We´re now on route up the coast towards the town of Cabo de la Vela, first stop is Riohacha, the capital of the La Guajra province. After a sweaty hour looking for somewhere to stay we found some over-priced pokey room to sleep in, Alison having got herself a ride on a motorbike as part of the search. The town is on the beach and there are loads of people just hanging out on the beach, there´s not any sunbathing going on though, it´s more of a ´let´s sit for hours talking in the shade of the trees´ kind of affair. It was still heaving in the evening (with Colombians), we didn´t see anybody that might have been backpacking or travelling. There was quite a bit of staring and some of the kids nearly walked off the pier staring at the Ginger White man - I´m considering calling myself the ´Fire God´ to see if I can get some free drinks.

During our dinner, in a plastic chair on the pavement on the street caf, a young lad, probably mid teens asked us where we were from and spoke to us in fairly good English before offering us lollipops. We immediately gestured that we weren´t interested, an automatic instinct since we have been handed all sorts of ítems on public transport (scissors, pens, chewing gum, bracelets, socks etc) with the hope that we will buy them (I had to restrain Steve from replenishing his sock supply a number of times in Buenos Aires.) Anyway, he said there was no charge, they were simply a gift, and he walked off. That of course made us feel incredibly guilty. It´s really hard sometimes knowing how to react to these kind of situations. As fairly obvious toursits (especially the Fire God) we are naturally targeted as being potential customers a lot of the time, and we along with most other people simply say we´re not interested, no doubt wisely so, but when somebody is genuinely being friendly and you´ve treated them so dismissively, it makes you question what you´re doing. Is doing one-off volunteering a bit self-indulgent when in real life situations, you don´t give ordinary Colombians a chance? So, anyway, Anthony came back and we had a really nice chat and he told us in his English (better than our Spanish) that he has 7 siblings and he likes meeting people from overseas. We gave him a little money for the lollipops which he was really grateful for but i think he was most happy to swap email addresses with us. He clearly has ambitions to travel but the chances are he´s not going to ever have the opportunity to leave Colombia. It made us appreciate just how lucky we are to choose to travel, or even to choose not to.

Yikes, getting a bit heavy there, but this country in a week is making us think a lot more than 10 weeks in Argentina and Uruguay.