The bus trip to San Gil was relatively painless and quite picturesque. We found the hostel without too much trouble and used the hostel map to find our way to Gringo Mike's for dinner where they served enormous burgers and a really good brownie for dessert. In the morning we had a look around town and at the markets, and purchased some things to make dinner. Lindsay was still in quite a bit of pain, so we decided to take it easy for the rest of the day. The host...

There ended up being 17 people from our hostel on the Guatapé tour, so in addition to a 10 seated van they also had a 4WD and a crappy old corolla. We were in the crappy old corolla. Before we even got out of the city we had to get out so the driver could get it to the top of a steep hill. After stopping at a lookout point over the city on the way, we drove for quite a while to a small town called Santa Elena, where we stopped at someone's house with a ni...

Medellín wasn't originally on our must visit list for Colombia. It'll be just another city, we thought. Let's visit some more regional areas instead. However, a lot of people said it's really worth going to and we were able to get a cheap flight from Cartagena, avoiding the reportedly hellish bus ride, so we booked for 2 nights. The airport is a while out from the city so we jumped on a bus that took us down into the valley where Medellín lies, and...

In Cartagena we stayed on Media Luna, a main street running though the hip Getsemaní district which lies inside "The Wall" that surrounds the city, Las Murallas, a ridiculously thick fortress. Our bus drove through the other side of Cartagena, full of high rise hotels and casino's, before dropping us in the much nicer old part of town. We had a nice little hotel room, though there was an opening in the wall of our bathroom near the ceiling that opened straight...

We arrived in our hostel in Santa Marta, a big old house in one of the nicer suburbs in town. It was a great hostel, our room was huge, there was a bar, pool, huge TV and games room, kitchen, or you could have meals cooked for you. In the morning we went to reception to ask a few questions about places we wanted to visit, and as it happened, the hostel owner was an old Barker boy, from the year below Fergus. Seems like such a small world at times! That day we v...