Decameron Decalodge Ticuna Leticia

One town, two languages and two different time zones! So good to finally hear Spanish!

Some info I found on the internet states that if you want to travel to Colombia from Brazil, youŽll need some kind of a tourist card from the Colombian Consulate in Tabatinga. You donŽt. Just get an exit stamp at Policia Federal in Tabatinga and youŽll get your entry stamp at the airport.

We rolled into Bogota at around 8am, Surprisingly we all seemed to sleep rather well. I was eager for us to continue on our journey. I wanted to be in Solento tonight which was another 6 hours away. We had a reservation at the Plantation house hostel there. But first we had to pick up our two bags we had left at the Platypus Hostel in Bogota two weeks ago. We grabbed a taxi and went straight to the hostel. We had arrived in peak hour traffic, the roads we almost ...

Another late start. On a wander through the markets we were handed leaflets for a circus that was in town for the weekend celebrations. The town, we discovered, is celebrating 200 years of the establishment of the first school in Colombia. Apparently the first ever school was here in Mompos. We now understood why there were several areas of town practicing with musical instruments although practicing is probably an exaggeration because it is clear that most of the band members had ...

Today we opted to get up late and have a lazy day. After a late breakfast we decided to try the three bikes that the hostel had available for hire. Niamh was to ride saddle with me. We followed the road by the river for about 5 minutes and came to a small market. It was very humid, I had foolishly left my shorts in Bogota, so when a stall appeared selling shorts I hopped off my bike to have a look. I bought a pair for $10mil ...

... interesting, but i didnt stay for long because i woke up one morning i knew that it was time to go and move on. i went back to iquitos for a night, woke up to catch el rapido to leticia, colombia which was a 10 hour boat ride down the amazon river. i thought i would see more of the coastline but that river is sooo wide, its crazy. but you are still able to see a lot of little villages and fishermen on their tiny canoes. it was cool.

then after the ride we finally got to ...

... off its horns, and over its back. Once the bull was exhausted they roped it in and led it out of the arena to make room for a new one. An English guy we ran into at the hostel who was also there, optimistically said he thought it was more humane than the Spanish version because the bull got to go home and rest. I sincerely doubted it and suspected it would be hanging from market stall rooves with flies swarming all over it before it knew what had hit ...

... to get nervous. We asked him where he was going and he said something about his companero, which made us even more nervous. He stopped the car and a woman approached the car to get in.

I was sitting in the front and Jacque was sitting in the back with her pack. To put it plainly, Jacque went ballistic, finding her inner Xena/banshee, screaming 'no, no, no otras personas, necesitamos vamos ahora’ at the top of her lungs and threw her body against each ...

... her skills. And most people spoke Spanish anyway, given we were so close to Colombia and Peru. so we took lots of photos before going for some cebiche...well, Alex had cebiche. I was still traumatized by the food poisoning incident last year, so I just had a cola and watched her jealously. It looked so good, but I just wasn't willing to risk getting sick on the journey back.
Semana Santa is over and it's back to work on Monday! :(

Another great day today, filled with activities. This morning we visited "Casa de los Micos", a monkey sanctuary run by an American biologist who has been working here for 10 years, taking in, caring for and re-releasing monkeys confiscated by the environmental police. The sanctaury is quite near the lodge and as we arrived the monkeys came swinging down out of the trees and landed in the boat ...

... but it was totally worth it - the view from the canopy top was just fabulous. We were able to see birds and some flora before we crossed a death-defying plank bridge, which was like walking across a tight-rope before arriving at another smaller platform and abseiling back down the 70 ft drop. I actually almost ******* myself when I swung my body out over the abyss, but I loosened up enough after about 30ft to enjoy the view!
After ...