My 1st Caribbean

Taganga near Santa Marta was the scene of my first carribean experience. I'm kind of sick of putting "oh what a wonderful place" at the beginning of my writings so i wont and to be honest it wasnt the best town in the world, but far far from the worst. There was a bunch of performing hippies there who would do (very impressive) acrobatic and juggling shows. the first night I thought it was excellent and gave a few pesos but by the 4th day when they yet again did the show in front of every restaurant on the front i was a bit tired of it. their existence kind of divided the town into either the hippies or the tourists, with many of the longer length travellers trying to get in with the hippies, gave the town an odd feel, almost us and them. the three main lads though were excellent chaps, it was some of the hangers-on that were a bit odd. Anyway - was but one aspect of the place and there were a great many good things to say too.

Mainly, it was the Caribbean! It was hot hot hot and the local were typically friendly, the sea warm and clear, loads of fish, nice beaches, all the things you'd expect.

This is a shot of the town from round the corner a little bit. the population was about 3,500 according to a chap I was speaking to at a sandwich shop. He also informed that about 1,000 people in the town had HIV or AIDS, usually an untold story but as he put it "a bare truth".

We went fishing, first with spears, then with lines, then trawling.

I swam down and shot this fish! It was well hard! I thought I was going to drown on the way back to the surface, a professional freediver is not a job that I could do. The spear worked kind of like a crossbow and were pretty fierce machines, but the most dangerous part was the fact that you had to spend ages floating round wearing a snorkel looking for fish to swim down to shoot. Got a rather sunburned back.

This was the catch of the day. 5 tuna, 7 little red fish, some other odds and sods and that lovely multicoloured thing. The Gods smiled on us, especially with the tuna, as we hit a massive shoal of them on the way back to port.

I caught 2 tuna, about 4 of the red things and the multicoloured thing.

We barbecued them! We had caught enough food for 9 of us to eat, and eat a good amount. Gutting a fish is rather easy as well, although a thoroughly smelly process. Took a lot of soap to get the smell off.

The tuna were by far the best, the red things (red snappers?) hardly had any meat on them and the multicoloured thing was just plain wrong, kind of like fish jelly.

Why do people make stupid bets? Eating fish eyes? Not nice. Will tried to eat just the one...

... and didn't enjoy it.

I then bet Moseley a stupid amount of money to eat the remaining 6, and then drink the liquid that they were in. I don't think he enjoyed it either but he managed to chomp through the lot. He's on his gap year and needs money, a fact I should have exploited earlier.

Sunset. What more can I say?

This is the lead hippy man doing some pretty amazing stuff on the fabric they'd tie to the tree every night. As I said they were good blokes and we had a few drinks with them, but it did get a bit annoying when having been out raving with them all until 8 the previous morning they started their show right in front of our table

So I did a daft daft thing... Yep locked my keys in my locker, and I got a strong padlock, so I was rather stumped as to how to get my stuff back. Simple solution in today's technological world, I read a manual on-line about how padlocks work, watched a video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5trcVcik0A), borrowed a hair-clip and a screwdriver and picked the bloody thing in seconds. It's really easy, I'd recommend getting combination padlocks now.

I bloody love Bogotá!

So I didn't take many photos in Bogotá... in fact those below are all that i took... But, it is probably the best city I have ever been to outside the UK. Better than New York maybe, better than London maybe... I'm not too sure, but it was excellent. Stayed in a quality place called Musicology owned by the same chap who owned the Nega Maluca in Salvador and had a similarly excellent layout and feel.

The Party Bus that we went on the Friday deserved it's name, the clubs were ace, the locals extremely friendly and always happy to stop and have a chat (a point I exclaimed many a time to the chagrin of everyone around me), the museums similarly excellent (especially the Police Museum which when i visited i forgot my camera...). Raving in a club on the 30th floor of a tower block as the sun came up surrounded by beautiful Columbian ladies and these three fooking mental lads from Oregon and all the stories that surround it was just down right excellent. I swore to myself that if I get chance I'll return to live there, I intend to keep that in mind and hope to make it happen.

I'm not a big fan of pictures only of people but seeing as I don't have any others then they'll have to do. I think i took them all within 20 minutes of leaving. Maybe i'll go back and take some more.

The Chest

Moseley

The front garden of Musicology

My bunk... there's a funny story attached to this involving the Spaniard (not pictured) which I'll not recount here...

Shitfoot

er... I'm short of material okay? The, er... computer room...

Little Lina

Outside the bar...

The French Telenova Star, and Estella in blur.

The bar...

Outside the bar...

Lula the dog (i think that's the name...)

The Mop...

Scuba Steve, aka Cock Latino, and Moseley...

The Reject

The street...

and again, from slightly further down it...

and that's all folks! Fooking great city.

Low end Lima

I didn't like this hat, and I didn't like Lima.

So I didn't buy the hat, and I left Lima.

I did however like this tortoise...

and the sandwich which came out of this.

Peru and Machu Picchu

I told the owner of this dog that maybe putting it in a cardboard box and then stuffing it in the luggage compartment was probably not the safest way to transport the animal. They listened! So they took the dog onto the bus. and it proceeded to wee all over a group a travellers hand luggage. They weren't so impressed with it all and with hindsight maybe the fluffy cute little thing would have been better off suffocating above the engine, rammed in with everyone's rucksac.

In Cusco they put wigs on the statues of saints. Which I liked.

Rather extraordinarily they put a firework show on for our arrival. I can see no reason why this wouldn't be the case. Whispers of it being Easter I disregarded as mere rumour.

This statue of a donkey playing football was outside the National College of Science.

I'd like to tell a good story about this but I cant, I took it by accident when showing a mate my camera. I was slightly surprised to have caught such an expression up on reviewing my files.

On the way to the train to Machu Picchu at a rather remote petrol station.

You get on this train yer, the only train to Machu Picchu, on the only line up there, and there is an announcement in about 35 languages thanking you for choosing Peru Rail.

Okay, so apologies for the below seeing as a great many people have been there, there are some excellent excellent photographers who have stalked the hills taking wonderfully professional photos, scribes with more poetry than bones have cast forth verse to the glory of the place, books, documentaries, every tourist shop in Peru bangs on about it but Machu Picchu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machu_Picchu) took me by surprise. I thought it would be massively overrated tourist trap, but they've done a really good job. It's pristine, clean, nobody tries to sell you anything in there (although expensive to enter). It's truly is amazing and worth the hype that surrounds it. The way the clouds part from morning time to reveal the deeply historical cradle of pre-European south American civilisation is a joy to behol... blah blah poeticcrap blah. It's shit hot, basically.

The steps were at the top of Wayna Picchu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huayna_Picchu, which we had to leg it up to get into as they only let the first 400 people on the site a day enter this part), and below them there was something like a 1000m drop. There were no guide ropes, there were no people saying stay away or even be careful. You could just clamber all over the place. I'm surprised no-one dies

Stalker zoom!

Really bloody steep.

and yer, that might look like the worst sunburn ever, but actually it was because of the light in the cafe.

And what type of crazy fule likes white water rafting? Don't even know if you can raft down this but I bloody well wouldn't.