Colombia: 6th January - 27th January

I flew to Cartagena in Colombia, not quite sure what to expect. Obviously Colombia has a notorious reputation for kidnappings and other crime, in addition to being well known as the major drugs trafficking route from South to Central America and then on to the US. Yet on the other hand I had met plenty of travellers in Central America who had come up from Colombia, and they all raved about the place, as well as insisting that it was one of the safest countries in South America in which to travel. Any doubts I might have been harbouring were instantly dispelled as soon as my taxi left the airport and starting fighting its way through the streets of Cartagena; it seemed like the entire town was on the streets, drinking and dancing. Music blared at every corner from huge speakers set up outside people's houses. There was no special occasion, this was just normal life in Cartagena.

El Castillo San Felipe de Barajas looms over Cartagena; it is the largest Spanish fort in the Americas.

At the top there's a great view over Cartagena. And a very big Colombian flag.

The colonial heart of Cartagena is encircled by 12km of massive stone walls. Inside lies a labyrinth of narrow cobbled streets lined with churches, mansions and houses, punctuated here and there by colourful squares where musicians play in the evening. Bougainvillea grows everywhere. It really is exceptionally beautiful.

After a few days in Cartagena I made my way to Santa Marta and straight away set off on a six day trek through the jungles that cover the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The goal was the Ciudad Perdida, or Lost City, of the Tayrona. These are some kids from the village at the start of the trek.

It takes three days of moderate trekking to reach the Ciudad Perdida. There are some long, hot uphill sections, and plenty of river crossings, but overall the trek wasn't too strenuous. There were also a few tranquil swimming holes in which to cool down. Here I am making one of the first river crossings.

On the way we passed a couple of indigenous villages. The local Indians are known as Koguis; they live in thatched adobe huts and live on the cultivation of maize and bananas, and by rearing pigs and chickens.

We also visited a cocaine processing plant in the depths of the jungle. I say plant but by that I just mean a tiny little shack hidden deep under the jungle canopy. A very happy old man (of course he was happy, fifteen tourists paying eight bucks each had just shown up) showed us the whole process for turning coca leaves into cocaine, a process that involves a worrying amount of dodgy chemicals and not a little petrol. He actually made some cocaine while we watched; he couldn't dry it there and then so he was left at the end with a kind of cream-coloured paste, which he invited us all to try. I dipped my finger in and put it on my tongue - all it did was make my mouth go numb for ten minutes. It still seems inexplicable to me that the Colombian government can be spending millions of dollars on trying to eradicate coca production, yet a bunch of gringo tourists can hike one day into the jungle and be shown the entire cocaine production process, and be allowed to take photos to boot.

We also passed plenty of paramilitaries; their reasons for being there are not something I fully understand or want to go into here; suffice to say that their presence amounted to a bunch of 20 year-old kids waving AK-47s around, so, while they were generally pretty friendly, and very keen to have their photos taken with the chicas, I think we were all pretty keen to have as little to do with them as possible. After the first day, thankfully, we had pretty much left them behind.

Kogui man with his daughter at one of our camps.

Jungle toilet. Seriously.

On the right is our guide, Gabriel. He was enthusiastic, friendly and amazingly sprightly for his sixty years. Unfortunately he couldn't cook for toffee, and me and my group were left looking enviously at the lavish spreads enjoyed by the other groups while we played with our rice , beans & crackers each evening. The guy on the left was Gabriel's assistant - I never did catch his name. I didn't like him. For a start he wore that bloody Arsenal shirt for the whole six days; things could only have been worse if it had been a Man Utd shirt. Then, on the second night, I was half way through my rice and beans when Anders, a Swedish guy in our group, announced he'd found a tick on his leg. I turned round to watch him remove it with help of a lighted cigarette, and when I turned back to the table, my dinner had disappeared - Arsenal shirt man had assumed I was finished, whisked it away and thrown it in the scrap bucket. And there was nothing else to eat!!! I went to bed grumbling and from that evening on kept a close eye on him whenever I had food in front of me.

The goal of our trek - the Ciudad Perdida. To be honest, a bit of an anti-climax. Just a bunch of stone platforms in the jungle. Admittedly in a spectacular setting with great views over the jungle, but other than that, not much to see. The trek itinerary was to spend two nights at the site with a whole day exploring the city, but almost everyone decided to head back after one night so as to have an extra day on the hike out.

My trekking group.

Me eating a banana with some Kogui girls on the trek back to Santa Marta. A lot of people said that the Ciudad Perdida trek was the best thing they had ever done on their travels. I couldn't agree; it was a lot of fun and I'm glad I did it, but I've done much better treks and seen much more impressive ruins. Six days was also too long, the hike out could easily have been made in two days rather than the three we dragged it out to.

After the trek I took a night bus down to Bucaramanga, from where I wanted to make it to a place called El Cocuy, high up in the Andes. Colombian bus stations publish statistics showing how many accidents the various companies have suffered over the previous months. Accidentes obviously means accidents, heridos means injuries, and fallecidos means deaths. As you can see, Copetrans are way out in front of the field. Guess which was the only company going the way I wanted...

The route from Bucaramanga to El Cocuy proved to be a lot longer than I had expected but also more spectacular. I had to spend a night in a town called Capitonejo at the foot of the mountains, then the next day made the trip up to El Cocuy through some of the most spectacular and beautiful scenery I've ever seen; the road followed a deep valley through dry, almost desert, scenery full of cactuses and bougainvillea flowers. I arrived at El Cocuy, 2650m above sea level, around lunch time. I needed to spend the night there to help acclimatize before I headed further up into the mountains. The next morning I hitched a ride on the Lechero, the milk truck, as it did its rounds above El Cocuy, collecting milk from all the dairy farms that dot the hillsides.

It was a long and bumpy ride in the Lechero, but fascinating and it gave me a glimpse of a rural Colombia that I never imagined existed. Every couple of hundred metres we stopped to pick up milk containers from the side of the road. This guy would pour it into a big tank in the back of the truck, and note down in a book how much milk each farm had contributed. Sometimes he even managed to get all the milk into the tank, rather than spilling half of it onto my backpack...

After a couple of hours on the Lechero, at about 8.30am, we reached the Hacienda La Esperanza, which, at 3600m above sea level, was to be my base for a couple of day hikes up into the high mountains of the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy. As the Lechero trundled off to continue its rounds, I dumped my stuff in the Hacienda's dormitory, had a quick breakfast then set off on a hike up to the Laguna Grande de la Sierra, a further 1000m up in the mountains.

After a couple of hours walking through fields full of cows, then through a small wood, I came out onto a vast plain at 3800m, covered in these amazing plants, called frailejones. They are actually related to the daisy and sunflower, but grow up to 3m tall. In the background is the peak of the Nevado del Pulpito (5210m) with the amazing rectangular block of the Pulpito del Diablo rising from its flank (unfortunately the mountains are kind of lost in the cloud and the sun was in my face so not a great shot but the best I got).

Another three hours hike led me to the Laguna Grande de la Sierra, at 4600m. Here it is with the Pan De Azúcar (5175m) in the background. By the time I reached it, my head was starting to hurt from the altitude. I spent maybe half an hour enjoying the view from the lake before starting to head back down towards the Hacienda. As I descended, my headache got worse and worse, and after a while was joined by nausea. The last half hour's hike back through the cow pastures to the Hacienda was agony, and when I got there I just collapsed on my bed and went straight to sleep without any dinner. I had the most bizarre and painful leg cramps as I lay there, and the nausea feeling got worse and worse until I fell asleep.

Next morning I woke up at 7.00am after a full twelve hours' sleep. I felt much better, in fact fully recovered, but I was no longer in the mood for hiking after the misery I had endured the day before, so when the Lechero arrived again, I jumped back on and rode back down to El Cocuy. On the way there was lots more milk spillage on my backpack, but also lots more beautiful views up to the mountains and other interesting stuff to see, like these guys playing a game a bit like boules, but played with rocks.

With hindsight, I was crazy to attempt a hike so high with so little acclimitization. I had basically come from sea level to El Cocuy in two nights, then after a night there climbed straight up to 4600m. That was an ascent even faster than when I climbed Kilimanjaro, and I'll never forget how I suffered there! The reason I went up so quickly was that I was in something of a hurry, because there is just so much to see in South America and so little time to see it. But in reality it might have been a better idea to skip El Cocuy entirely and spend some extra time trekking further south, in Peru or Bolivia, where I will hopefully be much better acclimatized. But on the other hand, the Cocuy area was beautiful, and my rides on the Lechero really memorable, so overall I am very glad I made the effort to get to the Sierra Nevada del Cocuy.

After arriving back in El Cocuy, I bought a ticket for the 7pm bus to Bogotá. It was supposed to take eleven hours, so I figured at worst I would arrive at six am, more likely seven or eight, given the inevitable delays. Then the bus was full of loud kids who showed no signs of wanting to sleep. Eventually, I think around 1am, I managed to drop off. So there I was, sleeping peacefully, when someone woke me up and told me we were at the terminal. I looked at my watch. 3.30am. "Which terminal?" I asked. "Bogotá", I was told. Arse. That meant I had two and a half hours to hang around in the terminal, cos there was no way I was leaving that terminal before the sun was up. Once I eventually made it to the hostel where I had booked, I had to wait until noon before a bed became available, so I had to hang around in the courtyard for another six hours or so before I could go and lay down my aching bones.

Once I was a bit rested though, I went for a short walk round the colonial centre, and liked what I found. Interesting architecture, a nice relaxed atmosphere and lots to see and do. Highlights of my time in Bogotá were the Gold Museum and a trip on the cable car up to Monserrate peak, with a stunning view across the city and the plains beyond.

Colombia has the best living statues in the world. Put your money in the box and they come to life.

An interesting half-day trip from Bogotá was to the Salt Cathedral at Zipaquirá. An entire cathedral has been carved out of the salt-laden rocks under the hills above the town. The original cathedral was carved by the miners to enable them to attend church without having to leave their mine; the mine is still active but the current cathedral is new, the old one having become unstable and unsafe over the years. A wide passage leads down past fourteen stations of the cross to the main hall, where a huge cross appears to hang on the wall (it's actually carved into the wall). Nearby is a smaller chapel with a font for baptisms; salt water has to be used to avoid dissolving the font! Lick the walls anywhere in the Cathedral and they taste of salt (really, I tried it and they do!)

My last stop in Colombia, a whole day's bus trip south from Bogotá, was San Agustin, and the Valley of the Statues. Scattered over the hills surrounding San Agustin are hundreds of huge stone statues, depicting gods, men and animals, dating from approximately 3300BC to just before the Spanish conquest. Nobody really knows who produced the statues or what exactly they are supposed to represent.

Several interesting carvings can be seen at La Chaquira, perched on a dramatic rocky spur above the gorge of the Rio Magdalena.

Each statue guards a tomb; originally the statues were found laying down, buried next to the towns that they guarded. Over the years many of the tombs had been plundered by grave robbers, for they contained many offerings such as gold, jewellery and pottery.

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