Day 223 - Cartagena, Colombia & Colombia sum up - Saturday 26th May 2012 It's hard not to completely fall in love with Cartagena, with its cobbled walkways, beautiful colonial buildings, huge balconies covered with those pink flowers (that unfortunately would never grow in England) - it's like a picture perfect postcard just waiting to be photographed and admired. The old town, a Unesco World Heritage site and where we were staying, is one of those places ...

Day 222 - Volcan De Lodo El Totumo, Colombia- Friday 25th May 2012 After gorging on a deep fried snack from a street vendor and then a cheese and ham pastry from the corner bakery, our 9am bus finally showed up. Today we were heading to the attraction of the Volcan De Lodo El Totumo - in short a miniature volcano with a mud bath at the top! After an hour on the bus we arrived to a frenzy of men and woman hustling people to the top of what looked like a large m...

Day 220, 221 - Playa Blanca, Colombia - Wednesday 23rd, Thursday 24th May 2012 Today we got the boat over to the beautiful beaches of Playa Blanca via the Isla Del Rosario. We (well Soph) had heard and read that playa blanca was one of the best beeches in Colombia so we thought it would be best to see it for ourselves! On our way down to the dock to buy our boat ticket we realised it was already 9.30am and the last boat left at 9am… So we hurried to the tour...

Day 213 to 219 - Costeno Beach & Tayrona National Park, Colombia - Wednesday 16th to Tuesday 22nd May 2012 We found paradise and it is called Costeno beach. We'd heard about it from someone in San Gil but the place is difficult to get information on - there is nothing in any of the guide books and the google search throws up an under construction webpage and a few people's blogs detailing how amazing it is. From Taganga it was just over an hour, past the ...

Day 210, 211, 212 - Santa Marta & Taganga, Colombia - Sunday 13th, Monday 14th, Tuesday 15th May 2012 We arrived into Santa Marta at 10am chilled to the bone - the air con on the bus was ridiculously cold. The taxi dropped us to the road that our hotel was supposedly on but after searching for nearly an hour, backpacks on and sweating from the sudden change of climate to baking hot, we gave up and decided to have some breakfast on the sea front. After eati...