Thursday 26th November (Thanksgiving in the US)

Tidied up the place a bit & drove through the Everglades to Miami to return the car at the Airport. The extent of the everglades is amazing & we were very amused to see parking & camping places in an area with warnings about Panthers. I think I would rather our camping sites than theirs with such friendly creatures roaming about.

All went well until we overshot the return spot & ended up in a car park but we fixed that & found the depot. Unfortunately the car had developed a crack in the windscreen & I hadn't checked it when I picked it up so I am expecting another bill.

We checked our flight baggage in without a problem & landed in Barranquilla at 5.30. From there we got a cab for probably the second most exciting ride of our lives. The airport is quite smart but when one leaves it the drive is mostly through a very run down industrial area & the
driving is best described as kamikaze. Roads all seem to be of concrete & obviously are left as is, so that there are quite large damaged areas.

The hotel is OK & is cheap but we couldn’t get anything to eat at the hotel & a quick recce suggested that breakfast tomorrow would be a better option. Unfortunately the staff have virtually no English & we have the equivalent amount of Spanish but we get by. The atmosphere is extremely warm & humid & only the hotel room appears to be air conditioned so we went to bed early.

Friday 27th November

Had breakfast including the most disappointing coffee & then they called us a cab. We wanted to go to the Museo Romantico of Barranquilla but the driver took us a long way & we arrived at the Museo Caribe instead, which was a bit of a surprise. This turned out to be in a very smart modern building with wonderful displays but no air conditioning, so we went through 5 floors of excellent video & other presentations before nearly melting in the heat. After escaping we took another cab to the Museo Romantico which is in an old house on a smart boulevard.

This was a very strange place as the rooms on the ground floor were full of a mixture of pictures & what appeared to us to be, an eclectic mix of junk & bric a brac. All at incredible temperature & humidity levels. Luckily the floor above was more interesting & the climate more temperate, with a fine display of Carnival Kings’ & Queens’ robes for various years. The Carnival, before Lent, is the big event of the city & the outfits are incredible. Also there were rooms for the expat groups living here in the 1900s when it was a big trading centre at the mouth of the Magdalena River.

We walked back to the hotel via a complex route as although the streets are either numbered as Calle’s or Carera’s, which should make navigation easy we walked in circles at one stage.