Tuesday 6 August - Wednesday 7 August

Santa Marta and PNN Tayrona, Colombia

The $20 shuttle we'd booked from Mamallena's Hostel to Santa Marta was bang on 1 hour late, which left us with time to sample some Colombian fried breakfast goodies - arepas - corn pancakes filled with cheese or a fried egg...we managed to buy the dud and had one with no filling - just good old plain fried corn - eugh - Gary managed to finish his and the rest of mine and I will not touch them ever again - they're worse than a corny joke. After a 3 hour journey up the coast past the town of Barranquilla, the shuttle dropped us right outside the front door of our hostel in Santa Marta - Drop Bear Hostel - we chose it as it was previously an old drug cartel house, and we were interested in the Cartel House Tour the Aussie owner offered three times a week.

The hostel was huge, filled with Aussies, and they couldn't give us the private room we had booked on hostelbookers. After a bit of re-shuffling with two guys who had booked a private but didn't want to share a double bed, we were finally given their private room, which was set inside a dorm room - hmmm, not so private after all, plus we shared a bathroom with the rest of the dorm. Unfortunately, with a number of faulty locks on the doors - I managed to have some random bloke walk in on me whilst on the loo - sooo mortified - what's wrong with knocking on a closed bathroom door rather than just waltzing straight in? Deciding to go to bed early that night for an early start the next morning to Tayrona National Park was not the best idea in a full hostel...after the music was turned off around midnight, we had a bunch of lads chatting and laughing outside our room until about 4am. I am so going to get you back tomorrow night - just you wait n see...Its amazing what horrible things you start dreaming up of doing to fellow backpackers who deprive you of sleep...I could start a new reality TV series with all my evil ideas and call it "Hostel Wars". At least these thoughts help me drift off to sleep.

Its 6am and we're up and out the door to catch the bus to Tayrona by 7am - not bad on 2hours of sleep. Tayrona is a National Park 45mins north of Santa Marta with exquisite beaches. This is the priciest National Park we've been into yet - $20 each admission fee, then another $2 shuttle or you can walk for an hour to the hike starting point where its another 2hour hike before you reach the beach! Since we were only staying for the day, we hightailed it onto the shuttle bus and headed up the hill to start our hike. It wasn't the most scenic nor enthralling hike we've been on yet, but it was punctuated by some Titi monkeys trying to drop coconuts on our heads - little b*****s - do they know how many people die from falling coconuts each year!? Me neither - but its a lot! When we finally did make it to the beach, we were met with a No Swimming sign - great, it was a turtle breeding beach...but unfortunately no turtles in sight. So we continued hiking on to the furtherest beach called El Cabo which is where you can also camp for the night or hire a hammock. By the time we got to El Cabo and were met with the sight of not one but two exquisite beaches, we were cursing ourselves for not staying the night as we'd only have a few hours there before we had to start hiking back. After a day of sun and surf, we started heading back and were glad not to be standing in the 'queue', if you can call it that?, to rent hammocks...it looked like there were definitely more people than hammocks and a bun fight was about to break out. So we managed to end up on the wrong path on our hike back out which also happened to be the horse trail, so most of the hike back was spent hoping we weren't getting ourselves lost in the middle of this massive national park whilst dodging passing horses and their smelly giant turds.

Back at Drop Bear, we unlocked our private room, only to find not our bags nor belongings, but someone else's - had we let ourselves into the wrong room? Freaked out about our things, we raced down to reception to find it all stuffed in a corner there and us without a room for the night. The private room we'd been given the day before had already been booked by others a week prior...their stuff up, not ours - so the apologetic owner comped us a free night in a dorm. Not ideal, but you cant complain when its free! That night I also won free punch after naming it "Cartel Coolade" in honour of the Cartel Tour we were about to set off on. The hostel owner started the tour in the bar area, which was the original leather covered bar, that it was rumoured, Pablo Escobar had even sat and had a drink at. He regaled us with stories about the Drug Lord (whose now dead) who previously owned the house and how he used to stash gold and money in secret compartments in the walls and ceilings all over the house. He's broken a few down to search for leftover stash - but is yet to find some. Then again, I wouldn't tell anyone if I'd found anything either...We were shown a secret escape route which had since been filled in with concrete which was an escape tunnel in his bedroom cupboard that led out to one of the houses in the neighbourhood, as well as a tile removed from the kitchen floor whilst renovating with swiss bank account details inscribed on the back of it. No doubt for money laundering purposes. The druglord also had a HUUUGE satellite on his roof for international calling, so he was never out of comms and could be in the know if anyone was on his trail. All very interesting - and man there are a lot of bathrooms in that house - 14 in total - all covered in Italian marble.