The long trip inland - from coast to capital // San Gil, Bogota, 13 - 19 July

1. Palomino to Santa Marta - 1.5 hours (note to self / pro tip: the availability of bus snacks are dependent on the time of the day. Daytime buses have more variety - like chips, nuts, popcorn, whole fruit or fruit nicely cut in cups - like sliced mango in cups with lemon juice and salt! But on this evening bus we only had ONE lady selling banana bread and brownie, which turned out to be pretty dry even though when she asked how it is Nic and I both smiled and…didn't say it was bad.)

2. Santa Marta to Bucaramanga - 8 hours, overnight, freezing cold (tip: buses in Colombia are usually cold, but not always, but quite often. Always be prepared.) I also realised here that I sleep better with a podcast on.

3. Bucaramanga to San Gil - was supposedly 3 hours but delayed by an hour because they oversold the bus. But I made a Colombian friend on the bus who showed me photos of his toddler and his own music videos on Instagram. 

San Gil - conquering fears!

II wasn’t actually planning on coming to San Gil at all. San Gil is often labelled 'the adventure capital of Colombia' and honestly I didn't have that much interest in adventure sports, but Nic told me about beautiful towns that are easily reachable from San Gil by day trips, and Nic and Stef were going to San Gil on their way to Bogotá, and I had time to kill before starting Spanish course in Medelliín, so rather than being a loner again I decided to join them. Because it’s (almost) always better to travel with people, especially when you have the time.

(Nearly) Nothing gone to plan // Tayrona, Palomino, Punta Gallinas, 6 - 12 July

This was the week where nothing really went according to plan.

Well, my plans were so vague and flexible (it was pretty much just 'go from north to south, with some detours'), that it was so easy to alter or interrupt. That was the beauty of this trip - that I had the capacity to decide on the go. This was completely new to me, since whenever I went on vacation in the past it was never more than 10 days, because vacation days were so limited, so pretty much everything was planned weeks beforehand to maximise the use of time.

But with much more time on my hands, priorities are different. Seeing places is fun, but rest is also important. And even more so, people. In fact, people has been the number one reason for changing my plans.

And the beauty of this place is you'll always be able to find somewhere to stay.

Firstly, I wasn't intending on staying in Minca for 6 nights, as I mentioned in my last post.

In Minca, the Germans (Uli and Jana) and I decided to travel together for the next few days as we were heading in the same direction. So I joined them on a sailing trip they had found on Airbnb Experiences, and we travelled to Tayrona together.

Wasn't planning on going sailing

This is where I wish I had actually made use of my super-underutilized GoPro and taken some footage to capture the day. The short video that I could have compiled would have looked something like this: excitement as we hop onto a sailboat on a fabulously beautiful day, relaxing, eating, chatting, lying in the sun in our swimsuits and sunglasses and straw hats, a bit of being tossed around by the waves, a bit of captain-Sam-attempting-to-sail, jumping off the boat, swimming to and from the beach (one of the beaches in Tayrona), and finally ending with an unbelievable sunset as we head back to the Santa Marta Marina.

6 nights in Minca, instead of the 2 that I had intended // Minca, 30 June - 5 July

5 reasons

1. My airbnb and the host - it was nice to have a proper home to relax in, a kitchen to cook in (not that I did much), to stay as long as I want, in a quiet neighbourhood. David also cooked us breakfast every morning - arepas (with his secret ingredient - honey) with scrambled eggs and brewed good coffee from local farms. And we’d sit at his little gazebo in the garden watching the dog chase the butterflies, looking at the fruit trees blossoming in the sunshine, and talking about our travels and food with the other guests.

By the end of the week my host and I became such good friends he (attempted) to teach me how to drive a motorbike. His manual motorbike. I managed to drive it...but only once he put it in the right gear :P

We get all sorts of visitors at the Airbnb

Colombia: football and grafitti nation // Cartagena and Santa Marta, 26-30 June

Beers on the seawall, deserted beach hostels and an unbelievable discovery…

The sun feels closer here on the coast in Colombia. It is sizzzzzzzling hot. A couple hours of walking around already got me a watch-tan.

After the iphone debacle in the morning and a nice lunch of ceviche tostada to tame my mind and cool my body, I venture out in the afternoon-day sun for a 4pm walking tour. A free walking tour is my must-do whenever I visit a new place (usually a city), without fail, and is almost always the very first thing I google and then go and do when I arrive. It’s the most effective way to get to know a place, the people, and meet fellow travellers.

Camilo from Free Tour Cartagena was excellent - his story-telling of the history of Cartagena was informative and entertaining, gave us pop-quizzes, was really patient with us, and gave us lots of great recommendations for food, bars and salsa clubs. Charlie, one of the guys in my tour ended up going to one of those recommended restaurants 3 days in a row for lunch!

Cartagena

From the volcano to a pawn shop // Panama and Colombia 19-26 June

While I still can’t get over how beautiful the Pacific Coast sunsets at Nosara were, I think I’m still more of a mountain person than a beach person. I find comfort and tranquility in the terrain, the greenness, the cool air that comes with each fresh breeze.

In the morning I met up with Aiko again for breakfast, together with the rest of her yacht crew, for breakfast at Kwang Chow Restaurant for DIM SUM - YES I never thought I’d have DIM SUM for breakfast in Central America. To be fair it wasn’t great. The owner even gave me some recommendations for better Chinese food in the city, maybe because I talked to her in Cantonese. She said her restaurant is more for the ‘gwai lo’ tastes. But still it filled a craving for me.

The minibus to El Valle De Anton had 2 gears - death speed, or dead stop. It stopped several times along the way to wait around to pick up passengers, sometimes we waited for ages for just a few more passengers; the only consolation was seeing all sorts of bus snacks being sold by snack-sellers popping into the bus during those stoppages - cups of cut up fruit with condensed milk, plantain chips and nuts, churros…If I didn’t already have so many snacks with me I would have bought them all. When we were in motion, the bus would be going at full speed along the Pan-American Highway.

I stayed at the Bodhi Hostel - a nice simple hostel with a huge kitchen, huge garden and smoothies from heaven. I’m normally not one for dorms but they didn’t have private rooms and thought I could give up a couple nights of quality sleep and catch up when I’m back in my air-conditioned room and double bed in the 10th floor apartment in the city. More on sleep later.

Thief! And crocodiles. And dim sum. // Costa Rica & Panama 10 - 17 June

Before anyone freaks out, no I haven't been robbed, no one has been robbed.

After spending a couple more days in Nosara after the Spanish course and realising surfing isn't just a hobby one can just have a go at once in a while and enjoy, I packed up my flip flops and headed for the hills.

Monteverde 

I slept for the first half of the shuttle ride up, but after an hour or so and a coffee stop, as the shuttle started to ascend the altitudes, all I could do for the rest of the drive was stare out the window and admire the views. After spending 4 weeks on the coast I have missed the mountains, a lot. I even asked the shuttle driver to stop to let me take photos (I had the shuttle to myself, thanks again to low season). It was mid afternoon and the lighting was perfect. Rolling wooded hills, cows grazing on undulating green pastures, and even volcanoes in the distance with its tops just peaking through the clouds…

Miraculous coincidences // Costa Rica 2 - 9 June

"She is the luckiest traveller"

At 4:53am on Sunday 2 June, Julio my Airbnb host sends me a WhatsApp voice message, "we're about 10 minutes away". We are actually nearly 250km away from his actual Airbnb. But he's picking me up from Alajuela, near SJO airport, where I spent a cold sleepless night in a windowless room (closet).

How?!

Aspirations

Rewind back to about 3 weeks ago, when I was sitting in my room in Ojochal where I got too bored of cleaning casitas and not talking to people, and was looking at alternatives to how to spend the rest of my time in Costa Rica, and decided to go to Nosara to do a 1-week intensive Spanish + surfing course. I had also applied for their homestay, but their affordable homestays were fully-booked. So I looked at Airbnb, narrowed it down to 3 according to distance and budget. One was an entire apartment to myself with A/C but the host sounded like a Gringo; another was a room in a house with a pool with a lady who did yoga and meditation and also some kind of spiritual stuff that made it sound kind of iffy; and then there was Julio's place, a room in a Tico family house in a Tico area, with shared kitchen and shared bathroom and laundry facilities. I chose Julio's - while it was basic, it seemed the most "normal", and it was the closest thing to a homestay.