First Taste of the 'Muricas

Note: My photos of cities, beaches and rivers were a little scarce in Colombia as I generally didn't have my iPhone in pocket, thanks to all the stories of muggings and thefts that locals took every opportunity to impart to me. 

Also, nobody mugged or stole a thing the whole time, and people were generally very kind!

Leaving Nepal, I made my way to London to meet up with Kelly, and after a week of music festival debauchery in the UK we left together for Colombia - my first ever taste of South America!

North Bogotá rooftops

Our first week in Colombia was spent mostly in the capital city of Bogotá. Home to 8 million people, Bogotá sprawls far and wide, and I'm told there's not a single local Bogotano that knows the entire city well. Bogotá must have the largest wealth divide of any city I've ever experienced; the northern part of the city is manicured and populated with fancy cars (although nothing like the Arab Gulf), while downtown seems to crawl at night with the homeless and drug-addicted. The graffiti along the highways is a true work of art (for which I never had a camera handy), and there are so many great restaurants in this gargantuan metropolis that a food-lover could happily spend years exploring them all.

Spooky Gold at the Museo del Oro

Bogotá also sits at 2600m up in the mountains, so despite being the capital of an equatorial tropical country that knows no seasonal change apart from rain or dry, it's blimmin' freezing - and quite hard on the lungs for lowland dwellers such as myself! It took me 3 visits and an accumulated 2.5 weeks in Bogotá to stop having random fits of gasping for breath.

The game of Tejo - Colombian bowling!

(You chuck a big chunk of metal at a cluster of gunpowder packages set on a clay panel,
and hope for explosions, all the while mandatorily getting drunk as a skunk.)

After hanging out with friends (Jemma, Jacques, Natalia, Ana-Maria and others - hey!) for the first week in Bogies, we took off up north to the Caribbean coast. Actually we didn't "take off" at all - rather we stumbled across the country missing flights, catching local buses in the pitch dark that took us miles past our destination, scrambling about and backtracking on motorbike taxis before finally arriving in "Costeño Beach" for our first few days of itchy itchy mosquito interviews. We managed to squeeze in 2 days of surfing hard, pounding, and completely unsuitable waves, and 1 day & night of obligatory rum drinking in the Caribbean with pirates Irish folk, before heading out to meet friends in the old town of Cartagena.

Caribbean Backpacking

Cartagena was listed as one of the top 10 places to visit before you die, and it's true the old town was gorgeous, an old colonial Spanish kind of feel with a Colombian twist. Botero's work & influence appeared scattered around the place as it does everywhere in Colombia - even the rubbish bins seemed to have a bit of a fatty-boom-batty stylistic effect - and we had yet more brilliant food experiences including the best sushi I've ever tried. To mix up the mosquito-bitten hammock-sleeping traveller vibe from Costeño beach we stayed in a 5-star hotel for 3 nights, thanks to mates-rates, and strongly considered stealing the bed and bringing it with us as we departed by bus to our next stop, Medellin.

Roughing it, 5-star style, in Cartagena

Medellin is an awesome city and definitely deserved more than the 2 nights we had reserved for it. It's very hard to define why after such a short time, the city has a sort of je ne sais quoi and a vibe that just feels very positive, despite an apparently similar amount of homelessness and drug-addiction to Bogotá. We met up with old friend Ulises who showed us around the city centre for a while, and led us to the Botero museum. We also found the one and only jazz club in all of Medellin, where kids as young as 16 were playing some dazzling renditions of old standards on a Tuesday night, and we chatted with the bar owner and the musicians until the bar had to close.

Typical Colombian Musical Instrument
"Escopetarra" in Medellin

Leaving Medellin we bussed down to a little town called Doradal and stayed in the aldea to the side of the town - an amazing little village built in Greek style, including Roman pillars holding nothing up alongside whitewashed water wells, produced by none other than Pablo Escobar, whose wifey had wanted to hang out in the Med without actually leaving town. I might point out at this stage that Colombian women can be pretty high maintenance gals overall, and Pablo's honey seems to have taken it to extremes, but thanks to her we had a stunning place to chill out in. By day we took a bus to the nearby Rio Claro river, a bit of a touristy spot where an idyllic wee river runs down a bed of solid marble, flanked by mountainous jungle.

Part of the Aldea Doradal

Our first day at Rio Claro was spent trekking upstream and tubing back down in rubber tyres, where I awesomely managed to lose my sunglasses, the shirt off my back, and a cool $50 from my board-shorts before the day was through. On our second day we decided to do a guided tour of a waterlogged cave network that runs for half a kilometre through the mountainside before opening up beside the river. The cave system is home to birds called Guácharos, or Oilbirds, which live and behave much like bats... What it's not home to however, at least not in any normal phase of it's existence as a pitch-black series of underground marble pools of chilly fresh water, is dogs. Which is why it was all the more inexplicable that our group of intrepid tourists should be accompanied by a middling to large coffee-brown dog weighing, I can personally attest, about a million kilos.

Out the back of the Aldea

Our tour began with an hour-long trek up and around the mountainside to reach the entrance to the cave systems, and the dog (duly named Cagado) got stuck several times in the rockier areas of the trek. His caterwaulin' and shrieking rebounded through the jungle whenever he felt that the group was continuing without him, and our guide took it on himself to return to the dog and help it along. It was at this point that everyone in the group began to realise that the dog belonged to nobody present, and it was precisely at this point that everyone in the group should have realised that taking a dog that could get itself stuck in a rocky pass on dry land into a wet and pitch-dark cave system spanning half a kilometre was not going to be a good idea. After optimistically assisting the dog through several more difficult passes, we succeeded in getting it inside the caves.

Beetles the size of rats around here!

Half an hour into our cave journey, our mad canine companion became stuck at a particularly impassible section - notably the first of many 2m drops into the next pool along - and our guide left us alone to try and help it through. 15 minutes later Kelly and I decided that the guide might not feel professionally able to ask anyone for help, so we turned back to assist. It took all 3 of us to successfully retrieve the mutt from deep in the caves, and bodily hurl the howling hound into the next pool - to the applause of all - and this pattern of motion was rinsed and repeated for the next interminable length of time as we waded deeper and deeper into the abyss.

To cut an already long story short, we managed to escort ourselves and the dog to the cave's exit on the edge of the river to find ourselves standing atop a 5m drop onto rocks, the descent of which is made possible for humans by a rope net. Sadly, the rope-ladder has yet to be conceived of for Man's Best Friend, and prospects were looking grim indeed. When he felt nobody was looking our confidently smiling guide shot me a brief glance of terror, before getting me to escort force the dog up to the edge of the cliff while he rolled up the rope net. To Kelly's and my horror we found ourselves loading the dog into the net, desperately trying to keep its neck out from between the netting, before unceremoniously dumping the lot over the edge. I was sure its 4 legs would go in 5 different bone-breaking directions but miraculously the dog was deposited safely at the river's edge, and it duly swam to the other shore and to safety. Memorable indeed!

Cagado after the adventure!

Eyes of Terror

...

After making our way back to Bogotá, Kelly took off back to the other side of the world leaving me to fend for myself, so I decided to disappear to the great Amazon jungle for a week and see what it might hold for me. Flying to Leticia, a border town touching Peru, Brazil, and Colombia, I prepared to launch myself into the wild and see what surprises it might hold.

Leticia, on the Amazon frontier between Colombia, Brazil, and Peru

Cruising the mighty Amazon river

Good friend and biologist Natalia had spent time working with the river turtles in the Amazon some years before, and recommended me to stay with the medicine man Don Rogelio, a 78 year old shaman living in the bush some 5 minutes walk from the nearby indigenous community. After catching a boat upriver and asking around for help, I managed to locate Rogelio and was warmly welcomed to stay in his cabin with him for the next 3 nights.

Jungle Life

The first night with Don Rogelio I was allowed to partake in an Ayahuasca ceremony with Rogelio and his middle-aged American apprentice from Chicago who currently speaks little to no Spanish, named Randall. I have no idea how Randy is learning his trade, but he was a cheerful fellow and very easy to take a liking to! They explained to me that Ayahuasca is a potion prepared chiefly from the leaves of the ayahuasca plant, and it is used along with lots of tobacco and ceremony as a healing and purgative treatment for almost anything that ails ya by the indigenous people of the Amazon. Now, if you read up on Ayahuasca Effects, you will find many claims to spiritual awakenings and grand life perspective changes; in my case all I received was 4 hours of vomiting so hard it was coming out of my nose in the sweaty and starless depths of the Amazon jungle, swatting limply at insects the size of rottweilers, and having a nice wee chance to contemplate life. I'm pretty good at the old contemplation gig already, so I might give the vomiting a miss next time and just have a good ol' cuppa tea.. But don't let me discourage you should you find yourself inhabiting the shack of an Amazonian healer, it was definitely a vivid experience to tick off the list!

Nearby indigenous village

Maloka, a sacred community house

The rest of the time was spent being guided around the jungle and various indigenous communities, or sitting around in Rogelio's hut chatting or playing guitar whenever the lightening storms weren't roaring too deafeningly to hear ourselves think. It was incredible to spend time in such an ancient cultural setting. No electricity or water or anything outside of the villages. You bathe in the muddy stream nearby. People have 1 or 2 neighbours 30 minutes walk away in the jungle; they marry early and work the land and fish and seem to produce entire villages worth of progeny by themselves (Rogelio had 11 kids and 16 grandkids!) I guess it's how we all lived some 10,000 years ago, proper Jungle Book style? At the same time it was easy to relate to a lot of the people thanks to the Spanish spoken there, and it was awesome to feel myself somehow "fitting in" - especially when compared with villages I've seen in Thailand many moons ago, where I couldn't find a word to speak to anybody.

The Don & I

All done and thanks Colombia, you were brilliant! Next up a brief stop in Panama, before I head to Costa Rica...