a millionaire (and still in my twenties!).  This is surely a good omen for Colombia...

You'll be happy to know that operation cross the border part two was successful - I arrived in the border town of Ipiales a few days ago.  Hurrah!

My emergency passport made the crossing a little more interesting.  The Ecuadorian guard interrogated me for 10 minutes as he thought it was a fake passport - I pretended I couldn't speak Spanish and in the end he gave up. The Colombian guard hadn't seen an emergency passport before so called over all the other guards...just so they could have a look!

I spent the night in Ipiales and visited Santuario de Las Lajas, a magnificent Gothic church built inside the canyon of the Guáitara River.

I jumped on bus to Popayan and settled in for the 8 hour journey.  Unfortunately we had two full police searches, where they took everything out of the hold and looked through it.  Each one took an hour so we were 2 hours behind schedule.  This conflicted with the driver's dinner time so he decided to stop the whole bus by a restaurant to have some food.  Everyone else joined in too.  We arrived 3 hours late, well after dark, at 10:30pm.

I've recently got round to signing up to couchsurfing.  For those who don't know, the idea is that you get in contact with locals who either give you a place to stay for a few days or meet up and show you around their town, or both.  I thought I'd give it a try and met up with Mani, who showed me around Popayan the next couple of days.  He introduced me to some local food, told me all about the town and we went out drinking in the evening with his friends.  I was surprised that I didn't run out of Spanish words over two days of conversation.  I was less surprised that I can't Salsa dance.  I need to learn how to do that.

Popayan is a small chilled-out town in the Southern countryside with some beautiful colonial buildings, nice parks and great food.  If you've read the blog before you're probably bored of hearing about colonial buildings.  Luckily there was a nice colonial bridge - built so the priests could walk from the rich South part of the town to the impoverished North, to give blessings to the dying who had some sort of plague.

I also wandered up a large hill to the three crosses that look out over the town.  Nice view, but they could do with a lick of paint.

Other than that, I managed to reschedule my flight, even though I'd already missed it - thankyou Avianca!  So I'm now in Cartagena, on the North coast.  Time to search out some beautiful beaches!  Will report back with my results in a few days.  Chao chao!

Quito - the non-crime stuff

It wasn't all crime in Quito - I actually did some stuff too!

After the Quilotoa loop I was looking forward to spending a few days in the same place, not lugging my heavy backpack around all the time!  I arrived fairly late at a bus terminal that wasn't on my map, so took a taxi into town and ended up at Casa Bambu - a great little hostel on the top of a hill.  With a rooftop terrace boasting lots of hammocks and the best views across Quito, I knew I'd be there for a while.

The reoccurring theme was Palacio del Gobierno, the grand palace where the president carries out his business.  You can go inside with a free guided tour to look at the state rooms, offices and hundreds of items presented to the president by other heads of state.  Free stuff is always a big draw for me - so it was the first item on the list of things to see.

Myself and Rita (from Norway) headed over at 11am to watch the changing of the guard and then visit the palace.

We were told that, due to the fact that the president had come to watch the changing of the guard, there were no tours that day.  Fail.  We re-visited the next morning and pretty much jogged there as we were late.  We got to the front of the queue and were greeted by the guard - "welcome, can I have your passports please?"....ummmm, who carries their passport while wandering around town?!  Fail number two.  The next day I went on my own - "sorry sir, there is an important conference on today, no tours".  Fail number three.  The next day myself, Rita and Fizal (from Indonesia) rocked up for the 11:30am tour - "there is no 11:30am tour today, please come back at 1pm".  We had planned to go somewhere else that afternoon and didn't have time to wait until 1pm - fail number four.

I didn't even really want to go to the palace that much but now it was getting personal.  I had a sneaking suspicion that the president was waiting behind the front door, laughing at me every time I failed to enter his palace.  Not to be deterred, I rocked up for the 11:30am tour the next morning and was told that there wasn't one today.  I told them I'd come back for the 1pm tour.  At 1pm there was a massive line so I got to the back, cursing myself for stopping off to try some weird ice cream.  They let 20 people in at 1:15pm and promised to let the rest of us in at 1:30pm.  Instead a large group of schoolchildren arrived and took the 1:30pm slot, so I had to wait until 2pm.  I think by then they had run out of excuses not to let me in, so I presented my passport and walked through security - finally, I'd infiltrated the presidential palace!!

It was average.  The most interesting things were the gifts that other heads of state had presented to Ecuador.  There were golden swords from Russia, gems from China, keys to lots of South American cities, commemorative coins from FIFA and native masks from Africa.  I searched for something from the UK, surely we had presented something to Ecuador at some point in time.  I finally found it - some James Bond stamps from January 2008.  Credit-crunch time I suppose...

The next day I climbed Mount Pichincha (4,696m) which gave me some beautiful views all across the country.  I could even see all the way to the famous Volcan Cotopaxi, a couple of hundred kilometers away!

There are two ways of climbing the mountain, the easy way, winding around the peak in a upward spiral, or the hard way, straight up the nose of the peak.  Obviously that was the way I chose and found myself tightrope-walking along ridges until I hit a sheer rock face that involved some serious climbing.

This would have been fun had I not had a large Lonely Planet guidebook occupying one hand.  After some seriously dicy one-handed climbing I made it to the top and was rewarded with a great view.

I spent 15 minutes wishing I could fly before heading down.

Third thing on the list was to visit the Equator, which is a few kms North of the city centre.  There is a huge monument built at the site where, in 1739, French geographers calculated 0 degrees of latitude (i.e. the equator).  The monument is surrounded by something resembling a theme park that has no rides.  It is a modern day ghost town.

Unfortunately for the French, they got it wrong (ha ha!).  The real equator, as measured by GPS, is about 300m down the road.  There is a smaller and much better museum that demonstrates some weird and wonderful phenomena that can be seen along the equator.  The first was the water trick - a bucket with a plug in the bottom was filled with water.  The bucket was placed over the equator and the water was let out.  The water drained straight out.  The same thing was done on the Northern-Hemesphere side of the equator line and the water swirled around anti-clockwise! On  on the Southern-Hemesphere side of the equator the water swirled clockwise!  If there was a trick I didn't see it - I was amazed that moving just 2 meters across the equator could have that effect!

My favourite demonstration however, was the balancing an egg challenge.  At the equator there is slightly more downward force than anywhere else on the globe.  For that reason it is easier (but still hard) to balance an egg on the head of a nail.  It took me two attempts but I managed to do it!

I spent a day wandering around the old town, visiting the El Panecillo hill behind the town to see the Virgen de Quito and La Catedral de Quito, a huge Gothic church.

The Virgen de Quito statue can be sen all across the town and is a change from the usual Jesus with his arms stretched out statue that most towns have.

La Catedral de Quito had some great stained-glass windows.  I'm not really sure why but I love stained-glass windows!

The most interesting thing that happened that day was that I noticed two sections of one of the windows had been replaced in the wrong place.  I mentioned this to the staff at the church and they straight-out refused to believe it was a mistake...see if you can spot them and make your own mind up!

The rest of my time was spent wandering the Old Town, looking at the beautiful old buildings and spectacular churches, and drinking in the new town with the people from the hostel.  I finally departed for the second time to Tulcan and managed to cross the border to Colombia.  Thanks Ecuador, its been a lot of fun!

Here are a few random Quito pics.  This piece of modern art reminds me of my good friend Steve Moody.

Nice building that houses the cultural centre.

Some cool graffiti.

A weird statue in the park next to us.  If I was famous, I'm not sure this is how I would choose to be depicted.

There was a sign that said please don't climb the statue.  It was impossible to resist!

The Ecuadorian coat of arms.

The room where the president has conferences.

A nice bunch of flowers from the people of Ecuador to their president.  I'm not sure who could have sent it as everyone I asked said that he was corrupt and that they hated him.  Maybe his mum.