Saturday, February 19, 2011

rum and overeating in bogota

the bbc weather website sold us a crock, but in a good way. the rain never arrived in cartagena, or if it did it only dared show its face in the witching hours when the city paused for breath. if anything, the sun was more furious than we could reasonably be expected to survive; the occasional patches of cloud were a welcome relief and, in their absence, it did not take longer than half an hour or so before having to head into the pool to cool off singed skins. after less than a week of sunshine i am looking suspiciously like a south indian; my late grandmother would have had a few harsh words for her once fairskinned grandson.
cartagena continued then to serve up perfect days; fresh fruit for breakfast, lounging in the sun during the parts of the day when any kind of activity beyond reading the economist was overly ambitious, punctuated with forays into and around the old town which continued to throw up new, postcard perfect streets and alleyways down which to wander. it was a gloomy pair who checked out of our spectacular home in casa canabal (www.casacanabalhotel.com) on friday afternoon in preparation for our flight back to a bogota which had not quite captured our hearts or imaginations initially.
our gloomy cynicism was not helped by the angry grey skies when we landed and our mood darkened further, in line with the heavens, as the rain started to pour down. we were staying near zona g, a newer part of bogota to the north of the historic districts which had served as our base ten days previously, but as we stared gloomily out of the window of our slightly grotty hotel room it seemed that all we would be seeing on our final night was the four walls which enclosed us. fortunately, as is so often the case with these over excitable rainshowers, after half an hour it got bored of soaking the good citizens of bogota and fizzled out leaving vicki and i free to tentatively step outside, nervously clutching our pacamacs, and head off into zona g,
if la candelaria had been where the poorer bogotanas rubbed shoulders with backpackers zona g was very much the affluent, new bogota which was looking to impose itself onto the city as a whole. secure streets populated by roomy gothic mansions and some very fine looking bars and restaurants into which the well heeled of bogata started to trickle, ready for their friday night. we had some frighteningly strong rum cocktails, accompanied by an unexpectedly large bowl of patatas bravas, in the very chic harry's, sipping our drinks whilst watching bogota's businessmen have a quick imported whiskey before heading back to their casas and clearing space into which the young, rich and mildly beautiful (though not so much as i had been led to believe) bogotanas slithered, flirting, backslapping and sipping expensive martinis. we headed off to dinner at a colombian steakhouse which, whilst very good, produced more food than we could handle (especially having inadvisedly loaded up on potatos). having chowed down on ribs and steaks respectively as best we could we shuffled sheepishly out of our chairs and rolled back down the hill to our hotel, content with our glimpse of a side of bogota which, whilst rendered exclusive by its associated pricetags, hinted at the vibrant, openly party city which i am convinced this place is about to explode into.
and that was that. the clouds scudded overhead as our redeyed hungover taxi driver sped us to the airport and, following some incredibly thorough security checks, a combination of colombian concerns about drug smuggling and generic us paranoia, we boarded our flight and left behind a country which whilst serving up numerous delights left more than enough unrevealed to generate a yearning for a return visit. two years, five years, ten years down the line this place is going to be very different and is going to become a must visit for travellers of all ages.

posted by bicrom @ 9:22 am

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

mud, glorious mud

the weather's holding; the weather's holding reeal nice. i'm typing up this post sitting in the blazing sunshine on the terrace of our hotel, in between quick dips in the small but perfectly formed pool, feeling, in general, a little bit smug.
cartagena is working out very nicely at the moment. the main attraction is the old walled town but it isn't so much a collection of things to see so much as a whole area to be wandered around, absorbing the trademark picturesque balconies crowding above the cobbled streets flanked by brightly coloured buildings, some showing the gaudy signs of recent care and attention whilst their neighbours look on wistfully enclosed in dilapidated walls. we have been getting up in the morning, going for a quick amble, lazing by the pool during the hottest part of the day before heading back out in the late afternoon as the sun sets and the cooling breezes make their welcome arrival.
cartagena feels incredibly secure, a testament to the dozens of uniformed officers on every corner. the plus side of this is that it allows vicki and i to go on our trademark mooches and pop up in random markets without feeling remotely uncomfortable. the downside is that it means that, every morning, a carribean cruise spews out a barrage of well meaning americans who tramp about in large tour groups intently absorbed in their audio guides, breaking concentration only to take myriad snaps. a little bit annoying for the travel snob in us, but a small price to pay for the security which makes this exotic town accessible to them, and explorable to us.
we've done some good meandering and had a sunset beer at the cafe del mar on the old city walls. the oddest experience so far however has to be our excursion to the volcan de tatumo, a oversized anthill filled with bubbling mud. having cheated a little and requisitioned a car rather than taking an organised tour, we were fortunate to arrive before any tour groups, thus allowing us to enjoy the mud in glorious isolation. well almost; we were at all times surrounded and tended to by various eager colombians, watching our sandals, taking photos for us, even giving us a nice rub down in the mud. to be fair to them, everyone had to make a living and they were not aggressive or pushy at all: being waited on (a generous description of the collection of services they provided) however was still a little bizarre. being in the mud itself was an unsettling, though not necessarily unpleasant sensation; it is so viscose that it completely supports your bodyweight, protesting only occasionally by way of a bubbly sulphurous belch. the pool is actually a couple of thousand feet deep but you don't need a floor, you just splash, scramble and inelegantly flounder around marvelling at the support provided by the gloopy mess which happily envelopes you. once done we were led down to the bank of a pretty little river into which a couple of colombian old dears led us and gave us a proper, swimming costumes off, washing. mudded, cleaned, we happily traipsed back to our car content with an odd, but oddly satisfying, experience.
a mooch to the other end of the old city tonight before finding some plaza on which to have a beer and a bite to eat. only a couple of days left, but cartagena feels like the kind of place where you could lose yourself for weeks.

posted by bicrom @ 6:55 pm

Monday, February 14, 2011

off the track

taganga has all the ingredients to be a picture perfect place, a small fishing village set in a deep, sweeping carribean bay guarded by dusty hills with boats bobbing in the harbour and fishermen chewing on cigarettes hauling their catch onto the sand under the watchful eyes of excitable children and hungry dogs. unfortunately, such attractive charm is very hard to keep secret: taganga is well and truly on the gringo trail. i am not so naive, or indeed arrogant, to believe that a place is inevitably ruined by popularity. angkor wat is no less spectacular for the hordes of tourists which visit it each day; sites tend to be busy for a reason, most usually because they are worth visiting. taganga however, with its hard to define sleepy allure, is busy for all the wrong reasons and with all the wrong people. it has become a mecca for the most tedious, look at me i'm finding myself, kind of traveller. yes you with the dreadlocks despite being white, middle class and of to some redbrick university next year. and you with the bongos, surely the most hideous "instrument" to be discovered by these cretins insofar as it requires little or no talent to make some noise and play at being musical (although if you're on a six month trip and carrying a guitar around you're also not welcome; i don't care that you can strum the chords to a couple of santana songs, nobody wants to hear it). i particularly enjoy the costume adopted by these unimaginative fools as they strive to be a bit ethnic and, like, totally like one of the locals, primarily because be it in asia or south america, the choice of clothing is identical and in fact completely independent of the locals, most of whom are wearing jeans and tshirts whilst smirking at the schmuck in the baggy trousers and licking their lips at the prospect of flogging them some totally genuine beads (just like the locals never wear).
i'm aware that the rant above sounds like the whinings of an old man but, in my defence, it is a beef that i have had since my first forays at backpacking in india, a particular magnet for this kind of thing. give me the british kids giggling to themselves whilst sloping back to their hostel with a couple of bottles of rum any day, at least they are being true to themselves rather than trying to live out some hideous cliche in the hope that it is authentic.
our plan for the first couple of days on the coast was to head off to tayrona national park for a few nights right by the sea. we did not, however, want to be stuck in close confines with the kind of people we had been despairing of in taganga, thus ruling out the most accessible, and therefore popular, campsites in tayrona. the whole park, in fact, was making us worry a little insofar as far from being a tranquil, unspoiled idyll it now appeared to be full of people. solace, it appeared, may have been available in a secluded campsite which required a three hour hike to reach and was cut off from the rest of the park. having emailed the place to make sure they had some space however, as to schlep all the way there only to be turned away would be a nightmare, we received an email back telling us that the people running the site had moved out of tayrona and to a place called palomino.
on receiving this email i immediately reached for my trusty lonely planet only to find that palomino did not warrant a mention. surprised but presuming this meant it was not worth a visit i googled it more out of curiousity than expectation. what i found was a place out beyond tayrona in la guajira, set on the same amazing rugged coastline but with a handful of shacks on the beach with the sea to one side and the snowcapped peaks of the sierra nevada to the other. all in all it sounded pretty amazing, much more so than tayrona.
vicki and i ummed and aahed for a bit, partly about whether we shouldn't just go to tayrona anyway as everyone does and partly about whether it was wise to go somewhere about which there was relatively little information available. eventually our sense of adventure and curiousity got the better of us and we boarded a morning buseta down to palomino. after a particularly well timed stop and search by police which allowed vicki to go for the wee for which she was busting, our buseta stopped at the entrance to tayrona; and promptly emptied out. we resolutely, if a little nervously, stayed put as the conductor and couple of locals looked on with some surprise. so we remained as we headed further west, passing through numerous police checkpoints and, bizarrely, a checkpoint manned entirely by salsaing children demanding sweets, until we finally arrived in palomino.
palomino isn't really a town; more a collection of about five shops staffed by bored looking old women. we collared a couple of mototaxis to take us to the beach and, five bumpy minutes later, arrived. the setting was everything we could have hoped for, miles of unspoiled sand worn down by the crashing sea, sparsely populated by fishermen and a couple of holidaying colombians. no shops, no cafes, no swarms of backpackers, no nothing. we found ourselves a little cabana with a couple of hammocks out front and settled in. from the battalions of pelicans skimming the waves and the palmtrees in formations of varying precision, to the (overfriendly) cats, dogs, chickens and iguanas pottering around our cabana, to the monster king prawns that had been happily prawning along in the sea about an hour before landing on our plates to, most of all, the delicious seclusion palomino, for all its rusticity, was everything which we had hoped for. expect it to appear in the next round of guide books and be unrecognisably changed thereafter.
despite february supposedly being the least rainy month in colombia, with rain virtually unheard of on the coast, online weather reports keep promising impending gloom. after a long morning lazing on the beach under clear blue skies we were heading in for the day in the afternoon when the clouds rolled in. we took a snap decision to split our journey to cartagena in two by stopping off in santa marta for the night and, following a slightly hairy mototaxi ride which concluded somehow with both vicki and i, and our two backpacks, squeezing onto the pillion of one wobbly motorbike, we hopped onto a bus which we presumed was terminating at santa marta. it transpired, however, that it could get us all the way to cartagena. taking it to be a sign we strapped in and, battling hunger pangs and with a little bus to bus shunting in barranquilla, we arrived in cartagena late on sunday night having freed up a day which would otherwise have been wasted travelling.
we checked into an amazing little boutique hotel which is newly opened and is consequently offering some great online deals (thank you internet). our plan for the next few days is to lazily take in the sights whilst keeping our fingers crossed that we don't get unlucky with the weather.

posted by bicrom @ 1:26 pm