Along with Sharon who I’m traveling with there is another Irish person on the tour who is staunchly patriotic (aren’t all Irish) and who I can only understand about 75% of what he says. I haven’t heard them use ‘good craic’ (fun) or ‘grand’ the expressions I commonly associate with the Irish. But [...]

From Merida we booked a four day tour of Los Llanos a plains savannah to the south of the Andes mountain range in the hopes of seeing an anaconda (giant snake) with some piranha fishing, rafting, horse back riding and bird watching thrown in.

I have decided that paragliding is the new sport I am going to take up. I loved it. I got to fly our chute and the guy who took me said that I had the right attitude for it. When I told my grandmother her response was, well I could have done [...]

One of the appeals of traveling with Sharon was that we were both going to go to Merida in Venezuela and take Spanish classes but we ended up booking all these tours so we made the most of having a tour guide to ourselves to practice Spanish as much as we could. As we [...]

There is this strange phenomena over Lago Maracaibo (largest lake in South America) of lightening with no thunder which they think is produced by wind igniting methane gas. So we did a two day tour to see the lightening and stayed up and saw the sky lightening up with flashes until two in the [...]

Citizens of Venezuela can not exchange the local currency (B = bolivars) very easily for foreign currency and then it is fixed to 2.1B to 1 US dollar and 3.7B to 1 € so a black market exists in dollars ($1=5.6B) and Euros (€1= 7.5B). So Venezuelans who are dealing with foreigners offer [...]

I was really worried about getting out of Colombia as I had a temporary imported bike registered against my passport and thought that I would have to explain where it was. Instead I had no problems getting out of Colombia but they wouldn’t let us into Venezuela without a flu shot which apparently the [...]

One of the main sights of Colombia is a lost city but when we heard that you would spend most of the six day track into the jungle wet we decided that we would rename the eight hour trek into the city ruins in the Tayrona National park the lost city.
We got to swim at [...]

Susan (the Canadian) had an underwater camera that she let me use on the dive. The visibility wasn’t great but we did see a lot of different sea life.
After diving we met up with some people who were also on our boat from Panama. While we were playing cards at a restaurant with [...]

I am meeting an Irish (Sharon) and Canadian (Susan) girl that I met on the boat to Colombia in, Taganga, a fishing village four hours away from Cartagena.
It took me less than two hours to miss my bike using public transportation. Somehow the journey that cost everyone else 20,400 cost me 72,000 as I [...]

I have decided to leave my bike in Cartagena for a few weeks and do the Colombian coast and Venezuela by public transport rather than take the bike across the border into Venezuela and back into Colombia. Plus as most of the people I meet traveling are going by buses I want to see [...]

Cartagena has a beautiful historical center which has been walled since it was sacked by Sir Frances Bacon. (Sir Henry Morgan sacked Old Panama – here they called them pirates while in the UK they are Sirs). I spent several hours walking around and then another one looking for the Sushi place I [...]

My first day in Cartagena was spent registering my bike with Customs. I think they are worried about swine flu as they wouldn’t let me into the building so I sat under a tree for a few hours and various people came out to me with forms to sign. Beats waiting in a [...]

When we reached Cartagena we weren’t allowed to leave the ship for most of the day apparently due to swine flu. So lots of time to play cards and figure out what I was going to do now that I had reached South America.

Colombia produces 80% of the worlds cocaine so on our third day on board the US Coast guard haled us. Apparently they have boarded the boat at night with no warning pointing guns at everyone. Unfortunately we didn’t get boarded.