i love Colombia

The city of Cartagena and Colombia for that matter are stunning. There is an electricity and sense of life in the air in Cartagena that I have never felt anywhere else. The city is drenched in history; you can almost hear the cannons fire or see pirate ships out in the bay as you make your way around the city. And the people, wow – truly kind hearted, patient and overwhelmingly helpful and nice. One of the best examples of how different Cartagena was showed itself when we went to collect the car (you may remember the Panama City experience from here). Sharply dressed people buzzed around the busy port carrying briefcases, paperwork and showcasing security badges. I waited in an air-conditioned white marble room with huge floor to ceiling windows with a view of the bustle while George and Dean, being the owners of the vehicles sat inside security at a conference table with offers of hot coffee sifting through and signing paperwork. The nice lady in charge of the security badges in the room I was waiting in chatted me up and helped me with my Spanish while I her with her English. When we left she said, “Welcome to Colombia, I hope you enjoy your time here.” It was actually a pleasant experience. After 5 days in the city I kept declaring, I love Colombia and especially Cartagena.


Colombia has only continued to impress us from there. In San Gil, we went class 5 rafting, ate cheap amazing food and drank delicious micro brews, took in the town, George went budget bungee jumping (not for me, thanks), and I took a dance class. We met up with a couple from Australia that we’d met on the sailing trip you might remember from here and another couple from Colorado (CragginWagon). One night we all adventured together to play the game of tejo – where you throw a metal puck at a clay board with the goal being to hit the ring in the middle that’s lined with explosives which explodes and sounds like a gun being fired. Yeah, it was amazing.

From San Gil we made the decision to do the long drive to Park National Natural El Cocuy. George said it well, “we didn’t drive all this way to skip the hard to get to places.” In the end it turned out to be two days worth of driving through some of the most amazing mountainous landscapes we’d seen. It made our first overnight at a gas station seem not so bad. Clean bathrooms, 24 hour security, and quiet night were right up our alley after 10 hours of driving.

Some times it’s time to jump ship or cut bait.

With 9 countries north of us, six months of time spent eating, drinking and surfing through countries, a van locked and loaded in a container bound for Cartagena, Colombia and a backpack full of sunscreen, bathing suits and booze we loaded a couple of pongas and headed out to El Gitano Del Mar, a 54’ catamaran, to sail through the San Blas Islands for three days before a 36 hour open water crossing into Cartagena to meet Dolores. 

We had dreams of an incredibly romantic sailing trip. We were sailing with our friends, Sara & Dean (that were also our shipping partners) and Katie O, who’d come to visit us. All along we knew that there would be other people on our boat, but we didn’t know that there would be almost 20 other people on our boat. Originally we understood the max booking number was 12. In total there were 23 of us (5 girls and 18 guys – yikes!). So the romantic idea of sailing was confined only to the stunning views of the islands -boat life with 23 people was not so romantic.

The 3 days of bouncing from one little uninhabited island to another, snorkeling, drinking from coconuts and taking in the clear water of the Caribbean was stunning. The highlight of the trip for Rachel happened when we were fishing during the open water crossing. We were trolling a few lines and finally caught a few fish. We had two on that were being reeled in when a third fish hit. As the crew turned their attention to the reel in the third line she was looking out at the water to see if she could tell what we had on. Right at that moment a huge shark flew about 5 or 10 feet out of the water to gobble up whatever we’d had on the line. It was like was watching National Geographic, but big and loud and real.

Sailing into Cartagena through the bay we encountered fleets of multiple countries’ old war ships as a US Coast Guard ship flanked us to our starboard. After a quick dinghy ride to shore the Captain handed over a bag of passports to the Immigration office and away we went to explore the city with our new Colombian passport stamp. Why can’t all border crossings be this easy? We quickly found a hotel, freshened up and hit the streets for food.

Cartagena felt that it had more history, life and passion than any place that we had visited before on this journey. We finally came back to a land of spices, sauces, and creativity. We sampled empanadas, arepes, kabobs of meat, sausages, fried cheese balls, tinto (black coffee), and more! Cartagena easily won us over with its organized chaos and friendly vibes. This town has renewed our sense of adventure for the trip and has us stoked for the rest of Colombia. If the rest of Colombia is half as awesome as Cartagena then it may be one of the best places on earth.

Bocas and Shipping - Panama

After sorting out our paperwork at the Panama border, which you may remember from here, we made the long and scarcely populated drive to Bocas del Toro. Well actually to Almirante, a pretty fantastic shit hole where the ferry to Bocas departs from. We arrived to Almirante just before dark and discovered there was only one hotel for us to consider for the evening, as it was too hot to sleep in the van. We had one of the last servings of Chinese food at the restaurant downstairs from the hotel and hit the hay in hopes that we would wake up to a fully intact Dolores in the morning. The small trash filled parking lot and consistent suggestions to remove the surfboards from the top of the van did little for our security confidence.

To our delight, Dolores fared well through the night. We boarded the ferry at 7:30am and it was exciting to see the clear water of the Caribbean again as we made our way through the mangrove islands to finally land on the small island of Bocas. We made our way as far north on the island and away from the little town as we could. At the end of the road we found a fantastic little spot for brunch on the beach. Working our way back to town was perfectly timed with school being out so we turned Dolores into a school bus and carted a few kids around.

One day we took a tour by boat around the island and surrounding area. We spotted dolphins, walked around an itty bitty island, sat on a doc and watched all the fish big, small, colorful and scary, swim about, endured a rainstorm and snorkeled above beautiful reefs and shipwrecks. Although, the highlight for me was loosing the bet with Katie about spotting the first sloth. As we approached Sloth Island, Katie quickly announced, “the first person to see a sloth has to buy drinks tonight.” Not two minutes later it was me saying, “there – I see one!” She laughed, knowing all along she was going to win the bet.

After surfing, playing in the waves, fishing, running on the beach, yoga in the mornings, hot sauce shopping, happy hour at the docs, discovering Bocas Brewery, and witnessing the intense and loud celebration that takes place when Bocas wins a baseball game we decided it was time to make our way off the island and towards Panama City to begin the shipping process. The island, however, had different plans for us. “Yes, the ferry runs at 4 everyday except Monday,” everyone told us. We arrived at 3:30 and to our surprise the only thing at the doc were a bunch of kids using it as a diving board. That seems odd, did we miss it? Nope, turns out the ferry doesn’t run on election day and that day happened to be an election day. Yep, we were stuck on an island. I guess there are worse places to be forced to stay for another night. Happy hour anyone?

The next day we repeated the drill from the previous day, but this time ferry included, and made our way from Bocas to the parking lot of the Lost and Found Lodge. It was set in a cloud forest and one of the only safe places we found to park back to the PanAmerican from Almirante. Only two days away from starting the process of shipping the van it was time to get-a-move-on to Panama City. George, possibly in a little too much of a hurry attracted the attention of the police… Don’t worry his new Spanish vocabulary word demostrar (to prove) helped him work his way out this situation ticket and bribe free. Thank you Spanish lessons.

The actual process of shipping was less of a headache than we thought it would be. It was a few days of paperwork, distributing money to different places and running around to crazy government offices in Panama City (one of which was in the scariest ghetto I have ever seen in my life). It was honestly what I thought was one of the most unsafe moments of the trip. The vehicle inspection office was in the ghetto. Since our engine is in the rear of the car, we had to take everything out of the van. There we were in the scariest ghetto with all of our belongings set out for the world to see and a 7 year old came over and peed not 5 feet from the car. It was laughable how ridiculous it was. Again, everything was fine and we passed the inspection with flying colors. Two days later, after they checked records and made sure that we didn’t have any tickets in Panama (good work again on getting out of the above, George), we drove to the shipping yard and loaded the van and our friends Toyota in the pouring rain into the shipping container so it could make it’s way to Cartagena, Colombia and touch down for the first time in South America.

Oh yeah, and then we went to see the Panama Canal!