Yet More Hysterical Outpourings

Earlier this week we set off for Tyrona, one of Colombia's lovliest, jungliest national parks, near Santa Marta.

The guide read:

'be wary of snakes. If you get bitten DO NOT let anyone take you Santa Marta! Find antivenom within the park!'

Which implied that if they did take you to Santa Marta, you might not be in need of any assistance at all. By which I mean, you'd be totally dead. From a snake bite. Oh the fear.

We arrived into Santa Marta in glorious sunshine. We arrived into Tyrona 2 hours later in pouring rain. So I put the special waterproof cover on my rucksack, Miranda stretched a ripped plastic shopping bag over her handbag, and we began walking incredibly carefully through muddy, rocky, thin paths. It didn't help that the path is strewn with roots to trip over occassionally, and more frequently to confuse with SNAKES.

The good thing about this state of terror though is that it doesn't, it can't, last for very long. Once you've walked an hour without being mawled by a jaguar, and a massive spider hasn't even jumped on your face like that scene in Aracnophobia, you begin to forget how utterly predatory the jungle is. With the fear evaporated, you begin to realise that the jungle is just the sort of place that holidays are made for.

Colombians are fully aware of this already. In fact, our campsite was so full of drum-playing, conga-line-forming Colombians that we had to spend the first night hammocking in the kitchen hut. The second night, however, we managed to haggle our way into the most extraordinary place I've ever slept... in a hammock in a tiny hut sitting on a rocky outcrop in the Carribean.

As the pitch black night descended, we decided to hit the sack. Turning on the torch we discovered a yellow snake right next to us. We screamed.

we slept up there

we trekked with our new Colomibian amigos Monica and Jose, a telenovela actor who managed to get a discount from everyone who recognised his chiseled face

sleeping in the kitchen tent

bloody look at it

the simple bare necessities of life: frisbee, lime flavoured cookies and a hammock

like most of the best things, we had to work for a taste of naked tropical beach paradise. the walk was not long, but it did invlove 20 minutes of dense jungle assult. there were deep trenches of treacley mud to wade through, barefoot as is the custom, large slithery bolders to scale. there were ants, large and red by the million, there were other insects of infinite sizes and formations, there were hills to mount, there were even more perilous ravines to descend, there was the ever present threat of a lurking snake. there was also no sign, no guide, no clue which of the many thin trails carved into the thick and frightening vegetation was the one which would lead us to to naturist nirvana.

against the odds, we found it.

an arc of utterly untarnished sand. ferocious waves roaring and tumbling over an off shore coral reef, elegant palms slinking and swaying moodily in the welcome ocean breeze.

a disney consturction of a beach, somehow fitted with a machine churning out freindly families of feeding pelicans, halos of humming dragonflies and oversized and benevolent butterflies in photoshop enhanced colours

identifying Jose, completely naked, surveying the wild scene from the top of a dramatic pile of boulders, we followed suit, removing suits. the latent nicholas cavanagh in me baring it's bottom.

The Greatest Menu In The World, Ever

A discovery of huge importance in La Ballena Hotel, Taganga, Colombia. Wow.

how is possible to translate 'pasta' as 'cash'?

Dangers and Annoyances

Are we going to die?

This is a question we ask ourselves every day. Colombia is an incredibly terrifying place. And not just the animals.

The top photo is a map of Cali. 25,000 people are killed here every year in drug related murders, and so we made sure not to go to a red zone, even though they comprised most of the map.

Many of the policemen carry huge AK47 machine guns. Some stand behind trees along the major roads near miliary checkpoints. When we bussed from Popayan to Cali and a soldier in full uniform ordered we all get out, we thought we were in for a miliary checkking. Instead of searching us, however, the soldier introduced us to a clown, a man in a furry racoon suit and a man in an inflatable soldier costume who gave us sweets and tickled Miranda. The soldier took a holiday-snap-esque photo of all the people on the bus with the clown, and then we got back on the bus. I think it was something to do with promoting the military, but it was incredibly odd.

The toilets are almost as terrifying as the soldiers, too. I won´t go into it, suffice to say that I did go into it.

Colombia´s Freaky Mannequins

You have to feel sorry for Colombia´s mannequins. They grow old but they will never die.

I am dressed as a mannequin now.

Meat Me In Bogota

At Andres Carnes De Res, you don´t just queue to get in. You have to queue to queue to get in. And that´s after a taxi journey so mammoth that the driver has to pull over and make you sign pages of paperwork at Bogota´s official border.

We made the trip as we heard that Andres Carnes De Res was the greatest restaurant in Colombia. Arriving though, it appeared to me that that the word `restaurant´isn´t really correct. I´d choose `theme park´. As you step through the door a man in a sombrero forces you take a shot of tequila from a hollowed-out lime. Walking on, as you eat from baskets of strawberries and are seranaded by a boysterous barbershop quartet, you notice that there isn´t a single space on the walls or ceiling on which a trinket isn´t hanging or flashing or hanging and flashing. When the menu arrives, it´s in a metal box operated by a little wheel which scrolls through pages and pages of meat options.

Above all this, it´s the diners that make Andres Carnes De Res truly great. The place is throbbing with drunk, attractive, drunk men and drunk women. Before, during, and after the meal, people will wander up to you to have a drunken chat. Noone really sits down to eat, but instead hovers around about 4 tables, picking at giant piles of meat and drinking from bottles of spirits. When the meat is taken away, people dance around and on the tables for long enough that they can sleep the taxi journey home.

What I´m saying is, you should go. Or alternatively, you should visit the experience-restaurant Miranda and I will soon found in Stepney Green.

Miranda turns the menu wheel to discover 100 new ways of frying meat

some of the meat

to give the whole experience a unique edge, we took the trip with 2 English girls who use the word `leathered´.

Tops

Tim´s top performance

the top three nicest things people have done for us
1. even when confronted with utterly cretinous gringos incapable of distinguishing a 1,000 peso note from a 10,000 peso note, shopkeepers in across Colombia have, on occasions too numerous to enumerate, laughed off our pecuniary peculiarities, handing back the money with kind councel.
2. a taxi driver in Bogota picked us up after a suitably terrifying cable car ride to a mountain-top view over the sprawling city, or the patches of it that we could glimpse through thick mist, smog and gaspes of thin air. the taxi driver made an unlikely u-turn after an entirely mouth based gesticulatory exchange with a police man (pointing with one´s hand, is, apparently considered quite rude) and we found ourselves hurtling and swirving round pot holes towards one of the many deeply slanting shanty towns on the city´s eastern edge. tim´s back straightened, his voice tightened as we drove further and further in the opposite direction from that which we had come. after a long-short while of entertaining unsavoury premonitions about our impending destiny, the driver´s circuitous mystery tour miraculously brought us to the upper peaks of La Candelaria, where we were indeed staying. many misunderstandings about the exact location, and a baffling torrent of completely unrelated and incredibly enthusiastic words in english from the driver - ´queen elizabeth´... ´fish & chips´... ´trafalgar square´... ´horse´- later, and we found ourselves walking merrily, if shakily, on our way with the driver insisting on a 2,000 peso reduction of the agreed price of the journey.
3. on the night of the 30th december we wandered out into the hot thick Cartagena evening to have a lovely meal. the lovely meal materialised sporadically, with my drink only arriving after the bill, but who needs yet another pina colada, when you can have an exemplary of Colombian kindness instead. for reasons irrelevant to this category, (perhaps more on this in the next) i needed a pharmacy. i needed one bad. leaving tim to a lone intermitant dining experience, i set out. it was 10.30pm, the old town´s salsa clubs and cobbleside restaurants were just getting going. all the pharmasists had, apparently, gone. i approached various people asking if they new of a late night ´drogueria´. no such thing in this part of town they said. walking frantically further from drinkless dinner, a short grey haired man of about 75 came limping after me. he had an alarmingly scratchy voice which, combined with the intense panting from his eager pursuit, was, well, alarming. undettered by my coolness he grapsed my hot hand in his and explaining that he had heard of my plight and knew of a pharmacy which would be open, lead me, perplexed, mildly anxious, and incredibly grateful straight directly to it. when we arrived, he stopped, kissed my cheek, bowed, and went on his way. what a man.

the top three threats to our bodies
1. 4 hours of sleep snatched in a Bogota-based 4 star hotel (paid for by the airline who cancelled our flight at 2am after a prolonged series of delays) resulted in an impressive array of giant swolen welts all over our bodies. these mini-mountains of interminable itch harrassed us for four subsequent days and nights. potions purchased from two further pharmasists proved useless at lessening the torturous need to scratch or the embarrasingly disgusting network of oozing scabs visible down our legs. a brief amount of internet based research confirmed our fears, no mosquito bite i´ve ever seen looked like this. we´d been singled out as nutritous snacks by a family of famished bedbugs. a word of advice on bedbugs: do not, on any account, undertake a google image search of bedbug bites if you believe you have been bitten by one. stronger advice still, avoid with absolute certainty, the Wikipedia entry on the subject. it left me me certain that i would surely never recover from the bedbug induced psycosis it outlined.
2. 5 days after this near fatal attack, we arrived in Cali, tired and a litte broken. retiring early to bed on the first night, we awoke to find that, whilst we had eschewed the revelry of the famed feria in favour of a restorative sleep, our old friends the Cimex lectularius had again found it´s way to my body for a night time fiesta and feast of it´s own. through some innately doomed deliciousness of my blood, i had again been savaged by bedbugs, whilst tim´s skin remained entirely unpunctured. this attack was more ferocious than the first, leaving me scarred in every sense. luckily there have been no psycotic episodes to date. a note to concerned readers: i assure you that i will not bring bedbug bedlam to your lives on my return. we are, for the time being, safe.
3. the worst, however, may still be yet to come... the Lonely Planet entry for Cabo de la vela - a remote Wayuu fishing village in the eastern most tip of Colombia - to which we will shortly travel, has the following advice for visitors to El Faro, a small light-tower on the edge of a rocky promontory: "The view is indeed stunning - just watch out for langosta, massive flying beasts the size of model airplanes, named for their keen resemblance to lobster." eek.

and finally, an update on the more curious components of our diet
two days ago we spotted this entry on a menu: a pizza of chocolate, banana, strawberry and yes, you guessed it cheese. tempted, we opted for the more traditional coca cola rice and chicken.




























































Top of the morning. Breakfast.