an alternative christmas and new year

Ay up,

I trust everybody is full of new year optimism and determination after excessively gorging yourselves over the festive period.

We have finally left the coast and arrived this morning at a laid back wee town in the mountains called San Gil. The town itself is ok but the main attraction to come here are the range of activities available. Over the next few days we shall hopefully experience some more paragliding, rafting, trekking and maybe rapelling down a 180m waterfall. That is the plan anyhoo.

Columbia is pretty chaotic just now as the locals here make the most of the festive period and use it as their main vacation time of the year. It seems they make the celebrations a month long and everything will be pretty much packed with Colombian tourists until roughly the middle of January. Christmas seemed to follow much the same path as back home. New Year was slightly twisted in that most people seemed to remain fairly sober new years eve and then drink themsleves into a wobbly stupor on new years day. A novel and perfectly reasonable way of bringing in a new year i suppose. For us, new year was pretty cool. We just got drunk with some pals at our hostel early doors, then headed down to the beach for the bells, where we sang [old langsyne (sp)] much to the puzzled amusment of the locals. After the beach we headed back to the hostel for a few more cheap and cheerful rum and cokes before hitting the towns' one and only late night drinking den, El Garaje. A name which seems to be quite popular here. I think we lasted until day break before stumbling home and nervously awaiting the hangover to welcome us into 2008. Which by the way is a bloody scary thought. Its 2008!! I'm going to have to start believing these old people when they tell me how much time flies. Its incredible. My decade of carefree debauchery is nearly at an end.

New Years day was spent in the usual fashion of lightly mumbling forced conversation but it was decided the second day of 2008 was to be productive. So in our aforementioned new year optimism and determination to make every day count we headed off to the nearby national park, Tayrona. This place is incredible and is exactly what i expected of the carribean coast. It reminded me of seeing old pirate films with whoever was the fancy don of the day washing up on some deserted island of paradise complete with hula girls and fresh rum. This was where they must have landed. The park is basically a stretch of light jungle hiding the most picturesque beaches i have ever seen. Skegness has its nice spots i know, but this place was fresh from disneys imagination. We spent two nights there, the first was spent with maya and myself in rather cramped fashion as we had to share a one man tent. The second however was much more exotic as we were rocked to sleep by the wind safely tucked inside our stripey hammocks. There wasnt a great deal to do there other than admire the scenery and play in some of the most enormous and powerful waves imaginable. Some said it was a bit dangerous but i looked on the ocean as a challenge and duly conquered it. Well that maybe something of a lie as the sea totally flattened me in humerous ways on several occasions but it was quite a hoot and finally washed away any remaining rustiness from the new year celebrations.

Two nights was enough there so we headed back to our old haunt of Taganga for one more night before braving another night bus to wind up here in San Gil. Hopefully our time here will be pretty action packed. Spending Christmas and New Year up on the coast was a really good idea, we both really enjoyed ourselves up there. But i'm not much of a sunbather and it soon seemed as though we were wasting money and days needlessly. Consequently the next ten days in Columbia should be pretty busy as we've got a lot to see and not a great deal of time, but thats cool with me. After here we are heading to a wee town called Villa de Leyva for a couple of nights then onto to Bogota to see what this amazing countires capital has to offer. After that its off to Patagonia and i can't wait.

Hope all is well and the January blues don't hit anyone too hard.
Rob