16/05/2019 – Travel day Palomino to Santa Marta, Colombia

We got up for a hostel breakfast, fried plaintain today with omelette! Then we got our belongings together and packed. My new technique to keep cool is to shove my hair under the sink every half hour and get it soaking wet, it helps so much, Josh must be so much cooler without his beard and hair! Then we got our packed bags into the shade in the courtyard, as the hostel man had said we could have a later checkout if we stayed in the communal area (again it was a guess that that’s what he meant when he spoke to us in Spanish, but you know, it seemed to work for us!) Josh edited some photos on the laptop and then we wandered off for a coffee in the vegetarian café we had been to yesterday lunch. We came back to the hostel and Josh updated the blog with photos and I started planning for our next leg of the trip. We fly to Medellin tomorrow and then plan to work our way South through the Colombia/Ecuador border by land, needing to be in Quito just before our Galapagos trip, so there are a few logistics to work out, and so much more to see in Colombia, we absolutely love this country so far! We left the hostel at 1400 and went back to the vegetarian café for some lunch. Josh had a vegetable bowl and I a cheese salad roll. The café is one of the first I have seen since we have been away that offers to refill water vessels in order to reduce plastic. We popped back down the road to find coffee (mostly just for a final toilet stop) and went to Bitacora, the café we had lunch in on our first day. They told us they were shut but we could use the toilet anyway, which was very kind an unusual here. We got chatting to a lady working there who said it was her family restaurant. The man who had been watering the plants gave us a huge bag of mangos from their mango tree, we got a lot more than we had bargained for on that pit stop! We loaded our backpacks back on and wandered up the path in order to find the main road and thumb down a bus back to Santa Marta. As we looked up the path we could see a big tourist coach pulled over, and a man beckoning us on. It was for Santa Marta and had air conditioning AND cost the same as our packed hot sweaty minibus had cost us on the way there! An absolute result (however Josh did end up with my rucksack on his lap for some of the way as even the coach became full!) Also, an absolute result that we were on the right side of the coach, so got great views of the coastline, of banana plantations and of the Tayrona National park. We both nodded off for a bit, and when we woke up were in Santa Marta. We have an app called MappsMe which is really good, its an offline map on your phone! We used this app to work out where we wanted to get off the bus (you can get off literally anywhere, we got off when the bus was waiting at a red light!) We thumbed down a taxi who took us to the right address from our bookings.com reservation. Once we were at the correct address it was difficult to spot where the apartment was exactly, so the taxi driver kindly rang the number provided on our booking. We spoke to a lady on the phone then the taxi man pointed at a guy coming out of the building to greet us. We got out and got shown up to our accommodation, and got settled in. We walked a few blocks down the road so as to find an ATM as there hadn’t been one in Palomino so we were low on funds! Then we came back and chilled in the nice cool a.c. room, and had a shower. It was luxurious to remain feeling cool and clean after the shower, instead of immediately being hot and sweaty again. Our host helped us organise a pizza delivery, which we shared with him. Then we got into bed and fell asleep to the ipad. We woke up at around 0200 absolutely boiling, there had been a power cut (running theme of the week!) and something was beeping really loud (some kind of battery backup or something?). Thankfully we both managed to drift off again until the morning, when everything was up and running again!