Galapagos Islands

This was definately the highlight of my trip. What a fantastic experience. Everything was total luxury, the boat was nicer than just about any other hostel I have stayed at, the food was wonderful, and most of all the animals were fascinating, and not in any way afraid of humans.

Regretably, words can not do justice to the experience, so I shall upload some images soon, which I hope will be able to help people understand how amazing the whole thing was. I have taken so many pictures, however, that I will have to wait until I get home to upload them. That will be in a couple of weeks, so not that long to wait...

I am in Guyaquil right now, Equador's biggest city, and frankly, I do not particularly like it. It is just another concrete jungle, and so far it seems to be more expensive than Puerto Ayora in the Galapagos. I will be making my way to Montañita soon where I will be resting on the beach until my return to Europe.

Quito

I arrived in Quito from Bogota by taking a plane to Pasto and then taking a bus to the boarder. What I had not realised was that the bus left me just at the boarder and had me cross it on foot. Oh dear...

It should not normally be a problem, but I arrived at the boarder at night, and everything always seems slightly more dodgey when the sun has gone down. Especially when you have all of your belongings on your back. There was no problem getting my passport stamped on the Colombian side (they were probably glad to get another gringo out of the country), but then there was about 100 metres of no man's land to have to cross with people trying to sell things, and they were the ones that scared me. I really could not imagine what I could have done if I had gotten mugged in no man's land, and someone stole my passport. How do you explain this to the immigration?

Thankfully none of this happened, and I eventually made it safely to the hostel in Quito that I had been recommended by several people. The reason it is so popular? They have free rum and coke nights on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. How could I miss out on such a fabulous offer? I am only human, after all. I arrived on a Monday night, just in time to take advantage of the rum, and started the downward spiral that would end up in what I thought was a terrible, unfixable mistake.

On tuesday, I went out and booked my flight for the Galapagos, which has been a dream since the beginning of the trip, so I was rather pleased with myself, but kept going and organised some Spanish lessons for 1 pound 50 and hour, and thought that if I kept doing things, there would be nothing else left to do for the rest of my time in Quito.

Skip to Thursday (morning after rum and coke), and a group of us decided to go to the basilica because it is possible to abseil down. For some reason it seemed like a great idea, and I went along with them despite my fear of heights and the fact that I have never abseiled in my life. The "guide" was not all that helpful either. I was looking for some last minute advice as he was telling me to climb over the edge, and all he could tell me was "hold on to the rope". Since there is nothing else to hold on to, I thought that it was pretty obvious and resented him for it, but once I got going, I realised that there really was not much else to tell me. It is a pretty simple process.

The mitad del mundo (centre of the world) is a museum just outside of the city where you basically just go and see the equator. At first it looks like nothing more than just a red line randomly painted on the ground, but there are a few experiments that they do to prove to you that you are actually at latitude 0.

Firstly, they show water draining, which was my favorite, because the water just goes straight down, rather than in a spiral. I had never seen such a thing. They them moved the same kitchen sink about a metre to the south side, and the water spun anti-clockwise. When they moved it a metre to the north side, the water drained clockwise. Fabulous.

The second experiment was to have us put our arms up and have the tour guide try and lower them. Being a woman of rather small stature, she failed rather dismally, but when we moved to the line, she managed to do it no problems with one had. Take that Damien's ego!

The final experiment consisted of trying to balance an egg on a nail head. This one sounded completely impossible to me, but when I saw the guide do it, it seriously brought my hopes up. It only took me a couple goes to get it, and frankly I could not believe it. They gave me a certificate, which looked really tacky, saying that I had in-fact balanced an egg on a nail head. No surprise that it was lost within hours of reception.

The rest of my time in Quito was just spent killing time between Spanish lessons before my flight on Tuesday morning. Tuesday morning... What a silly mistake I made when booking for that date. The rum and coke started flowing on Monday night, and I had to join in the festivities. The plan was to stay up all night, and catch my flight in the morning, but what happened was that when I got to the airport, I was really tired. How did that happen? Basically, I waited around, and by the time I stood up, someone told me the gate had already closed, and I could not get on the flight. This was one hell of a scary moment, because I thought that it was $400 out the window, but luckily flights to the Galapagos are very flexible, so I just changed it to the next available flight.

I have finally made it to the dream islands, and I will start a boat tour on Sunday. I can not wait.

Taganga

From San Gil, there were five of us taking a bus to get to Santa Marta. Only 16 hours, and a night bus, which means most of it would be spent sleeping. Perfect.

We wake up in the morning on a stationary bus in the middle of nowhere. No one seems to know how long we have been still, or for what reason. This nice little country road had a multiple car pile-up - not surprising considering how people drive here - and the police had just stopped all traffic from coming through.

This gave us a 5 hour delay, and to save time, the bus steward had the brilliant idea of skipping over the stop in the city of Santa Marta, making everyone who was going there get off. We were litterally in the middle of a desert, and no one in the group really understood what was going on, or how we were expected to get to our destination, but we followed the man anyway. He hailed over a colectivo (public bus), and paid for our fare into town. What we had not realised was that this bus did not go to Santa Marta.

On the colectivo, there was a nice man selling something, but it was difficult to understand exactly what it was. He was talking for a while, though, and I paid little to no attention to him, as per usual with these people. It seems like I was the only one, though, because he made a killing selling what seemed to be nail files. I could not even begin to estimate how many he sold, but some people were buying two. The things you see in South America...

The bus once again stops, and the man asks for people going to Santa Marta to get off and take a taxi. This was confusing us even further, but we were off the bus, and it had driven away before we had a chance to realise what was going on. The nailfile salesman had also gotten off, and realised that we had been done over completely by the Colombian bus system, and kindly took it upon himself to help out a bunch of dazed and confused tourists. He started talking to all the taxis and negotiated a good price for us to go not to Santa Marta, like the bus was supposed to, but Taganga, where we wanted to go in the first place.

Taganga is a beautiful little village in the outskirts of Santa Marta where absolutely nothing ever happens. Exactly how a village on the Caribbean coast should be. Palm trees, fishing boats, and people serving fresh fruit juices on the beach. What more could anyone want?

I spent several days there doing nothing durring the day, and partying hard durring the night. The Caribbean is not famous for its rum for nothing, I can tell you that. Some of the best rum I have ever tasted costing us next to nothing.

After many nights on the trot like this, my friend and I woke up at about 1pm, and went in search of the taxi rank. We needed to get into Santa Marta to get to the nearest cash machine (what is it with towns in South America not having cash machines). On to get a taxi, we must have looked pretty lost, because a police man walks up to us and starts talking to us. Normally, with the questions he was asking, we would have been able to understand him no problem, but our brains were feeling rather fragile, so we had to get him to repeat everything several times.

Neither one of us really knew what was going on. Having a cop come up to you normally means that there is a problem, so when he pronounced the word "vamos" (let's go), we really started to worry. What have we done? What does he think we've done? Are we getting arrested?

He takes us to the police station where he talks to his boss for a bit, and then he takes us to the taxi rank where he and his other two policeman friends get into a taxi with us. So at this point, we had told them that we were going to Santa Marta to take money out, and the only sensible reason we could think of why they would be with us was that they wanted some kind of bribe for whatever reason they could come up with.

We were slowly waking up, and the more we talked to them, the more it seemed like they just wanted to take us into town so that we would not get mugged after taking money from the ATM. Suddenly the situation became amusing. We now have a police escort to the bank. This will be my first, and probably my last time.

Once we successfully took money out, they followed us into the restaurant we went to, and sat down in the chair next to us. Apparently, they were joining us for lunch, also. They were acting all chummy, and talked to us about music, and sports, and whatever else young men talk about, only they were dressed in full police uniform, and were carrying guns. One of them actually put his gun on the table before sitting down. Seemed kind of dangerous, but whatever.

Then came the time to pay for the bill, and - surprise, surprise - we were expected to pay for their lunch. This is when it became apparent why they had followed us in the first place. Difficult to say no to a Colombian policeman with a gun, though. That's probably why neither one of us tried.

The whole day was spent with them following us to the beach, and constantly asking us if we wanted a beer or something to drink, knowing full well that if we got one for ourselves, they would be able to get one on us. We kept using the excuse that we had had enough the night before, and that we did not want to drink again today, but they kept persisting, which became really annoying after a while, and that is when we decided to leave.

I am now back in Bogota, where I am making a quick stop before heading off to Equador. Colombia was nice, but everywhere I went was just more of the same. I am ready to see something new. Bring on the Galapagos!