Santa Marta y Otra Lugares

Did I mention that my kids LOVE the beach. Yes, yes they do. So does Leo. We really want to move to California. Just so you know. This was in Cartagena at a beach just in front of the "nice" hotels. We actually stayed at an apartment building with a kitchen that was much less expensive, but still decent. Oh, another tip about Cartagena. It's hot. And it's humid. Ana thought she was dying when she stepped off the plane from Bogota. And because of that, (not Ana's supposed death, the heat I mean) they don't have water heaters. At all. What you turn the tap for temperature is all you get. Elena and Isabel screamed a lot during their showers, I didn't really mind it because the water wasn't really that cold, just chilly at night.

We took a lot of tours in Cartagena, it's a pretty high crime city, if you didn't catch that before and we thought it would be safer than going off exploring by ourselves. Here we are at a mud volcano. It was really weird. You stayed very buoyant so you couldn't sink even if you wanted to. Elena and Isabel were not very impressed. I was only in there a short time because they both clung to me like they were going to die, and screamed the whole time. It was hard to maneuver around with them clutching me. When we got out and rinsed off, Elena said very empathetically, "That was NOT fun!"After the volcano we drove to another beach where we were fed lunch and played at the beach. It wasn't that great of a beach, but our tour group were the only ones there so that was neat. The lunch was pretty sad too. Oh well, for how inexpensive the tour was ($4 or $5 per person), what can you expect?

Another tour we took was to Santa Marta, another city on the coast about 3 1/2 hours from Cartagena. It has gorgeous beaches. Much nicer than Cartagena. It's also quite a bit more dangerous as a lot of drugs are run through the jungle around there.One day Leo and I would like to go back to Santa Marta and then go up to the Ciudad Perdida (the Lost City) which is what the pictures are of above. It's a three day hike through the jungle and once again, there's quite a few guerillas and drug runners there, so maybe not any time soon. Hee. Hee. To back track a bit, the night before we left for Santa Marta, I slept terrible, I was awake for most of the night and I had all these awful nightmares, and I was soooo hot! I turned on the other fan in the room to cool down, while Leo was shivering beside me. We had to get up at 5 AM to catch our tour bus, and I was feeling okay, only I used the bathroom three times in the space of 30 minutes. I didn't really put anything together till we went over the first bump on the road with Isabel on my lap. I thought I was going to pee my pants. Umm, yeah, I lasted about 35 minutes sitting at the very back of the bus with Isabel on my lap and very bumpy roads before I traded seats to sit further up in the bus and gave Isabel to Leo. By that point I knew I had a severe UTI. Literally, it was the worst trip of my life. (The only thing to compare is when I drove with my sister Amy from Canada to Utah, and she wouldn't stop for me to go to the bathroom the whole way through Idaho.) I was in agons y. We stopped halfway through the 3 1/2 trip in Barranquilla for breakfast and Leo walked with me to a pharmacy, but despite having the reputation of selling any medicine over the counter, they wouldn't sell us any antibiotics because I was 6 months pregnant. I almost cried. Martha came to my rescue during the next half of the trip. She called one of Leo's cousins who is doing her residency right now, and she got a prescription from an OB-GYN she works with at the hospital, and when we stopped again she went and had the prescription filled for me. I was having chills with goosebumps every so often in the 100+ heat with 90% humidity. I was in tears by the time we stopped. I rushed off the bus as fast as I could, asked the nearest guard where the bano was and when I didn't understand they sent someone to show me the way. It was a long walk. I spent almost the whole next hour in the bathroom, by that point I was peeing blood. But Martha arrived with the antibiotics, and luckily they kicked in quickly so by the drive home, I wasn't bad at all. Anyway, the place above is La Quinta de San Pedro Alejandrino, where Simon Bolivar died. Those are the only pictures I have of it, although it's a huge place and really beautiful, because, like I said, I was in the bathroom. It's kind of like the Washington Monument in Washington D.C. Anyway, there were huge iguanas walking around all over and beautiful grounds and gardens.

Yeah, and this guy is from Santa Marta, Carlos Valderrama. There's a statue in town that we passed. Definitely the coolest hair I have ever seen on a statue. He's world famous, if you don't follow futbol.

Another day we took a ferry to the Oceanario Islas del Rosario, a group of islands mostly covered in resorts or privately owned, but a few are national parks. The boat ride was long, another 3 hour trip. And their entertainment wasn't quite family appropriate. People threw up. Not us, luckily. I was not having the greatest time at all. Then we arrived.

It was gorgeous. When I go back to Colombia, I'm just going there, forget the rest of it. Seriously, it was the crystal clear blue water and the snorkeling was apparently great (I didn't go, due to a few kids that were hanging on me.) We at lunch at the resort and swam in the ocean and pool. The only problem with it was there was no real beach, they just had a cement bulkhead and then the ocean. We actually were supposed to go to this beautiful white sand beach (La Playa Blanca) but due to weather conditions we had to leave early and we couldn't go there at all. Leo and I were pretty sad about that. But by the time we arrived back in Cartagena and the ocean was rough and it started to rain, we were glad. Elena liked that trip a lot too, as you can see.