30/8/05
Hey there friends, family and other furry animals…
Well we are currently sitting in Panama Airport on our way to Nicaragua and honestly, after all the scary stuff we were worried about, we LOVED Colombia and saying goodbye is actually really sad…
Colombia has been such a friendly place to travel and the raw natural beauty of the place is definitely one of the world’s best kept secrets… We have now totally joined the masses who have been converted and we now would say that Colombia is definitely the best country to visit in South America.
In actual fact, for all you funny bunnies who have been to South America and didn’t make it to Colombia, you definitely have to try and get back someday soon as we reckon Colombia is poised to be the next big thing and it would be great to see it now before it is spoilt by tourism…
It wasn’t all good though… After our last email we headed north to Cartegena which was meant to be this fantastically beautiful world heritage listed colonial town on the Caribbean Coast that everyone raves about…
…but instead of being charming we found it noisy, hot, dirty and stinky… which is fine if you like your cities …or women… that way, but we definitely preferred the tranquility and friendliness of the south.
The town definitely had some really nice colonial architecture and some amazingly fantastic history and the city is surrounded by a fortified wall from defending against pirates back in the 1600s which is sort of cool… however, we stayed in the grotty backpacker end of town and it SUCKED dead dogs… LITERALLY!!!
Now normally when we read in the guidebooks that the backpacker area in a town is in the dirty budget end of the city, we normally ignore it, as those areas are often full of character and charm… However, after almost going the biffo with a rorting taxi driver, and then walking out of our hostel to find a decomposing dog on the sidewalk next a lady happily selling sweets, we totally FLIPPED OUT!!!
We don’t normally cut short a visit, but we decided this time to hightail it back to the south, especially since Cartegena is a definite overated FAT TOURIST town so everyone is out to be your amigo and rort you…
The only redeeming factor is that we got to get some mud in our cracks…
Now, we’re not talking about when you have diarrhea and you accidentally slip out a wet fart that leads you to proclaim proudly to your mates “…ew…I think there was mud with that one…”
…No… instead we got to swim in Volcan Totumo a 20m big mud volcano!!! Apparently, when rotting material decays, it causes gases to bubble up and liquify mud that then forms a volcano, and the thing to obviously do is to swim in it…
You can check out photos of our muddy bits on our website as it was so much fun being a pig in mud… But even more fun was then getting stripped butt naked and washed down by the local women in the nearby lagoon… sigh… it won’t be until 20 years time when Avril is older, that I’ll get to be felt up by a postmenopausal woman with saggy tits again…
Other than that, we headed south again to an amazing cathedral called Sanctuario De Las Lajas which is built into the side of a valley where Mary was supposed to have appeared… It is definitely the most amazing church we have ever seen and heaps of miracles have supposedly appeared here although the biggest miracle is that we didn’t throw up from all the deep fried guinea pigs that line the entrance way… Even though they are the local speciality, I won’t forget the looks on their little deep fried faces…
Anyways, we have now posted up the rest of our Colombia photos which start half way down page 2. We also forgot to post the pics of the fashion show that we got on our plane, so they are up too…
And lastly, we get a lot of people who keep saying that they would like to travel to exciting places like we do, but they don’t feel that they are as intrepid as we are… SO…as promised we have posted up a diary entry that I wrote on the day before we got to Colombia to show that we are just NORMAL paranoid scaredy cats with big puffy tails… if you want to read it and have a laugh at how PARANOID I was, just click here.
It’s a bit long winded so don’t read it unless you like psychobabble or if you want to get a glimpse into Ced’s head- which you may be surprised to find is filled with more than just bubblewrap, fluffy bunnies and cereal box toys…
But basically we got the idea from our mate Darren’s website and wanted to do a before and after Colombia post to show how much unbalanced media controls our fears and how fear of the unknown can really freak you out…
And we reckon that fear of the unknown is one of those things that not only stops people from travelling, but also from progressing with anything in their life so we’ll always look back on Colombia as more than just a cool funky place… it was more about a place for overcoming fear…
…oh and it is definitely the BEST PERVE in Latin America… for boys and girls, and we definitely will sign off by saying GRACIAS for the GRASSY-ARSEs as Colombians have the best butts too!!! (thanks to Dom who I stole that saying from)
Wishing you lots of Love and Smooches and Mud Bunnies in your pants
Wet Cheeks Ced and Mud Taco Avril
PS Trip Stats for anyone who is interested. Colombia is dangerous for sure but the dangerous places are well demarcated and easily avoided and all the tourist sites we went to are nowhere near the guerrilla zones. The current president is doing a really good job with security. The kidnapping risk seems non-existent as most of these are political or of wealthy people and we know that none of our friends are wealthy. We wouldn’t advise taking night buses for the risk of holdups, but we took several day buses and never felt that they were unsafe. The mugging risk is no worse than any other capital city and Lima and Quito seem to be much more dangerous than Bogota. You do need at least some backpacker Spanish to get around and feel safe as there is not much English outside of Bogota. If you have been to other latin american countries, then you will breeze through Colombia as it is much the same feel.
PPS I got pickpocketed for the first time on a bus in Bogota, but I give them a big thumbs up since I was actually watching closely for pickpockets and they still got me… They only stole my decoy wallet though… the fuckers…
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