Canada to Patagonia at a Worrying Age

Time to leave the Caribbean coast and head into a different jungle (in the wet season) over a thousand miles away. I must be daft as I could head back up to Santa Marta for Xmas on the beach and come back to Cartagena for the New Year Festivities and a 4 day electronic music festival in January. But that would be too comfortable, obviously.

So instead I’m heading out at 4.30am to try to catch an overpriced flight (with a dodgy connection in Bogota) to Leticia in order to catch a boat up the Amazon to Iquitos in Peru. Trouble is I’m cutting it fine to catch the boat, which may not be running on Xmas Eve anyway. Should that happen I’m in a town of 30,000 souls for the holiday. Wonder what will happen. As ever I’m nervous, but I can’t stay here any longer as I’m starting to feel like Alan Partridge in his Travel Tavern. One of the receptionists even gives me one of those wry smiles as she corrects my Spanish each day.

Final thoughts on the area I’ve been staying for the last month.

Extreme poverty goes side by side with a burgeoning middle class here. Yesterday I witnessed two self-styled parking attendants fighting over the right to hinder motorists trying to park their 4-wheel drives for 100 pesos a time (two and a half pence). It ended with the old guy trying to hit the young man with the golf club he was using as a walking stick, before enlisting the help of the police who did nothing. Puts it all in a nutshell, really.

An unexpected thing has been the Colombian need to celebrate Christmas by putting up as many lights as the National Grid will allow. It’s truly astonishing the levels to which people will go to have illuminated santas, reindeers and nativity scenes in 30degree heat. It’s like the whole country (including the poorer barrios) has turned into a huge American suburb. Even the naval and army bases on the edge of town have joined in.

Whatever, everyone has been nice and it will be a shame to go. But I need to get to Patagonia before the end of January (sort of) or it’ll be too cold to visit.

As ever, a small warning about the diary. It may be a bit difficult to access the interweb t’internet in the Amazon, so I’ll wish you all a Happy Christmas now. I should be in relative civilisation for New Year whatever happens unless I’m kidnapped. If I am, though, my insurance runs to £100 per day of incarceration up to a maximum of 10 days. So that should leave everyone comfortable in their dotage.

Great quote from The King appeared the other day – so much so that I feel the need to spread it further…

‘Ronaldinho is the kind of player who makes kids dream. Kids aren’t going to walk around with Deschamps or Desailly on the back of their shirts, are they? If there were only players like Deschamps and Desailly around, there would be about 10 people who’d bother to take up professional football and they’d be their cousins and nephews.’

So there we go. Colombia about to be history. Peru about to be the future. All relies on taxis and planes. Neither are too reliable around here…

Mad note to sisters. You may have multiple entries in your in boxes. Essentially letter to parents. If problematic please work out a way to print the note and then visit the following link for general photos, one or two of which you might like to print for Mum. Will try to continue to leave pics there, which may be interesting to others as well.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28108075@N00/

By the way there is a well dodgy note on ‘Still Rhyl’. Anyone know anything about it?

Feliz Navidad everyone.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.