Cali is the third largest city in Colombia and supposedly the party capital of the country, Not that we were going to see any of that! We travelled for 20 hours straight to get to Cali, waking up at 5am to walk from Cabo San Juan to the National Park exit, then a bus journey to Taganga, then a minibús to Cartagena where we caught a flight to Cali. Sometimos travelling is jolly hard work. We arrived in Cali late at night and crashed at our hostel exhausted. ...

About a 6 hour mini bus journey from Cartagena lies Taganga, a small charming fishing village. It has a Mediterranean feel to it with unpaved roads, a small beach and being set at the side of a mountain. Despite all this Taganga is remarkable in that it is not very photogenic. The heat in the village is unrelenting, it seemed at times like the village spent the entire day in siesta. Taganga has possibly the cheapest scuba diving in the World at $45 for 2 dives. ...

Our original plan had been to move south leaving Colombia and entering Ecuador as quickly as possible. However, whilst in Bogota we had learnt of the Colombian EasyJet who did flights around the country for $50. So we took the difficult decision to spend more time in Colombia at the expense of Brazil at the end of our trip. After a relaxing morning in Bogota we took a lunchtime flight to Cartagena, billed as a tourist goldmine lying on Colombia´s Caribbean coast...

We had an early flight from Santiago and were up with the lark at 5:30am to catch the first tube and bus to Santiago airport. The flight was nondescript however upon our arrival in Colombia our apprehension grew as we were about to enter the country in South America with the worst reputation for both drug related violence and anti-government terrorism. Neither of us quite knew what to expect and the good natured jokes made by friends back home about ransom dema...

Sad as we were to be leaving New Zealand we would have rather not endured the 7 hour delay that extended our stay and which was inflicted on us at Auckland airport. Luckily for us the airport is rather nice and it seemed like no time at all had passed before we boarded our flight bound for Santiago de Chile. After our adventures in Asia and Australasia we were both excited at the prospect of entering a new continent, but on the other hand sad that we were technic...