Guilin Day 2
Ok, bring on day 2 of our tour! Its difficult waking up without an alarm as I found out this morning. My roomie, K, tried to wake me up, but she’s far too polite and doesn’t insist I actually get up, so the result is that she’s ready for breakfast before I’ve even opened my eyes. I had no idea what the plan was for today; that how good our personal translators are, they tell us nothing.
First off, we stop by a river and do a short bamboo raft canoeing activity. There’s some women dressed in traditional outfits that get on the rafts with us and serenade us down the river. Gotta say, you wouldn’t find Chinese singing on my ipod ever – far too high pitched. They even got us to join in and sing along to the songs. And by ‘we’ I mean anyone who could read Chinese, so not me. The ride didn’t take all that long, but we each got a turn at paddling using the long bamboo stick to steer.
Guatape
September 22nd 2014
Skipping ahead to 6 days into my stay in Medellin, and Phil and I had decided to go to Guatape. Guatape is a cute little town about 2hrs bus ride away from Medellin. Everyone has been telling me its amazing and not to miss it. I’m not sure how Phil has caught up to me; he stayed 2.5 weeks extra in Bogota to study Spanish and I am yet to stop to take classes so it seems I am just making my way through Colombia incredibly slowly. Anyway, its nice to hang out with someone and not have to do the regular introductions: What’s your name? Where are you from? How long are you travelling for? Where are you going next? Where have you been? Etc It’s starting to get repetitive.
Mud Volcano
September 4th 2014
Something about air conditioned rooms here; they can never seem to get the temperature right. The night before last, the room was freezing, then last night, some idiot had set it to 29 degrees and it had been blowing hot air all night. It was cooler outside than inside the room.
Today we decided to go to ‘Volcan de Lodo El Totumo’; a natural mud volcano just outside Cartagena. Once again the staff at this hostel proved useless. We asked the guy last night to leave a note for the morning staff to book us a morning tour. Charnie got up to inquire this morning and they had seen the note and chosen not to do anything about it.
Palomino
30th August to 2nd September
When I got back from the Lost City hike I checked back into the hostel I had moved to the day before going. No sooner had I walking into the dorm, I heard someone scream my name. Charnie, a Perth girl I had met in Bogota, had been staying in the 8 bed dorm alone for a few days and was super excited to finally have some company. She had travelled over a year in Europe and had met up with one of her best friends to do 4 months in South America, arriving on the same day as me. Unfortunately though, her friend had met a Russian girl at this hostel and decided that he couldn’t live without her so had ditched Charnie to travel with the Russian, 3 weeks into their 4 month planned trip. How rude. So I convinced her to come chill with me for a few days at the beach in Palomino. I felt that after the hike I was in much need of some relaxing beach time.
Villa De Leyva
When the sign behind the reception desk says breakfast is from 7am until 11am, you would think that at 7.20 I would be able to get something to eat. No. The problem is hostels where the occupants generally are not people that get up early is that the breakfast time seems to move back to suit them. At least I managed to find a banana.
I had agreed to meet Guilia at the fountain in the centre of the town’s main square at 10. Unfortunately, when I got there I found that the council had already started blocking off access to the square for the kite festival that starts tomorrow. So where’s the next most logically place to meet someone where they will be able to find you without getting to communicate the change with them? The steps of the church.
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