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Santa Marta, groan... Before much longer I was well enough to want to travel and desperately needing to leave. Having kind of ground to a halt hanging out with my amigas who ran the hotel I'd stayed in I think I'd forgotten how to backpack. (It's terribly difficult don't you know... You get up each day (if you want), do what you want, when you want until you wonder whether trying somewhere new might be worth a pop. Get off bus and repeat. For best results try not to dwell too much on how sickeningly privileged your life is in a continent enveloped by poverty and crime.)

Pimp My Bus!

Graham Perkins
2006-09-27 09:20:25

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Santa Marta, groan... Before much longer I was well enough to want to travel and desperately needing to leave. Having kind of ground to a halt hanging out with my amigas who ran the hotel I'd stayed in I think I'd forgotten how to backpack. (It's terribly difficult don't you know... You get up each day (if you want), do what you want, when you want until you wonder whether trying somewhere new might be worth a pop. Get off bus and repeat. For best results try not to dwell too much on how sickeningly privileged your life is in a continent enveloped by poverty and crime.)

So I think in the end I decided to visit Tayrona National Park, seeing as it was all of 21 miles from Santa Marta. Plus after seeing photos and postcards of the beaches there, I hardly felt like I had a choice. I awoke on the bus outside the park's entrance and it was all rather cloudy. More irritating still, though, was the fact I'd been having a really good dream about some old bollocks or other. Nope! Not getting off the bus, forget it! Zzzzzzzzz....

Ooh, Wake up an hour later approaching Palomino again. Sod it, that'll do. At least the kids were delighted to see me again. Spent a couple of days there doing much the same as on my previous visit. (Minus the guns and camo gear, you understand). Took the kids out. No, you daft sod... not that kind of 'took the kids out', my cold-blooded killling days are well and truly behind me. I just mean I took them out and played with them. No, you daft sod, not that kind of played... wait. I'll shut up.

So the weekend came and went. I thought I'd check out La Guajira, the nobbly department right next to Venezuela home to many of the country's few remaining indigenous communities, where they all waltz around in these cute little pointy hats. I'd heard mixed things about the wisdom of going there solo and was quite surprised when changing buses in Rio Ancha, the department's ...