15 July - 15 August (or thereabouts)

How to condense a month into a few paragraphs? I have to bear in mind that I am blogging, not writing a dissertation ;-)

First off, I spent a few days in stunning Tayrona National Park - swinging in a hammock, hanging out on the beach, walking to Pueblito (a tiny "lost city" of the Tayrona natives), eating fish at the only restaurant on the beach, and playing cards. Tayrona truly has some of the nicest & most deserted beaches I have ever seen. It was easy to have the whole beach to yourself, or share with a couple of other people hundreds of meters away... Paradise!

But the main part of the next month was spent in Taganga, a fishing & diving village on the Caribbean coast. Eager to use my new "skills", I bought a 10-dive package at Poseidon Dive Center. After just a short time I started to get addicted - not at all helped by living at Poseidon and only hanging out with other divers, mostly instructors and dive master students... There was only one thing to do - dive more - so I enrolled in the PADI Advanced course to spend some more time in the water and hopefully learn something at the same time. I also signed up for a cavern dive, a special excursion to Tayrona National Park done only a couple of times a year. The dive was really cool! Inside the cavern all was black until we looked back and saw the clear blue color of the opening, with little schoals of fish swimming by...

I had such a great time diving, going out for drinks and salsa dancing, cooking and hanging out with new friends that when my time in Taganga was coming to an end I was feeling a bit depressed. It was nice to have a bit of a "life" instead of moving all the time, to spend some time talking about other things than the usual "where have you been, where are you going, how much did you pay for x... etc". I will never forget my time with the lovely people at Poseidon...

In between dives, I managed to squeeze in the 6-day trek to "The Lost City", a vast, ruined city of the Tayrona Civilization, lost in the jungles/mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. It was a great trek; easy hiking, lots of rivers to cool off in and refill my water bottle from, varied scenery and never-ending amusing (to the rest of us) anecdotes courtesy of a group of very young Brit/Ozzie/American guys who had spent the past few weeks partying hard and destroying as many brain cells as possible with cheap drugs and alcohol... For example, one day at lunchbreak:

At camp:
-Mate, I think I left my backpack somewhere on the trail mate. Mate, I have to go search for it, mate, will you come with me mate?
-Yeah, mate, let's go mate! Mate, that's not good!

On the way to locate pack:
-Mate, hey check out that palmtree at the bottom of this pile of big rocks. Mate, I bet you I could jump from this rock mate and cling onto the tree like a monkey mate.
-Give it a go mate!

Back on trail after hurting back and inflicting quite a few bruises:
-Mate, look at those Kogi Indians coming our way... Mate, they have machetes mate, you think they will kill us mate??
-Mate, that's scary, mate, we may need to bribe them so they don't kill us mate!
-Mate, I don't want to find out if they are hostile mate, I'll give them my brand new space-age red puma shoes with black spikes, mate.

(Takes off fancy shoes, throws them at bewildered Kogis and takes off running, barefooted, mate in tow)

Back at camp:
-Mate, that was close, mate, but how am I going to hike now? I only have my $2 flip-flops.
-Too bad mate, but at least we're alive!
-Mate, that was a close call!

Yes it was mate, I bet they were about to chop your heads off with those machetes! Or perhaps they were simply on their way to see their relatives, minding their own business when a pair of space-age shoes were thrown their way... Time for a detox :-)

The story of my Lost City Trek will have to be its own entry... and if I had spent any more time with the "mate-mates" I would have felt compelled to write a book just about them and their trekking mishaps... Bless them!