The Caribbean coast: lost civilizations, slave cities and free souls. 28th May – 11th June

Having enjoyed the mild climes of the Andean region, with its coffee farms and city cable cars, it was high time to turn up the heat and fly up (yeah I know, I’d had enough of bus travel by then) to the irresistible city of Cartagena de Indias, ready to soak up whatever it had to throw at me.

Cartagena de Indias. Carrtageeeenaa de Iiiindiaaas. Just typing those three words is enough to get my heart racing and my mind wandering off to thoughts of horse drawn carriages racing through narrow streets, vibrant squares where Argentinian street musicians play, and ancient city walls soaked in history.

When I first arrived I was first figuratively hit by the heat, which during the day is stifling and repressive, and then literally by the dust that swirls around the outskirts due to the general hustle and bustle that this city seems to be constantly caught up in. I frantically befriended a French couple who looked like they had some kind of idea where they were going, jumped (and again I mean that in the literal sense) onto the back of a passing minibus, and held on for dear life.

I would quickly get used to this manic pace of life on the Colombian coast. It is a universally accepted fact in South America that the costeños live life at twice the speed of land-lubbers, and given how crazy Colombians are in general, it’s no exaggeration to say I was panting to keep up with the speed that these people live their lives.

But it’s addictive.

First, the city. The main draw is the old walled city, a relic of the time when Cartagena was the major hub of the Spanish slave trade around 400 years, and everywhere you turn there is evidence of this shameful past. If you’re interested in that sort of thing then the Palacio de la Inquisicion, complete with two huge sections on the torture of suspected witches, is definitely the place to go.

Plenty an hour can be whiled away strolling the colourful corners of the walled city and gazing up and ornate balconies, safe from the heckles of the rather pushy tourist pushers. In the heat of the day I would duck into the air-conditioned haven of the Abaco for some guarabana (Colombia does fruit like no other place) juice and plot my next moves.

Those next moves inevitably involved music, which is also everywhere. On consecutive days I made it to a series of Afro-Colombian musical performances on the city walls at sunset, the formidable noise of a traditional band in a bandstand near the walled city, and then ventured solo to the legend that is Café Havana for some live salsa. If you look for music in Cartagena, you will find it.

Saturday led me to Rafael, a quintessential Cartegena resident who speaks at a million miles an hour and just exudes life. I got to know him through couchsurfing, and he had planned to get a group together head to Playa Blanca near Cartagena to camp in hammocks on the beach under the light of the moon. In the event I was the only one to turn up, so the two of us headed to the armed with not much more than guitar and a few tins of tuna, via two buses crammed to bursting and a stunning off-road moto taxi journey. What else?

Given the dreadful state of Cartagena’s beaches, playa blanca was less tropical paradise and more overrun kid’s holiday camp during the day, but at night all the bohemian Argentinian empanada sellers come out to play, and the vast blackness makes the world seem like a very big place indeed. If you go to playa blanca, get there for mid-afternoon when the families leave, make the most of the night and your hammock, and ideally leave early enough the next day to leave the refugee-style situation of having to wade desperately into the water to avoid being left behind by the last boat back.

Sailing into Cartagena’s port that evening to the sight of that rugged old-town skyline gave me a feeling almost like coming home, and it was with real sadness that I left to Santa Marta (birthplace of football’s Falcao, no less), arriving just in time to bang down the door of the closed tourist office and demand a place on the trek to the lost city the next day.

I joined the trek the next day at 9am feeling sleep-deprived (it’s so hot in Santa Marta that I kept waking up because my cheek was so sweaty on the pillow) and flustered from an early morning dash around town for bug spray and peanuts and was plonked back at my hostel four days later feeling even more sleep-deprived and exhausted from head to toe, but invigorated by an amazing trek that surely won’t stay a secret for long.

The trek is around 42km round trip, which due to the terrain (there were some truly brutal uphill sections) made our four-day trek a physical challenge to say the least, but a true experience. We were led by our local guide through farmland into denser vegetation with a huge array of natural life, and were introduced to the customs of the four local indigenous groups, learning about how they farm the land, their social hierarchy and the use of coca leaves in formal greetings (they pop a few leaves in each other’s pouches when passing as a sign of respect). Bathing spots are generously dotted along the path, and they are necessary because you sweat from pretty much every pore.

Accommodation comes in the form of large camps with rows of hammocks and mosquito nets, very basic amenities and delicious local food prepared over open fires every night. Due to those very limited amenities you become a completely diurnal creature, rising at 5am to watch the sun rise and collapsing in bed around half past 7, the disappearance of the sun draining any remaining energy from your body. This back to basics approach is in keeping with the simple lives that people live there and is in stark contrast to Macchu Piccu World™.

Some say that the actual lost city itself is an anti-climax after the stunning walk. Don’t listen to them. I’ve included some pictures as I’m not sure I’m equipped to describe how beautiful it is. Not just that: the reverence that people have for the place imbues it with a calming effect; I could have stayed there for days.

After getting back to Santa Marta, I firstly had to check myself in to the poshest hostel in Colombia, where the plan was to rehabilitate by the pool for several days. In the end I managed less than a day – there’s too much life on the coast to sit by a pool with privileged Australian school dropouts. Through couchsurfing I got in contact with a local who invited me over for a games night with her and her friends, which somehow turned into an all-night session involving one of them eating a worm out of a tequila bottle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezcal) and table-top renditions of Bohemian Rhapsody, before some truly outrageous salsa dancing in "The door" ("La Puerta" - the place to be seen in Santa Marta). Quiet night in indeed; I was beginning to think that costeños don't understand the concept.

The kindness of Colombians led to me staying in my board game friend’s house for a couple of nights and leaving my bag there whilst I scooted for a trip to the otherworldly coastal nature reserve Parque Tayrona, yet another area of stunning natural beauty in that part of the world, with yet more hammocks strung up by beaches so beautiful they're almost unrealistic and crystal clear lukewarm water. By this stage I was starting to get used to it. The walk to the main campsite snakes through huge areas of coconut trees, where visitors step over busy leaf-carrier ants and duck under passing monkeys, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

And then, as quickly as my coastal adventure began, it came juddering to a halt. As I sat on the beach waiting for my flight to Bogota (another thing that people there seem to think is normal), I wondered what kind of lorry Caribbean Colombia had run me over with. One thing was clear though, I wanted to be run over again, and soon.

Andean Colombia: salsa, coffee, couchsurfing, pigeons, and exploding paper triangles. 15th - 28th May

“Wooah-oh, Colombia, wooah-oh!”. As I sat on the flight from Rio (good to see you again) to the Colombian capital of Bogota, even the promotional video on the front of my seat gave me an idea that I was onto a good thing. Images of colourful colonial towns, genial smiling old men, cascading coffee beans and some frankly ridiculously beautiful scenery on the screen only increased my excitement.

However, first things first it was time to get on with a new adventur– couchsurfing. My first ‘appointment’ was with a 40-year-old English teacher called Mao in Popayan in southern Colombia, keen to let me sleep on the floor of his bedroom in return for my English skills.

And what a lot of them there were looking to learn from my fountain of knowledge. On my first evening I was met by three from the airport before shots of aguardiente, a sugarcane-based spirit, and for the rest of my stay there my time was almost entirely taken up by students who wanted to show me the city (I was given three different tours over two days), take me out for arepas (cornflour pancakes) or take me salsa dancing.

Ah, salsa. In other south American countries salsa is all over the radio, a key component of a night out and an excuse for sad human beings such as the ubiquitous Marc Anthony to continue to use up precious oxygen. But in Colombia salsa is LIFE. You can see in the way that they conduct even mundane everyday business with the sway in their step that only a lifetime of salsa dancing (it’s like riding a bike – almost everyone is taught how to dance salsa by their parents at the age of 5) can give you.

Myself, on the other hand… I thought that I could hold my own in a salsateca after picking up a thing or two in Ecuador, but when you find yourself in a sticky and sweaty salsa club surrounded by those with at least 18 years experience of not just dancing but living salsa, you realise you have a lot to catch up.

The way that Colombians meet members of the opposite sex is by going out, dancing salsa with as many people as possible, and once sparks start shooting between one of your partners, to continue to dance with them until all the hip-shaking flirtations of the usual salsa steps are forgotten and they’re basically having sex with clothes on. Once this stage is realised then they presumably go home and have actual sex.

I think this way of hooking up is much better than the English way of getting shitfaced and taking home whoever your confused mind wanted at the time. For a start, Colombians stay mostly sober on nights out, since dancing is the most important thing and you can’t dance if you can’t stand up straight…

So this free and open attitude meant that very few girls would refuse to dance with me. It’s just a dance after all. The only thing is that their friendly welcoming manner soon melted away when they realised that they’d said yes to a clumsy gringo with two left feet, and by the 5^th time in a row that a girl spent the whole song looking around bored in any direction but mine, I was starting to wish I’d spent less time as a child riding my bike and more time grinding my hips.

With a bit of practical tuition in my back pocket from one Popoyan girl who found my ungainliness charming rather than unbearable, I headed for one night in Cali, salsa capital of Colombia. Unfairly maligned, Cali’s centre offers charms such as a church square with 30 stands offering to type up documents on very old fashioned typewriters (how hipster) and another square which makes you feel like you’re in a scene from The Birds, such is the infestation of pigeons. This is presumably caused by local residents who pose for photos as pigeons eat from both of their hands and shit on their head. Must be a cultural thing.

So go to Cali for that, and stay in the Pelican Larry hostel while you’re at it. A group of us gringos and gringas headed out for some Sunday night salsa from there, finding ourselves in a huge club with a live salsa band where many people bring holdalls full of cowbells and other percussion and pass them around the public. I decided that was a safer option than testing out my moves on a Cali girl, but still managed to get chastised for bad cowbell playing by a pensioner, who then owned me in a dance-off. After that club finished, eight of us bundled into a 5-seater car to go to a late-night salsa club where the rule seemed to be not to dance with gringos. I went back to the hostel soon after.

The Colombian bus network led me next to the village of Salento in the coffee-growing zone of the country (or zona cafetera). Described as ‘charming’ by my guide, I took a rather different view of it due to the fact that this is where I joined up with the Colombian gringo trail and had to come to terms with seeing more of those people that I had gone out there to avoid. The climate is usually wonderful there, and offers the chance to go horse riding through fields of giant palm trees and visit the charming coffee farms that are dotted around the countryside.

My memories involve it raining so much that I could barely see the giant palm trees that were 5m from my face, and not being helped by some crappy Swiss people when I was bitten by a dog on the way to my coffee tour. But hey, maybe you’ll have a better time.

One cool thing that I did get to try in Salento was the national sport of Colombia – Tejo. This has to be played in large backrooms of bars and involves chucking heavy metal balls a good 10m to try and land on four tiny exploding triangles embedded in clay. It’s kind of less fun than it sounds, but in Colombia it’s taken very seriously, with a professional league and everything. That seems less strange when you consider that it’s possible to be a professional darts player in the UK.

Medellin was to be my shining light to rescue me from my salsa rejection and coffee-based trauma. What was the most dangerous city in the world a mere twenty years ago under the reign of drug lord Pablo Escobar has become an ultra-modern city since his death, and partly because of all the money he invested in infrastructure to appease a population that was ruled by fear.

Most people would agree that a man who used to have a bounty of $1000 on every Medellin policeman’s head was a bit of a dick. However, he still retains huge popularity amongst residents, willing to overlook all that killing and drugs because he helped to fund a cable car up from the city to the slums above. The view from said cable car is probably the daytime highlight of Medellin, along with the bizarre sculptures of fat humans and animals in the Plaza Botero.

As for the night-time highlight, there is absolutely no contest. I went to the El Tibiri bar with a mate of a Popayan couchsurfing student, and it was everything that you would hope for in a south american salsa bar – located in a dingy basement with practically no ventilation, free-flowing beer and aguardiente, incredible, joyous music, and the most incredible salsa dancers I think I’m ever likely to see without moving to Cuba.

One girl in particular springs to mind, and one song in particular where she was flung and spun between two partners in a flurry of legs had most seated (and many that had been stood dancing) stopping what they had been doing in amazement. The whole venue broke out in applause at the end. Once again, girls were willing to dance with me, and even if I was awful, the energy and joy in the room meant that it didn’t seem to matter. Even the disturbing sight of an interval act where an old bloke got puppets to perform sex acts on each other couldn’t sour the mood.

A day later, I took the bus to experience some good old Colombian hospitality with my mate from El Tiburi. I stayed in the youth camp where he worked and was given three hearty meals (usually rice or pancake with some type of dark meat, three times a day) for around £3 a night, just enough to get my strength up after an energy-sapping couple of weeks, ready to head up to the sultry Caribbean coast to let South America throw all that it could at me for one last exhilarating time.

The end of my stay in Brazil: 7th - 15th May (and musings on this complex country two months on)

I may be just a little behind on updating my travel journal, but sometimes a bit of distance and a world cup since leaving a place is useful and necessary to work out how you feel about your experience. This is the case when it comes to my final week or so in Brazil.

Brazil's problems are well documented and were brought into focus thanks to that month where the FIFA circus further complicated the situation in an already fairly complicated country of contradictions. This is a country that boasts about its jungle and incredible biodiversity whilst simultaneously destroying that same natural abundance to feed the flames of its booming beef and biofuel industries, that despite its booming economy even relatively well-off citizens struggle to survive due to crippling taxes (those same taxes that paid the $9bn world cup bill), and that prides itself on its ethnic diversity but where afro-Brazilians still are mainly treated as second class citizens and forced to live in hillside shanty towns called favelas.

As the US-based British comedian John Oliver noted in a brilliant rant on his late night show (http://youtu.be/DlJEt2KU33I) it seems incomprehensible to casual observers that a nation which clearly loves football so much could be so angry about staging the world cup. Never mind the so-called pacification (in reality anything but) and destruction of whole favela communiques in order to clean up the cities for the arrival of tourists and FIFA officials, the fact that huge stadia were built for no essential reason at great cost in places such as Manaus where they will serve no further purpose is reason enough to be on their side in this conflict. Especially when you consider those huge taxes (tax fraud is necessary to get by and the norm) and that ordinary citizens lack basic. Public education is well below standard, and the public health service is dogged by low standards that lead to grave mistakes such as a leg being amputated after a patient went in for a routine operation.

Put simply, Brazilians pay an arm and a leg (sometimes literally) for services that only the desperate and those who can't afford to go private would use.

It's symptomatic of an exploitative form of capitalism very prevalent in South America, where profit is everything, and the customer is always wrong and almost always loses out. I experienced exactly this at my language school in Ecuador, where the staff were paid pittance and the students passed through the levels at a detriment to their education in order to keep the parents' money coming in the naïve notion that they were actually learning. Most of the profit was of course creamed off by the owner, who lived the good life in a huge mansion in the countryside.

The addictive property in Brazil's football drug is success, much more so than the pursuit of jogo bonito, as Brazilians name their infectious football flair. There were therefore many who believed that a world cup win would be the only thing that could reunite the country with the people who run it. After the humiliating way they were knocked out, it will be interesting to see where things go from here.

This political and social turmoil is even harder to understand when I equate it with all the joy and warmth I encountered in my final week in the country. My journey onward from Salvador towards the final destination of Recife took in the instantly forgettable Maceio which you'd be best to avoid and along the coast to Porto de Galinhas.

In my efforts to make the move from Maceio to Porto de Galinhas I experienced a bit of a bus nightmare (lady at counter speaks lightning fast Portuguese and denies existence of bus I want, charges 20 real more which leaves me 5 short, won't accept my card and sends me back into town when there are machines around the corner etc...) but then had that offset by some kindness to put a smile on the weariest traveller's face.

This came in the form of a family who drove me around town in search of money and then back to the bus station to put that vaca straight. As if to highlight my desperate situation, upon explaining what had happened in broken Portuguese to a mother and daughter on my bus they looked very concerned, took my hand, told me "Jesus te ama" (Jesus loves you) and gave me a leaflet on the story of Christ and a bracelet with 'AMOR' written on it.

A touching gesture you'll agree, and a demonstration how people survive the madness - no matter what this country throws at you, there'll be someone or something around the corner to pick you up again.

Porto de galinhas, or 'chicken port' is essentially a fairly tacky seaside resort which is worth putting up with for the tours to the natural rock pools half a mile out to sea at sunrise and sunset, where swarms of tropical fish gather in such incredible numbers that you fear of slapping them as you swim through the water. That the swarms are due to tour operators dumping huge amounts of feed in the pools when tours visit actually did little to spoil my enjoyment!

Feeling the effects of the huge and lovely but basically deserted Che Lagarto hostel I stayed in in Porto de galinhas and a fair few days of lonely travelling, I arrived in the cute arty Dutch settlement of Olinda near Recife determined for Brazil and I to say goodbye on good terms.

Safe to say we did. Olinda is a picture book old Brazilian town, and the sunset view over its narrow tree lined to the mass of skyscrapers that is Recife on the other side of the bay takes some beating, enhanced by the smug feeling of not being in that concrete monstrosity of a city. Olinda also knows how to party, with an incredible carnival involving some exhausting-looking headwear (see pictures) and more than its fair share of street parties, all brought to you by Axé, a potent memory-erasing alcoholic brew with cinnamon and fresh cloves.

At a street party on the Saturday night that I arrived, my German friend and I befriended some locals, who did the usual drunken thing of insisting we do this and that while in town. The difference here was that they showed that Brazilian class by actually going through with my promise by taking me to meet their friends and to an open air concert in Recife and an evening DJ set in the garden of an Olinda museum.

Add to that the dreamy pousada alto astral (complete with four poster bed to sunbathe by the pool) where I stayed and shared my time with a couple of Canadian girls who drank me under the table, and I was happy that Brazil had given me a worthy send off.

Brazilians make themselves a bit unpopular amongst the rest of south america with the assertion that they are not latinos but something a bit more refined, and having spent time there it's hard not to agree somewhat. The word gringo is used in a more affectionate way than in other nations, as tourists and foreigners in general are more welcomed, and little things like hotel owners actually showing you the way when you say you've already booked at a rival (wouldn't happen anywhere else!) make a big difference. Brazil is a big, complex beast with a warm fuzzy heart, and has to be seen and experienced to be believed, never mind understood.

So go!

Finding the 'real Brazil' in beautiful, buzzing and bootylicious Bahia: 28th April - 7th May

My travels in Brazil had been all well and good up to this point, but in going to an ecotourism hotspot, one of the most famous waterfalls in the world, and two huge global cities in the form of Rio and Sao Paulo I felt that I had not yet experienced the real Brazil, whatever that may be. I had heard many whisperings of a magical land called Bahia, spiritual home of all that makes Brazil great. So off I went.

The flipside of Brazil's expensive bus network is that a flight is often pretty much the same price, and given the huge distances involved it can save you a good day or two of your life in travel time, as was the case with my flight from Sao Paulo to Salvador, the capital of Bahia.

Even in the few initial hours in Salvador before jumping on a bus to Lencois, it was clear that you were in a very different place to the relatively safe and orderly cities of Sao Paulo and even Rio (everyone I met in Sao Paulo thought I would be robbed in Salvador and Giovanna's father was '100% certain' that I would be physically assaulted at least once). The first thing that hits you is the oppressive heat and humidity that had me dabbing my ears within 5 minutes of trudging around with my backpack on, and that oppressiveness is compounded by the masses of people buzzing around the transport hubs, selling their wares and generally living at a frantic pace.

This intense introduction and the warnings from the paulistas meant that I was happy to make it through my taste of Salvador alive and escape to Lencois, six hours inland and the gateway to the Chapada Diamantina national park. I arrived at around 9pm to a sleepy little town that could just have easily been in Belgium as in Brazil, but as I passed the two separate groups of little kids playing football barefoot on the cobbled streets, it was as if this place had been made to fulfil the most clichéd gringo idea of what a rural Brazilian village should look like. To be fair, it's not inconceivable that such a place could be built for that exact purpose.

The town was no less charming for this, and the national park on its doorstep was truly stunning. I think I knew I was onto a winner with this place the first morning, as my budget hostel served up a breakfast buffet including papaya, pineapple, slices of pizza, sugared cinnamon plantain, two types of cake and a full muesli buffet.

Day properly started, myself and a French-Spanish couple headed off walking with our strictly Portuguese-only guide (a common downside of the real Brazil) to NAME, a trail consisting of a bit of walking and a lot of leaping between huge boulders up a stream at the bottom of a 20m canyon. As with any physically demanding/life-threatening activity there needs to be a payoff, and we got two. The first was a leap into a refreshing (freezing cold) natural pool with a waterfall to scramble behind, and the second was the plain insane 'natural slide', a very bumpy rocky incline with a fast-flowing stream running down it. We feared that our guide would either kill himself doing the slide stood up or ditch us for his friends (I'm sure he planned the tour to rush through the sightseeing and get as much barbecue time with his mates by the barbecue as possible), but we made it back one way our another.

The next day a motley crew of myself, a Romanian wannabe pornstar on a sex quest through Brazil, his latest conquest, and a strange middle-aged bloke who'd been travelling so long he mistook me for an American (safe to see I wasn't his biggest fan after that) headed on another trip. This time we took in, and climbed up, scenery that looked like the result of several mini asteroid crashes, snorkelled through a pitch black cave full of feet-cleaning fish and a further huuuge underground cave. We even got to try curried cactus, which funnily enough tastes just as you'd expect.

The next day I filled up on sleep and kilo buffet food in the knowledge that I'd be needing all the energy possible for my night bus and for the sensory experience that is Brazil's third largest city, Salvador de Bahia. And what an experience it was.

Our hostel (HospedaSalvador) was situated a short stroll from the multicoloured façades and cobbled streets of the historic Pelourinho district, although any thoughts such carefree wanderings were put paid to by the charming hostel owner, who made it clear that we were not to walk left out of the hostel at any costs and only to walk around after sunset if accompanied and with only a photocopy of your passport and enough cash for your evening's entertainment or to satisfy a mugger.

So Salvador is dangerous, they were right about that, and in the five nights there my group (an Argentinian, two Italians, a Brazilian and myself, all speaking Portuguese) suffered a few hairy moments late at night with strange people trying to lead us away from our hostel. But Salvador is also the Brazilian capital of happiness, and in a country whose folk are well known for a pretty sunny outlook on life, that's no mean feat. If you take the necessary precautions you'll come to no harm, and then all that's left to do is sample all that this amazing city can offer.

The happiness of this city is truly contagious. It's almost as if the citizens soak up the energy from the constant sunshine and take that positive energy and happiness and use that in every aspect of their everyday life. You see it in the bright and vibrant colours of their clothes and handicrafts, you hear it in the African rhythms that pulse from practically every street corner, you smell it in the delicious shrimp acarajé and tapioca stands which seems to permeate the air, and, well, you just feel it. Salvador was the first capital of Brazil and the most important port in the slave trade in the days of colonialism. As such, around two thirds of the population is of African descent, and it is thought that Salvador is the city which has preserved its African slave culture the best of any city in the world. And this pride in their roots seems, again, to make people very happy.

During my five days there I enjoyed many a coconut on Salvador's excellent beaches, tied my deepest desires to my wrist and the railings of a pelourinho church in the hope that the three knots would come free and release my wishes with it, and soaked up the happiness in the form of another great kilo buffet or a capoeira show in the hours that it was bearable to be out in the

But it's in the night that Salvador shows its true colours and its happiness is at its most irresistible. From impromptu late night drumming sessions in the Rio Vermelho to an open air jazz concert by the museum of modern art and an open air samba concert down by the old lighthouse, Salvador is the city where the nightlife really feels alive. The best nights are Saturdays and Tuesdays in the pelourinho, where the whole district comes alive and the experience is almost like being at a European music festival, where you just want to get lost and stumble across a new band playing on the steps outside a church or in a wide open warehouse, swigging from your cinnamon liquor as you go.

Above all, it's the people who make this city great. Salvador was the friendliest city I encountered in all my south american travels, and you'd actually have to go out of your way to NOT make friends. We met many people desperate to sort out our two left feet, the gayest man in history who literally pranced one mile down the street with us (we were walking), a crazy bloke dancing around selling booze from a box on his head and countless people just curious to get to know us, no bad intentions to be found.

Bahia has beautiful scenery and people, Salvador buzzes with energy, and the bootylicious part? I guess you can figure that out.