i´m in Colombia at the moment. My observations so far are as follows:

- You can get cappuccinos here (this is good).
- I've seen less guerrillas than I had imagined.
- There is no pervasive smell of petrol as in Venezuela (which I enjoyed).
- Almost every single commercial establishment sells coffee. If you ask if they sell it you usually get a "Claro!" (which means of course) in a slightly insulted tone of voice.
- You don't necessarily get instantaneously kidnapped by a group of unruly types decked out in military regalia and automatic weaponry upon arrival in the country.
- The town of Cartagena is lovely but prone to subjecting the visitor to unexpected pungent aromas e.g. sewage.
- I'm getting increasingly annoyed by my inability to track down a suitable cowboy hat.
- It's hot here.

Anyway. The last blog was from Caracas, Venezuela's huge concrete monstrosity of a capital city. We headed out west towards a beach resort on the Caribbean coast called Puerto Colombia. This place had a nice beach but was quite windy (my least favourite type of weather) and the sea had big waves which spoilt it slightly for me. It was however the scene of my first utterly ridiculous purchase of the trip (how have a lasted this long?), a 7ft long inflatable crocodile. I named him 'Colin' (pronounced "Co-lin" as in the previous US Secretary of State Colin Powel and not "Col-in" as in the surname of expert drummer and singer of legendary pop song 'Susudio' Phil Collins), played with him in the sea and posed for photos before realising I'm now left with something taking up half my backpack and will probably take an unfeasible amount of time to blow up again.

Also in this place a few of us paid a lady called Margarita to take us on a hike through the neighbouring national park. I'll mainly remember this little outing for being nonsensically hot, nearly stepping on a snake, and discovering a tree on which something closely resembling elephant testicles was growing (see most recent photo album for irrefutable evidence).

Next stop was Los Llanos, another national park type area a couple of days drive from Puerto Colombia and famous for it's wildlife viewing. What was particularly exciting was the prospect of anacondas which we were led to believe we were in with a pretty good chance of spotting and something I have been banging on about pretty much since leaving Rio on the trip at the beginning of February. Luckily we had possibly the most audacious guide of my whole trip for our 3 days in the Los Llanos area, a bloke from Barbados who has been living in Venezuela for the last 20 odd years. He is a bit of a wildlife nut and has recently had a previously undiscovered butterfly species named after him, outrageously enthusiastic, and has a library of jokes that is so significant that you can give him a subject at random and he will know a joke about it. I did manage to stump him with the subject of circumcision and told him one related to a poor sighted circumciser getting the sac to add to his repetoire. The trip with Alan was excellent and inbetween his jokes we got to see pink dolphins, howler monkeys, an extremely rare mata mata turtle, tree frogs, numerous birds, piranhas, the bizarre looking anteater, caiman, an orinoco crocodile eating a rooster, and the elusive anaconda (since named Nigella by me).

The anaconda incident was absolutely hilarious. We were camping in hammocks out in the bush somewhere after touring the area in a boat during the day. After dinner and a few rum and cokes Alan took us out anaconda hunting in the dark, he had been poured quite a substantial rum and was therefore in an even more daring mood than normal. His sidekick Carlos somehow spotted an anaconda head popping up from the surface of the water in the pitch black by the bank of the river. Alan manoeuvred the boat over to that spot and then proceeded to leap out and position himself half in the river feeling around underwater for the snake and waiting for it to surface again for air. We sat there in silence in the boat right next to where the anaconda was appearing and it bobbed up once after 5 minutes or so but Alan couldn't quite get to it. When it came up again 5 minutes later he grabbed the thing behind the head before getting into a bit of a wrestling match with it to try and pull it out its underwater hole - this was more Steve Irwin style than the late great man himself. Eventually he and Carlos pulled it out and we all got loads of ridiculous pictures of the snake over our shoulders and wrapped around our necks etc. It was fairly small by anaconda standards (they can go to 8 or 9 metres in length) at about 3m long but still amazing nonetheless. Now that there is a tick in the anaconda picture box all that remains now is the amazon's biggest mammal - the tapir. Hopefully I'll be able to track one down in Ecuador/Peru/Bolivia in the next couple of months.

Post the excitement of Los Llanos we headed further west to the city of Merida and my first glimpse of the Andes on this trip. Merida is quite a nice place in the mountains, a bit of a student town and a good base for doing adventurous stuff like biking, canyoning, parasailing etc. It's also famous for an ice cream shop that holds the world record for greatest variety of flavours (they have sold over 1000 different ones over the years). I went for tuna, power rangers, beer, and jurassic park flavours none of which tasted very nice at all. After a day mountain biking to work up a decent sweat in the town's surrounding hills and a night out on the town at which I uncovered a hidden talent for dancing to reggea music, it was time to embark on a 24 hour journey to Colombia.

We dumped our big orange tour truck as they don't take it through Colombia for security reasons and caught an overnight bus back to Caracas (on which I realiseded while listening to my ipod that I really like the song 'All Night Long' by Academy award and Grammy award-winning american singer, songwriter, and occasional actor Lionel Richie) from where we flew to Colombian capital Bogota and connected on to the town of Cartagena.

Cartagena is one of south americas most historic cities and has a stunningly beautiful old town area with loads of colourful colonial bits and bobs going on. We've had 3 full days here to explore, drink coffee and eat in some very good restaurants indeed. The highlight of this particular stay was probably a short trip out of town to this peculiar volcanic mud bath thing. There's a big mound of earth that sticks up about 50 feet and at the top there is a bath of tepid mud that when you get in you are suspended just below the surface without sinking. you can get what must be a pretty unique experience of a back massage while floating. I posted some pictures on the blog.

It's too hot to type any more so I'm bringing this to a halt. We fly to Bogota tomorrow morning and have another week or so here in Colombia before making our way to Quito in Ecuador where the tour ends for me.

tchau