Currently we are on a 16 hour bus ride 6 or so hours in. I’m contemplating sleep but it seems unlikely. We are officially one week into our trip. I generally find that with long trip the first 2 weeks and the last 2 weeks are the hardest. We are still adjusting, and figuring this trip out, as well as this blog.

Carl and I tend to travel a bit differently. The things that stress Carl out are not the same that stress me out. And how we deal with that stress is different too.

One of the hardest parts early on in the trip is determining a realistic pace. There is some serious FOMO (fear of missing out). I know for most people 3 months of travel in South America sounds like a long time but South America is HUGE and there are so many places to go and things to do. In a 2 week trip you can move everyday and go balls to the wall each moment but for long trips that can burn you out. There is this fine balance. Trying to do too much can result in feeling like you’ve done nothing at all. We are working on finding our rhythm.

The trip so far has been good. Nothing has gone wrong, we haven’t had anything lost or stolen. And Colombia feels very SAFE. It seems many people were worried so I figured I toss that out there.

We’ve spend the first week in Northern Colombia. We started in Cartagena. We stayed in the old walled city for 2 nights. Its full of narrow streets and beautiful colonial buildings with the most fantastic balconies. It’s a bit more on the touristy side and therefore also a bit more expensive for basic things like food and lodging.

From Cartagena we moved a couple hours north to Santa Marta. It felt a lot more like being in Colombia. They had a more typical street market filled with street meat and fresh juice as well as other staples like shoes and shirts. We stayed in a hostel, which was nice and cooked a pretty solid vegan dinner. We didn’t really go to Santa Marta to see Santa Marta through. It was our jumping off point to Tayrona National Park and Minca.

Tayrona is about an hour north of Santa Marta. It’s jungle right up until you hit the Caribbean coast. We found a stilted hut on the beach to stay in for about 50 dollars a night, which is a bit of a splurge for us. To get to the hut you needed to complete a 10+ km hike through the jungle which took about 3 hours- not bad considering…

For those that don’t know, I’ve been working 2 near to full time jobs to save up for this trip. That means working out, yoga and backpacking has been a thing of the past. To make matters worse we brought our full 40+ pound bags with us! Later we realized we probably could have left a great deal of our stuff at the hostel.

Regardless, the hike was beautiful. We saw lots of bugs, plants, an ant eater and listened to the beautiful calls of the howler monkeys (j/k- not so beautiful). After the trek we reached our place and rather than relax on the beach decided to hike another couple of km to see a waterfall, to up the ante we did this one barefoot. We had dinner with a nice Canadian couple who would be hiking out and flying home the next day.

The next day we did take a bit of down time and hung out in hammocks on the beach before we had to head out. We decided to change it up a bit on the way out and went by horse back.

Once out we headed back into Santa Marta to catch a bus to Minca. I was hungry though and because nothing happens in a speedy manor we missed the last bus. As a resulted we ended up in a bit more expensive taxi, although it was still less than 20 dollars.

We stayed at Iguana Soul an Airbnb in Minca. We woke up early to have breakfast to do some bird watching, which was actually really fun. Carl got super into it. He got a picture of a toucan with my telephoto lens and texted it to half of his phone contacts! (Carl here- Actually it was way less then half, but sorry if you didn’t personally receive a copy!)

After breakfast we hiked to a waterfall. It was pretty and also pretty crowded so we opted not to swim. The rest of the evening was pretty low key and spent mostly in hammocks.

And that brings us to the bus. We are off to Medellin. Once one of the most dangerous cities thanks to the drug cartels it is now super safe and supposed to be beautiful…