Surprise!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Couldn't quite resist sneaking back to England and surprising everyone with my uber-tan (which turned out to be mainly dirt) at Sandy's 30th birthday party.

In retrospect, perhaps it is better to announce these things in advance, especially as most of my friends are now around the 30 mark, and perhaps will soon get to a stage where their tickers will not take the level of shock I inflicted on them this week!

After everyone regained the power of speech, we had a nice time :) ....now what?!?!? Argh! How much are flights to Buenos Aires again....? To be continued...............................................

Cordillera Blanca

I'd wanted to go to Huaraz and the Cordillera Blanca ever since I the last time I was in Peru and didn't quite make it far enough north. In fact, I wanted to go sooo much, that i subjected myself to the embarrassment of advertising myself on various hostel and cafe notice boards. Something along the lines of "loner without friends requires travel partners"....yes, my phone was ringing off the hook.

Luckily I bumped into Dave, who i'd met before in Ecuador, and was able to convince him that the Santa Cruz trek would be the most fun he'd have on his whole trip, and that he should immediately abandon all other plans and make me look less like a person who has to advertise for friends.

The hike was a lot of fun...snowy mountains, pretty flowers, high-altitude passes and glacial valleys carved out of the rock. It was a relatively easy trek (especially with mules to help!), but beautiful. Though give me a tent and a large enough supply of oreo cookies and i'll be happy almost anywhere :)

Yay, hiking with a friend!!

Ah, i have a hiking buddy. We walked up to Laguna Churup near Huaraz in Peru, it was such a brilliant hike! Look how lovely it is!

We had to pretty much rock climb for the last 15 minutes to get there...high up, on slippy rocks, over a waterfall. We had very shaky legs afterwards...

At the bottom of the mountain a nice old couple made us coca mate in their garden....perfect.

Loner hiking

Yes, adventures with auto-photos. It took me about 20 minutes to get a shot that was not mainly grass, so it gets published to the blog regardless of photo quality/interest :)

Quilatoa

A bit of hiking to Quilatoa lake...very nice. It's a volcano crater filled by a freshwater spring, and rain over the years.

I stayed at a place called The Black Sheep Inn in Chugchilan. It's operated with the idea of making only a positive impact on it's environment and the surrunding community. EVERYTHING is reused, recycled or repurposed and most of the food they provide is grown in the gardens around the hostel. Interesting. At the very least, it was nice to eat some healthy food for a while. I am DONE with fried chicken!

How to make a shrunken head...

Instructions below in case anyone needs them...

El Mitad del Mundo

Yes, I am officially the centre of the world, everything revolves around me :)

I did some amusing experiments balancing eggs on nails and watching water going down the plug hole in various directions (don't worry Sandy, have taken extensive video footage so that you can explain to me at length why it's all a hoax!)

Confusingly, there is some disagreement about the exact location of the centre of the world. A few hundred years ago, a French dude did some experiments to confirm where the equator line was. In 1979 a massive monument and museum was erected to signify the spot. Unfortunately, more recently, GPS has determined that the real equator is actually 200 metres down the road....oops. In general, it is still maintained that the monument marks the equator line, but probably it's quite expensive to move a massive stone structure.

How do you know when you've finally reached the Andes?

Answer: The sound of Pan Pipes everywhere you go.

Dezza, you'd be in musical heaven!!! ...probably on your own ;)

Me and Anita in the countryside with some funny old statues

These statues are OLD. And kind of unusual too. I think the ancient Colombians were a fun bunch to hang out with. Their statues are nothing like the dour old statues the Mayans and Incans built. They have penguins, and orangutans and funny little men holding two fish....

Safety

In general, Colombia has felt like a pretty safe place to travel. Could be something to do with an almost constant military presence in anywhere that could be remotely dodgy (Ecuador take note!!!).

This photo was taken when our bus stopped for a rest break on the way to San Augustin. Would have been a better photo if I'd taken it when he was walking towards me, but I was scared of the man with the gun!

Market day

Anita and I went to the market in Silvia for a morning. It's a really colourful place, with lots of people from surrounding villages coming to buy fruit and veg...and just about anything else they'd like too. We just bought some cheesy bread:

Nights out in Medellin and Cali

I'm not really sure if i regret not taking my camera or not.... perhaps what happens in Cali should stay in Cali!!

Zona Cafetera

So the four amigos went off to have a look around one of the main coffee producing areas of Colombia. Our main investigation of coffee as Colombia´s primary legal export was tasting the end-product to ensure that you guys all have nice tasting coffee shipped over to you courtesy of Starbucks. I can confirm that it generally tasted nice.

We also did some walking and relaxing and eating of ice-creams.

Quatro amigos

Good travel buddies are hard to find, but obviously a bit like buses too... Either that, or me and Anita are quickly multiplying to found our own band of happy-travellers. If that really were the case though, you might expect Euan and Kenny to look a little more like me and Anita....hmmm.

We had a week of many fun events together...to the extent that i made the unprecedented step of heading North rather than South so we could hang out longer and play drinking games for Kenny's birthday.

The boy versus girl lines were definitely drawn though. It started with cards, and spread to cookery, swinging, drinking....it became quite competitive anyway.

Some photos

Good travel buddies, not struggling at all to reach summit of small hill:


Day One of the cook-off, the boys are confident, I am keen just to get on and eat:


Hard-core swingers:

Pre-Colombian/Pre-Hispanic(?) Gold

Look at this gold flying fish, made 'quite a while ago' (oops, didn't remember when...) and found in the tombs near San Augustin in the south-west of Colombia.

It's so unusual, and weird....and well made. I like it.

Old Travel Friends, New Travel Friends

Yay! Rachel & James are in Bogota too! This is Me, new travel friend Anita, old travel friends Rachel and James, and random additional bloke Alex.

Salt Cathedral

Just outside of Bogota there's a huge cathedral made entirely of SALT! It's in part of an old salt mine near a town called Zipaquira. They built the cathedral mainly cos a lot of people got injured or killed in the mines, so they wanted to say a quick prayer before heading down into the thing.

We were very impressed. So impressed in fact, that we couldn't quite believe it to be true! This is Anita checking it is definitely salty:

Bogota Coolness

Bogota is definitely much cooler than Cartegena. It's not as pretty, but it has EDGE*!

There are a lot of buses too, see....and this is a Sunday!!!

*No definitions currently available.

Very cute kid alert...

Naughty factory

On the way to Ciudad Perdida, we paid a guy (ethical?) to take us to a cocaine 'factory'...which is actually much more like a cocaine workshop, being only a table, a tarp, a few buckets and some chemicals.


The process is pretty disgusting....basically involving soaking the coca leaves in petrol, with a bit of sulphuric acid, caustic soda and potassium permanganate for good measure. More info: http://www.a1b2c3.com/drugs/coc08.htm

It's quite off-putting, none of the guys that make cocaine ever take it....can see why. They do drink beer though, so that must be ok :)

Fairly obvious note to remember

Do not drink water from rivers in Colombia. It will not end well.

Oh, just the one and then home for bed....

One for you Dadsy...

A nice leaf:

Oh yes, and Ciudad Perdida was nice too...

(just not as much fun as the walk to get there)

FARK didn't get me...

Despite wearing a military print baseball hat for most of the week walking to and from the Ciudad Perdida, i managed to come out of the jungle in one piece....almost.

A tick took a big bite from my bottom (removed by very cheerful guide), and i got a massive bruise on the sole of my foot....this seems to me an unusual place to bruise, so i took a picture of it. I didn't take a picture of the tick on my bum....

Matching outfits....felt VERY uncomfortable with this photo...teenagers playing with guns scare me!