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...

We flew over the island of Aruba before making a turn to come into the airport, and we could see the battered east coast as well as the calm aqua waters of the west coast scattered with hotels. For a tiny island it sure has a lot of hotels! Our taxi driver was an interesting chap. He thanked God about every 5 seconds, for the lovely place he lives, the times when they get rain so his farms can produce fruit (not often, it hadn't rained for 15 months), and he eve...

We had another 4 nights in Georgetown after Kaieteur. We would have loved to continue through the interior of Guyana, to the Rupununi Savannah or Iwokrama Rainforest, anywhere really except Georgetown. Alas there was no way we could afford it in the absence of a major lottery win. We did very little each of the 3 full days we had. There is little to do, and its too fricken hot anyway! We were back in the land of sweat, poo smells, stagnant filthy canals and stre...