Cartagena is a beautiful old city on the Caribbean coast with little winding cobbled streets, pretty plazas and traditional balconied buildings covered in bright colourful flowers. Perfect for one of Tim's magical mystery tours! Plus there are some really bizarre streets too, with rows and rows of little stalls with guys offering the same services.....like laminating, stamping and typewriting on ancient machines while you wait! Handy.

We managed to stay and amuse ourselves for almost two weeks pretty much just wandering the streets and doing a lot of sitting around sipping beer and watching the world go by while we waited to book our sailing trip across to Panama.

Miserably there was a lot of rain while we were there, unbeknownst to us October is the rainiest month of the year, and the rain is super impressive. If you get caught out in it for even a minute you are drenched like a drowned rat. This happened to us poor planners a fair bit! Then the streets flood and you have to pay enterprising young men to cross over their makeshift plank bridges. Sneaky. Its either the modern day version of the troll bridge or walking through ankle deep unidentified brown water!

But we did have a few lovely sunny days and scored winning weather days for our boat trip to Columbia's best beach Playa Grande and our exploration of the fort which had us running around like prize fools getting lost in the underground secret tunnels. Well, mainly a very excitable Tim!

Spent a far amount of time watching the local talent in our nearest bar The Havana Club...all good preparation for next months visit to Cuba!! And would you believe it, we suffered yet another dry weekend. Seriously, how many elections can one continent have in one year?? This time tho', we were fully prepared and our hostel was stocked with our own body weight of rum, so everything was OK!! We even managed to persuade a restaurant to cheat the system and serve us a cheeky bottle of vino in coffee cups. Ha, in your face nacional policia!!

Checked out a couple of boat options before voting against the salty old sea captain with the gammy leg and a worryingly accurate impression of the original drunken sailor...and plumped for Capitan Marcos the American Mormon and his young Columbian wife Paula on their boat Melody with high promises of a butter ball turkey feast on the high seas! Har-de-Har!