We were surprisingly rested after this day. I thought the Lost City would be still feelable in our bodies. The only one having a strange reaction on the hike was Jelle. He was full of rash everywhere! Face, body, arms, legs. It looked a bit scary! Luckily an Austrian couple saw him during breakfast and they gave him some allergy pills. It helped!
So, what else to do? There seems to be a small town only 1h from Santa Marta, where we could see lots of waterfalls and we could do some rafting on the river.
We saw a waterfall, which was nice, but not that amazing. [it seems to me that after seeing all the beauty in the jungle during the trail, I don't find anything that amazing any more]. I carefully jumped in the water and started swimming. All of a sudden I feel something on my knees. It was sand. I was swimming in 30cm of water.
Liesje & co were asking me if the water was deep. I stood up and they all had a good laugh.
Rafting in the river was not possible due to a low water level. We were planning to walk to another nicer, bigger waterfall "Pozo Azul". But just when we were about to start our hike to the waterfall, this guy tells us that it is closes. Apparently someone just died in there. He was being daredevilish and went into an area where he shouldn't have and got sucked in a hole by the strong currents. They hadn't been able to retrieve the body yet, so they had no idea who it was. Somewhat later we heard someone mentioning 'Casa Loma', which was the hostel we were staying in. Creepy! Imagine it was someone we had met the night before.
If you ever go to Minca, maje sure you book yourself a bed in Casa Lukas, the treehouse at Casa Loma. This was one of the most interesting hostels I have been so far!
Their food was delicious, the same holds for breakfast. You can order something like the "run up the mountain" breakfast. Cute!
Every place I would visit, I would search for a place to do yoga. So far I have been unsuccesfull, not that the place didn't exist, but either I didn't find it or it didn't fit the travel schedule. This time the forces of the universe were with me. I couldn't imagine a more relaxing place than this one! The yoga teacher focussed half of his class (or maybe even more) on the breathing - which is so important! After a few vinyasas we went straight into savasana. I was somewhere far far away. Namaste.
The view from 'up there'.
Getting back to my story.
Some of you might have seen the video on the Facebookpage of us sitting in the back of a jeep. There's a story behind that.
So, since Pozo Azul was out of the question, we didn't really had much to do in Minca. Our next destination would be Paso del Mango (close to Bonda). I had found a hostel run by Belgians and I really wanted to check that out. To get there we needed to go back to Santa Marta and from there take a bus to Bonda. From Bonda we should take motorcicle taxis to deive us up the hill.
While we were waiting for a 'colectivo' (jeep/bus) in town, we saw some guy with a jeep and a trailer stopping around the corner where we were standing. I was joking: "what if that guy would take us to Santa Marta in his trunk?!"
...guess what happend!
While sitting in the trunk of this jeep, we overheard the driver speaking to a friend. He was saying something about Bonda, the palce we needed to go. Apprently he lives there and he was first driving to Santa Marta to drop off his merchandise (bags of coffee) and then heading home. That was just perfect! He could take us to Bonda!
In Santa Marta the driver suddenly stops in the middle of the street. He was kind of obstructing traffic and we could hear this clearly. [Colombians love to hunk.]
Apparently there was a problem with the breaks and the driver was looking for a screw to fix it. He was walking around the car to see where he could miss a screw. Wauw, I thought all screws on a car were mandatory, not optional, but apparently not in Colombia. A sentence we keep hearing around here: "everything is possible in Colombia".
Break was fixed, a few moments later, the coffee was deopped off and we were on our way to Bonda! The driver was so nice he even offered to drop us at the hostel, 20mins further.
When we got to Bonda, our driver caught our attention when leaving the main road and taking a shitty landroad. It was the only way to the hostel he said. What did we know...we had to trust him. But then...after a few minutes of driving this deserted road, he stopped the car. He got out, opened the hood of the car and was talking in Spanish to his friend.
My intuition was telling me this was wrong. I had read lots of stories and seen this scene in lots of movies and this wouldn't end good!! I was scared, honestly! But the driver was saying there was no problem, that he was just trying to turn on the lights, since it was getting dark. Oh crap!
We continued...we had no choice. The road was getting worse and worse, even tough we were in a jeep, the car began to have trouble getting uphill. And it was getting darker and darker. The driver pulled out a flashlight and this was his only light, the lights of the jeep didn't work. Actually this must have been a really funny sight.
My fear and little distrist, made me turn on my 3G and look up direction on Google maps to see if he was taking us in the right direction. I could see that we were almost there! When I thought it couldn't get any worse, the car made a grinding sound and lost a bar from underneath the car. Apparently another piece of the car that you don't need around here...the driver stopped to see what it was, they took a look underneath the car and...continued.
The road was really getting undriveable! Eventually he stopped, we got out, paid the man and thanked him and continued the last meters by foot. My fear and mistrust were clearly not necessary and I ended up feeling bad about the whole situation. The man was so nice to drive us up all the way, he even broke his car while doing that. He could have said he didn't go any further and just drop us and leave us, but he didn't. I admire this his kindness!
Our hostel, Carpe Diem, was only 30m up the hill and we were feeling so relieved to finally arrive! The place was só nice and the aromas that were coming from the kitchen made us feel right at home! Hearing Dutch might have had something to do with that as well :)
We got seated and one of the owners was a little bit confused about our arrivl, they didn't expect us. Even tough it was not foreseen by him and he was already cooking diner for his guests, he made some extra for us. By the time he was almost finished in the kitchen he came our way to sort out the confusion about our reservation. After looking at the e-mail confirmation I showed him and explicitely telling him that I had made a reservation 'today', he looked at me and said: "Miss, your booking is for tomorrow evening!" Crap! I made a mistake while doing the booking. Oh well, these things happen every now and then. It sucked tough that it happened that day.
Nevertheless, he searched for a solution and had put us in every available bed he had: private room, bunkbeds in a dorm,... I would have even slept in a hammock, I didn't care that night!
The next morning I woke up to this view:
