Stuck on a bus with a goat and a wee boy being sick - Colombia que linda eres

Hi pals!

Happy 2009 to all, hope Hogmanay was a belter wherever you may have spent it. Mine was spend in the Parque Tayrona by the Caribbean coast, crowded round a table by candlelight drinking cachaca (the Brazilian spirit that goes in caipirinhas, more to do with this later) with lots of holidaying Bogotanos. Muggins here was a bit free with the bevvy and had to go to bed (hammock) at 2am, i tell you it´s a nasty business getting into a hammock when you´ve had one dodgy cocktail too many. Then i fell asleep without taking the precaution of covering my face and woke up the next day with one half of it covered in mosquito bites. It was deeply embarassing, it swelled up and went all bumpy and i looked like the elephant man for most of the holiday. And i didn{t even have my fringe to hide the top part of it since while i was in Aracataca (birthplace of big Gabriel Garcia Marquez) i got a dubious haircut which left me with a really short fringe which makes me look permanently startled. Aracataca is grand though, a wee sleepy hot town in the middle of miles and miles of banana plantations with lots of old guys sitting out on the steps of their houses chatting and wee kids briling about on bikes.

After Tayrona and the mosquito bite horror i went to the Guajira, the desert region on the border with Venezuela. It´s beautiful with big dusty plains and blue lizards and incredible sunsets. I liked the whole region, travelling around in the back of shoogly trucks with women in big flowery smocks and people trying to put goats on the van ("You can´t put that thing on the truck! There isn´t a seat for it!" the lady beside me cried in horror) you see boys by the side of the road selling knock-off Venezuelan gasoline in old Coke bottles, and some of the cars have these strange green and white licence plates which mean they´ve been stolen in Venezuela, smuggled across the border then registered and legalized in Colombia where they sell them for knock down prices. All very shady and exciting, these are total border towns where a man accosts you as soon as you get out of your rattly truck and offers to take you across the border in another one, with documents or without. In one such town i had a plate of fried goat for breakfast, the cafe was a block away from the goat market where rows of sad goats sit on the ground with all their legs tied together waiting for someone to buy them, so i though that at least it´d be nice and fresh because it was probably alive an hour earlier. Nae luck though, frankly i don´t think that deep frying it is the best way to cook the stuff, and i mean if anybody´s going to like it deep freid it´d be me.

Then we went on to Valledupar, home of vallenato where there was a Peter Manjarres concert to celebrate the birthday of the city, lots of sculptures in the streets and much time spent tanning tintos and sitting on walls. From Valledupar we went to Pueblo Bello and to visit and Arhuaco village called Nabusimake which is 2 of the most unimaginably uncomfortable hours going up and down steep rocky hills and through rivers and over huge boulders. Whiplash-a-rama. I don{t think foreigners hang around Pueblo Bello too much because our arrival caused some hilarity among the local population, endless questions about where we were from and what we were doing there, and the night we went to play pool in a pool hall with huge paintings of Vicente Fernandez and Hugo Chavez on the walls we attracted a crowd of people on motorbikes and wee kids who stood around openmouthed as me and Mark rattled the balls around the table and resolutely failed to pot the black. Luckily two dogs got stuck together in the heat of passion so this took the heat off us, as the unfortunate couple took a turn at being the subject of speculation and hilarity.

Next stop San Gil, Colombia´s adventure sports capital where we went rafting on the Rio Fonce and i fell in, and more time was spent in pool halls and tanning tinto on park benches and visiting waterfalls and swimming in freezing rivers. On the last day we went to the natural park and discovered that their open air swimming pool has a resident pair of ducks who glide around as wee kids push each other in and people float along in rubber tyres. Needless to say there are some undignified photos of me and Cherie in the pool with the ducks, which i will be sharing with the world as soon as i get the holiday pics organised.

Back in Bogota now! It´s as grey and rainy as when we left, but now i feel colder because i´ve been swanning about in hot weather for the past month. Despite unpleasant weather it´s good to be back, and me and Cherie and Adam are going to learn Portuguese from a Brazilian friend who´s running classes, if we keep it up for 5 months we´ll be able to have a decent conversation, how exciting! We went to his house last night to meet everyone that´s doing it, they seem like a very excellent bunch and we all learned how to make, and then tanned a lot of, caipirinhas.