I think we were both fairly content to leave Cartegena, even though it´s an incredibly beautiful city with more quaint colonial houses and balconies that you can shake a stick at, it felt time to move on. We decided to head to Taganga, a ´fishing village´just outside the sizeable town of Santa Marta. What may have once been a fishing village seems now pretty geared to international tourism, diving and backpacking in particular. Our belief that we are perhaps too old for our years (or perhaps we feel like most 30 somethings) was confirmed when we went out for dinner with another older English couple and looked disapprovingly at the places blaring out loud music. None of this partying all night for us, no. It´s not Buenos Aires after all. The Colombians have an even more obscure way of partying. On Sunday morning, we had dodgy Colombian music from next door from about 5am. Apparently it was mother´s day and some dear son decided to honour his mother by starting his music nice and early. Not sure either of our mum´s would appreciate that gesture so much…?

We spent one day at the beach in the next door bay, getting a small boat out there, paying 12,000 pesos (about 4 pounds) for a return ticket. The beach was pretty nice, entrepreneurial Colombians nabbing all the shade with their deckchairs, forcing us to pay to sit somewhere without burning ourselves silly. After a day of snorkelling, swimming and napping, we returned to our departure spot at the designated hour and waited. And waited. And waited. It was still light and super hot but we´d been warned not to walk the 20 minutes back after 4 or 5 as it could be dangerous. We didn´t ask too many questions about what kind of danger but given that we´d arranged to get a boat back we didn´t worry too much. We waited for about 40 minutes but as the sun was setting we took the decisión to walk back. The walk was absolutely fine and it seems so crazy because we were in the middle of this beautiful countryside, seemingly so tranquil and safe but we stuck close to other tourists and didn´t hang about walking home. I don´t know what happened to our boat, but the slightly nervous walk home makes you think about the every day threats that Colombians face. There is ongoing insurrection from FARC (a guerilla Group) which makes parts of the country inaccessible, there are significant organised crime groups linked to the obvious drug issues and levels of street crime etc largely due to the levels of poverty. We have seen none of this (although our pretty eccentric hostel owner who has lived through 28 years of bombs, kidnapping attempts etc gave us a pretty full account) but you feel there is a nervousness that sits below the surface for a lot of people. Note to Mothers: we´re of course taking every precaution and it really is an interesting country to travel in.

We also had a mad afternoon in a school in a shanty town just outside Santa Marta. This was the reason we´d come here. The ´yellow butterflies´ (http://www.volunteersouthamerica.net/MariposasAmarillasWebpage/MariposasAmarillas.htm) volunteer school visits about 40 children in an area which is essentially very poor, with little or no education. We joined 3 other volunteers, who spend 2 hours a day with the kids teaching them maths, English and art. We arrived on ´art´day. Gulp. We were genuinely worried that we wouldn´t be able to cope with crafts and small children. However, very little crafts were actually created, we spent most of the time trying to persuade children not to stab each other with scissors and trying to learn some names. The kids were great, completely unable to sit down for more than about 2 minutes so we have no idea how many kids we actually were with. I think they just loved having a lot of attention. We have some thinking to do now about whether we are going to come back here to volunteer on a longer term basis. The kids are great and the other volunteers are investing a lot of their time and we need to decide if we can make a difference here too. It may be that we go somewhere else but even the thought of that, having met the kids, makes us feel guilty and kind of indulgent that we are swanning about picking and choosing which ´project´we can help with. Anyway, it´s something we need to think about.

Leaving Taganga, excited about going further east to the desert and beach.