The day before I was due to leave for Colombia, I finally got a message back from the school assuring me yes, we know your coming and yes, someone will be there to pick you up from the airport. For all I knew they could have just set up a website advertising a school, posted a few fake reviews e.g. "Fantastic experience! - Linda, Brighton" set up a fake PayPal account and watched travellers like me, pour money into their account hoping we've secured a deposit at a school in Colombia. Luckily that was not the case!

I left Grampa house via the bus to airport feeling very apprehensive and nervous about being on my own for the first time during my trip. Although I had plenty experience travelling on my own (as in Me, Myself and I) in Africa, South America and India, I'm older and instead of not having a care in the world and being oblivious to how dangerous these places can be, in know full well from experience sometimes it isn't all that safe being a young girl on your own.

I had an awful day of travelling through boring airports in America getting pissed off about the McDonalds and Starbucks everywhere but realising no its not globalisation, they are actually meant to be here. I flew via Houston and Miami and finally got on my flight to Cartagena. I was getting away from America already! Wohoo. I looked around as we took off and everyone starting to make a sign of the cross which was a little scary! But then the rum started flowing and I remembered the flight I took to Venezuela where the airplane became like a flying bar with salsa playing and people mingling in the isle. Yes South America again - the most fun continent in the world!

I saw evidence of the light hearted Latin spirit already when I left the airport I noticed a lady security guard sneaking off hand in hand with an air traffic controller while trying not to look suspicious. I was picked up by a man and his wife holding a sign with my name on it, I got in their rickety old car expecting a journey of 40minutes to my house, went 4 blocks and here we were at my new home. I was showed my room by my new host parents Belen and Eduardo. Belen was obviously the lady of the manor who ran the show, bossed people around and spoke at least 3 decibels higher than usual. Stern but kind hearted.

I spent the first night unpacking, settling in and sitting in the living room trying to remember the Spanish I had learned. There were people coming and going all the time in the living room which I figured out were the neighbours just coming and going for a chat. I met the daughter Elisa, who's 18 and lovely and has all of her teenage friends all the time. The middle son has his girlfriend around all the time and the eldest daughter who is married and lives with her husband but visit every weekend. Just a very normal family but with a few long term residents living in the spare rooms. We have an old couple that come in everyday to help with maintenance, cooking and cleaning. The poor things look about 70 and there still both working. I think they must have been working for the family for at least 20 years.

The first night was just how I expected, a little scary but being welcomed by at least 30 people coming and going through the living room really helped me to settle in. The next day I was taken to school and started class with Roger. An old, jovial man with a weathered face and heavy wrinkles from a long life of laughing. He's always joking around, high fiving when you do something right in class and seems to drink too much rum.

My neighbourhood Crespo is a middle class area right near the airport, it large enough to have a supermarket and some fast food joints and few basic shops lining the main drag. On Sundays people line the streets outside their homes with plastic chairs and rocking chairs to sit and chat with neighbours and people passing by. Even during the week, most people leave their doors open so neighbours come in and chat as they please which is very different in comparison to Venezuela where each home was protected by a 10ft high wall.

Amazingly my home is only 200 meters from the beach and when I was told this I did not expect the white sand and blue sea combo, I expected dirty and grime which is what I got. Due to the volcanic activity in the area, the sand is grey, the open sewers flow directly into the sea, plastics wash up on the shore and the oil rigs in the distance have polluted the water to a greyish brown colour. Luckily none of this has stopped the people of all different classes having a great time in the water together. There's people swimming in the sea and hanging out on the beach day and night. The pollution defiantly hasn't stopped me from swimming but let's just say you wouldn't travel half way across the world for the beaches here.

What you would travel half way across the world for is the Unesco world heritage sight of the old town of Cartagena. It is the only walled city in South America still intact, with 17th century old walls securing the city from invaders in the form of the English to now wealthy Colombians wanting to develop hotels. Most of the buildings inside the walled city are original, painted in bright tropical colours and draped with bougainvillea. Although this is defiantly a tourist town, with hagglers hawking cigars and panama hats, chic coffee shops and air conditioned internet cafes. The city still hums with life of the people that still live there. Typical comida corriente restaurants reach full capacity at lunch time, clothes shop open their doors to blast salsa music with DJs shouting out bargains and offers over the stereo while fruit ladies carrying steel bowls of plantains exchange their produce for pesos through the windows and balconies of houses.

The fact that it is a university town really adds a certain character with most of the population being in their 20s. It has attracted the free thinkers and the hipsters. The square closest to my school, is home to the art department so every morning I see my fair share of individuals with bags of art supplies and other students practicing their instruments before class begins. It also has the best medicine and dentistry schools in the country so I was surprised at first to see 1 in every 5 people walking on the streets dressed in scrubs. There are also so many free events linked to the university from art exhibitions to free dance and aerobics classes every night.

There has got to be something said about the convenience of being in a developing country. With so many people and not enough jobs, entrepreneurial people have started to sell things on the street (or this has always been the way and I don't know which has come first) from people walking around with shirts saying "llamadas" - calls, with telephones for all networks they are the equivalent to walking phone boxes. Ladies and men come through the streets every morning shouting what fresh fruit and veg they have in their cart which notifies the wives preparing lunch, who then go out to the street to buy from them. The cerviche men, whipping up the most delicious seafood cerviches in polystyrene cups to the men carrying a holder of 8 different flasks of coffees and teas. I can even get as chamomile tea in a plastic cup anywhere in the city at any time. Ladies set up stalls selling fried goodies such arepas con huevo and empanadas (delicious meat pies) with several home made sauces to smother them in. While stationary fruit vendors chop up mixed fruit pop it in a cup which sell for around 50p. The list is endless. Whatever I want I can get within seconds.

The 3km road from school to my house is serviced by 4 types of public transport. Taxi, moto-taxi, motorcar and collectivo. The latter is the one I use most frequently which takes the form of a taxi but instead of being exclusively for one customer it picks up customers along the way until full where it drops them off in the town, loads them up and drops you off wherever you want along the main road. It's the best of a taxi and a bus. The motor cars are brightly coloured busses decorated floor to ceiling with nick naks and blast salsa music while weaving in and out of several neighbourhoods. They are a lot slower but can be amusing just for the experience. As are moto-taxis which zip through the city traffic and are great when you'd like the ocean wind in your face on scorching hot days when the idea of being shoulder to shoulder with 3 people in the back of a sweaty collectivo is hard to bear.

On entering collectivos you great your fellow companeros with Buenas, which seems even odd to me as it's the equivalent of saying good morning to the people you're going to be sharing your personal space with in rush hour tube traffic in London. People would just find it awkward if someone tried to say hello to them while squished up against you for at least 3 minutes. Although I have found the people to be very friendly and open, I was first a little disappointed because everywhere I have travelled in South America other travellers have said the friendliest people they have encountered have been in Colombia, however the people I have met in Cartagena who have travelled around Colombia have said that comment is true except for Cartagena.

This is probably due to the fact that the coast is one of the poorest areas in Colombia in comparison to the wealthier cities in the mountainous regions of Medillin and Bogota. The hoards of wealthy travellers who demand air conditioned European style cafes and boutique hotels clash with the locals in rags begging on the streets and prostitutes working to feed their children. I think any kind of environment like this produces a bad atmosphere and feeds crime levels and resentment between classes, and tourists and locals. Saying that, the tourism here is no where near as developed as in Goa or Cape Town where world class malls are constructed in between squatter camps.

For me as a tourist, I love this level of development. It's comfortable to live. You get used to cold water showers, no AC, sleeping without any glass covering your windows so you're woken up every morning by dogs and street sellers. The city is only 1 million people so that's enough to have all your basics of a city but still remains a good mix of colourful flurry of traffic, street vendors during the day and quiet streets in the night where you can drink beer with the university students in low lit plazas in the evening.

I eat out for lunch everyday with Johanna, a girl from Wisconsin who lives just around the corner from me and studies at the school. Were both long termers so have seen our fair share of people coming and going. Being a country that's not on everyone's must do list, it seems to attract a lot of odd characters especially the older retired American guys travelling on their own. I think they must want to come to Latin America to try to meet younger women but I'm still not sure, I'd tell them to go to South East Asia if that was the case. A very nice German man called Dirk stayed for one week who was here to speak in a science conference in front of 7 thousand people in Bogota, he must have been a genius in his field. Then we had Matt, an America who is studying in Madrid, who was a very normal person, going against my weird countries attract strange people rule. Then Tomo arrived.

Tomo is one of the most interesting people I have ever met. She has the confidence of a New Yorker and the business mind of a Japanese and the sex appeal of a Latina. She's Japanese by culture but has worked for CNN in The States for 20 years and has been studying Latin and African dancing for 10 years. I finally had someone in my dance classes I could learn from instead of trying to teach the others. We would dance in our classes for 4 hours a day and go straight to the bar to quench our thirsts with ice cold Aquila beer.

I've also met my fair share of girls in my salsa class doing exactly what I want to be doing in the NGO sector. Johanna worked for a charity in Texas assisting Mexican women trying to enter the US legally, while Lucy was over working for the US government for 4 weeks here, another girl who was studying medicine was working during her summer break in a hospital and I met three Spanish girls who had been working with the Colombian government here for 3 months. Meeting all of these young girls, exactly like me wanting to do exactly what I want to me, reinforced my knowledge that the career I would like to follow is extremely competitive and if I'm at all serious I should try and get my foot in the door sooner rather than later.

But I'll just try and have fun while its here. The Spanish lessons have been like pulling teeth as being a mix of English AND American I'm inheritably a dunce at languages. Although I'm going to pursue it and set my goal to be fluent by the time I'm thirty. However the dancing comes naturally to me. I spend at least 20 hours a week in the dance studio learning mainly salsa but also bachata, cumbia, champeta, vallenato and mapale. All Latin styles of music which mix Latin, Caribbean and African rhythms. My school is in fact a dance studio with tables and chairs for English classes in the morning then by 5 turns into a dance studio for mainly Colombians but with a few American men trying to learn to dance who are just hopelessly hopeless.

Part of the reasons why I wanted to come back to the Latin Caribbean world was because of the music pulsating in every area of life. The supermarkets play salsa, that have people dancing and jiving while bagging their tomatoes and standing in the queue. The shops and malls blast it as well as on the buses, the collectivo drivers sing along to the songs on the radio while to street vendors play their CDs to attract customers and amuse themselves. It's a completely different way of life which is so raw and natural. I honestly think if London was like this people would be involuntarily happier.

People also seem to care a lot less of what you look like in the way of weight. Instead of pages of which celebrities are getting fat, the tabloids are full of sex scandals. It doesn't matter if women have muffin tops, overhang, spilling out everywhere they will still wear the brightest, tightest clothes and jeans. It's a concept so strange to me where people purposefully show off their body by wearing tight clothes whether it's in shape or not. It really doesn't matter here. And there are a lot of big women here. Which is strange as the diet seems very balanced.

Everyday I go with Johanna to eat in a "comida corriente" place which is ubiquitous of Colombia. The standard plate follows, rice, beans, salad and a choice of chicken, beef or fish. Which is served with a light soup, a drink and always on the table will be a bowl full of lime wedges for the food and bottle of hot sauce. I can't even remember what its like to choose my food anymore; it's so simple and works so well. Food isn't wasted and you get a plate of fresh home cooked food in maximum 5 minutes because there are only 3 choices. What is also a surprise is the amount of health food stores and vegetarian restaurants run and for Colombians instead of these yuppy hippy hang outs in backpacker towns all over the world.

The first time I went we sat on a table with one other man which is usual as every lunch restaurant seems to pack out for lunch. We got chatting and found out he was a yoga instructor. I have never done yoga because of course I don't have time in London and it's so expensive. However with everything here being so cheap I could have private lessons a month for £20, as many times as I want to go. So when I thought he was taking me to the yoga school to check it out, I jumped in a taxi with him and had no idea we were on the way to his house.

I panicked and assumed the worst, oldest trick in the book I thought: lure young foreigners into house offering cheap yoga lessons. However luckily when I arrived I was greeted by his message therapist wife and lovely alternative Colombian family who are all vegetarians and into herbal teas, incense and healthy living. The whole thing was welcoming and very rare for a Colombian family. So I go at least a week for 2 hours, he teaches me yoga, tai chi and meditation and she teaches me a little belly dancing. The sessions always finish with a ice cold cup of flor de Jamaica a popular Mexican juice made from flowers.

My teachers friends reggae band were playing in a club in Cartagena so I gathered all the people I had met here together and planned a night of it. As I had been on a strict study hard and dance hard routine for the last two weeks I was dying to let my hair down. Tomo, Lucy and I started drinking mojitos in the Plaza and after realising happy hour was actually a rip off we bought beers and sat under an enclove of the university building where other groups of students gathered to drink and shelter themselves from the rain.

Before we knew it we were being passed plastic shot glasses of aguardient, aniseed local sprit, and they just did not stop coming. The students and my group were doing shots of this sickly sweet liquor every few minutes until the bottle ran out. Lucy felt guilty and bought a bottle of rum which was drunk equally as fast with this group of incredibly jovial friendly uni students. We headed to the club for the reggae band concert and stayed there until as long as I could remember. I texted my teacher telling her not to bother waking up and coming in to school as there was no way I was getting up at 7am so spent the day nursing my hangover with arepas, fresh juice and a trip to the cinema with Joanna to watch Inception which utterly boggled my mind with the state in was in already.

The next day Tomo, Joanna and I went on a day trip to Playa Blanca which takes an hour by boat. The weather looked incredible when we set out but being the tropics, the heavens opened and it started to pour as our boat sailed out of the mangroves. The rain drenched everyone on board and as the speed boat was heading towards the wind the rain pierced our skin like tiny needles. That didn't dampen the spirits of the Colombians who had already opened their bottles of rum and got their glasses out to drink in the rain at 9am. Playa Blanca is the post card picture perfect beach that everyone dreams about when thinking of the Caribbean. We spent the whole day relaxing while trying to ward off the masseur's and necklace sellers. The water must have been 33 degrees and clear as crystal.

While on the internet one afternoon Mal, Soran's friend from London who I had met several times in London and Japan had been living in New Orleans for several months started chatting to me, I asked him where he was and he explained that he needed to leave the US to renew his visa and Mexico and Canada didn't count. As he was thinking on Jamaica and I suggested that he stay with myself and my host family in Cartagena for a few days instead of going to a ritzy hotel in Jamaica on his own.

He booked the ticket the next day and flew a few days later. I picked him up from the airport, gave him a tour of the house and met my family. We spent the day walking around the quiet streets of Cartagena sampling delicious street food like empandas covered in salsa and cerviches that could have been served for £20 a plate in any London restaurant. He met Tomo and we went out for dinner and drinks at the local hot dog stalls that line the streets of our neighbourhood.

While Mal was here I got to do all the touristy activities that I had yet not done. We visted the Castillo de San Felipe castle, wined in boutique hotels with Toucans in the courtyard, lingered over drinks in different Plazas at outside restaurants where you can watch street performers and be hassled to death with sunglasses! We smoked Colombian Bolivar cigars at Café del Mar on top of the 17th century walls while watching Carribean sunsets and ate lunch and drank coffee at the European style cafes in Miami style areas of Boca Grande.

Throughout my time in Cartagena every traveller that I met had been or was enroute to a little fishing village called Taganga. Taganga lies on the edge of Tayrona National Park very near to the Venezuelan border. So Joanna and I decided that we had fallen into our comfortable school routine and needed to do some travelling and shake things up a bit. We headed to Taganga without knowing why we wanted to go apart from everyone else go there's.

There has got to be said about those places, which I have long viewed with contempt and trying to avoid the places that everyone wants to go. Thailand and Australia for example are places on 90% of the average English persons list of far away holiday destinations and for years I had a complex that I only wanted to visit Australia when I've seen everywhere else and I'm too old to rough it. After realizing there is a reason why people go to the same places I got over it and went to Australia and saw for myself why everyone raves about it.

Taganga is one of those places on the Gringo Trail list that you just have to visit. It's a laid back town with a backpacker, vagabond vibe with streets lined with a few simple restaurants catering to tourists who want to linger over drinks for several hours and Argentinean hippies selling their hand made jewellery on the beach. It's a bit ramshackle but the setting is glorious. The town is set in a horseshoe bay, backed by vibrant green mountains. There are cliff pathways to walk to other near deserted beaches and the large town of Santa Marta is only 15 minute drive over the next hill.

The combination of backpacker joints and laid back locals has maintained a good combo that doesn't make the scene here too imposing on the local town, both gel well together. We spent the weekend chilling on the beach, eating succulent extremely, fresh fish dinners, watching the sunset on the cliffs, drinking beer with drunken fishermen.

I did two scuba dives in Tayrona National park and got to see seahorses, squid and angel fish which was a first and nice to practice as its been over two years since I took the scuba diving course. I met an Australian girl in Cartagena who commutes the 6 hours back and forth to Tanganga every weekend to see her boyfriend while she studies in Cartagena. I also met another Sydney girl on the dive who we hung out with at her hostel and sat round a big table with 15 or so other travellers drinking beer and rum. The scene was akin to what I had experienced while travelling 3 years a go.

We sat, drank and chatted about the usual, where you've been, where you're going, what you're doing now which is nice once in a while but I remember getting very tired of it although I did meet some very I interesting people. A couple had motorcycled all the way from Canada to Colombia passing borders with their own bike is near impossible, lets hope they have safe travels in Colombia as the roads in the south can be very suspicious.

As the group from the hostel were heading to a club in another town Joanna and I were trying to decide if we could be bothered but realised we had already stepped on the Gringo Trail and might as well just drink, be merry and go en masse with 10 other gringos to a night club. When I lost the snobbery of oh no I don't want to hang out with a bunch of Europeans; it was a lot of fun, the club didn't have a roof so salsa dancing under the stars with hundreds of sweaty bodies shaking and pulsating on the dance floor with you, was incredibly sexy scene. After that club closed at 3 we headed to another night club until close and realised we wouldn't have time to go to the National Park that everyone says is an absolute must. Oh well, we had a great time dancing all night, I've really changed my ways by relaxing abut sightseeing and not caring if I don't do everything there is to do in the places I visit. If mom were here she wouldn't care if we only had 3 hours sleep, we would be up and out to see the national park before catching a 6 hour bus back to Cartagena. I wish I had her energy and I'm 36 years younger than her. At the moment though I'm only 21 and have seen my fair share of amazing places, I have a lifetime to revisit places but right now I'm happy and incredibly lucky to see the things I've seen in my life.