Apartahotel San Juan del Lago Pereira

I stand corrected. With some woeful Internet page navigation I managed to miss the Colombian travel advice on the British Foreign Office website (I thought it curious that only countries beginning with the letter "A" had advisories). Writing this in Santiago, Chile we now know that there are several no-go areas and alerts. It makes no difference to our impressions of the country - Colombia was fantastic and we felt safe most of the time. I say most because between ...

Sharon and Jason, our friends that we had been camping with for the last few days, had a friend in Pereira they were planning on visiting... and they invited us to come along. We drove down into the beautiful valley that Pereira sits in and found their friend´s house. Luca and his Mother were very kind as they invited us into their house, serving juice, snacks and fresh Colombian coffee. We ...

... at a carnival. You are pulled up approx. 30ft. in the air, then they release you and you swing out over top of a cliff then a busy road. But once again, I found my self hooked to a wire ready to plunge to my death. Christina loved it so much she did it three times, two of them hooked in for Superman Extreme. At the end of the day we couldn’t believe that we did all that for US$10, at home it would have been hundreds. On top of that we ran in to the ...

... Up early to get the 7:30am jeep to Valle de Cocora. Its a beautiful valley made famous by the tall wax palms that grow there. Palm trees at 2600m high, weird.<br>Spent 6 hours hiking in the valley, first through farmland, then following a river under forest and finally up what was more like a cliff face. Im not one for hiking, so I turned around, but some other mentals from the hostel hiked for like 10 hours. Insane, im far to lazy.<br>Caught the jeep back into town and had some ...

... Periera we were dropped off at a huge Exito superstore, bought some basics and then found our way back through the Plaza to our hotel, briefly stopping to eat some toasted sandwiches. We hadn&#8217;t spent any time here looking around, the town also had some magnificent buildings, and it was incredibly busy in and around the main square. The town had plenty of newish and boutique type shops you would find in any modern country.<br><br>We went back to the hotel to pack and sleep.

... we could see the city centre high above us, and many of the poorer suburbs well below us. They were in the final stages of constructing a cable car transport system that would take travelers from the bus terminal to the city centre. It was working but the carriages were not yet taking passengers so we had to take a taxi. <br><br>It was a steep ascent to Calle 23 where it meets El Cable, a tower which looked a bit like a miniature Eifel Tower. We were told we ...

... the stream, not exactly well constructed but good enough to stop getting your shoes wet. There were parts of the trail that were very muddy so it was necessary to find some logs nearby to avoid sinking into the mud. When we first started the trail a couple of dogs decided to join us, one was a medium sized black male dog, the other a medium sized brown dog who was on heat as we discovered, to Jody and Niamh&#8217;s amusement. To our surprise the dogs stayed at our heels ...

... or so horses, and a trail where you could ride the horse in a group for about 20minutes. For this you needed to be at least 1.4metres tall. Niamh was very disappointed missing out on the horse ride being only just over 1.3metres,and Jody just made the 1.4metre mark. There was a cable car that could be used to get from the entrance, and also a Sky ride which was out of action. The park was nothing on the scale of Disney, or even some of the smaller theme parks but the rides ...

... dreams, aspirations, everything. more and more i am learning about my roots here in Colombia, rhythms, sounds, smells, commotion, and then the peace and tranquility in the mountains. everything. everyday i would wake up here and go for a day hike, through the mountains, to the river for a swim, and best of all, through all the coffee plantations around town. I did a tour through one, and learned the coffee process, and then had one of the best cups of ...

Another great thing about Colombia is the coffee, after experiencing the worst coffee throughout all South America, it was time to feed my habit again and check out the coffee region that makes us all coffee junkies around the world.<br><br>Another nightmare bus journey, dropped us in a town 3 hours before the one we had asked for, the bus ...