cartagena, santa marta, san gil, barichara

it's nçbeen a while since i last updated...well, i am glad i got to leave cartagena for good, that place was too much...maybe i'd like it not during peak season or something, i don't know what it is! we did 2 excursions outside the city and those were fun. the first one was the islas del rosario, some islands right outside the bay, cristalline waters, coral reefs and big waves to make a lot of people on our boat throw up and stuff! hehe we had the whole array of families with grandmas and such traveling so it was quite entertaining! we stopped at playa blanca for lunch and that was easily the best beach i've seen on this trip! not as clear water but very very photogenic! then the next day we went to a mud volcano called el totumo. that was super fun, because we went mud dipping, and the mud is very creamy so it feels good, plus it's so dense everybody is floating, there is no way you can sink even though your feet are not touching the bottom...it was exhilarating! and in the middle of our dipping session it started "erupting" bubbles of mud!!! haha then we washed off in the nearby lagoon...apparently the whole thing is created by some strange phenomenon in the lagoon where the water pushes the mud from underneath all the way up till it erupts, and throughout the years it eventually formed the volcano that many tourists now enjoy! we also got to visit, once back in cartagena, the spanish fortress, that was pretty interesting. the most impressive part was the tunnels going down deep till they were submerged!
then we finally got to leave cartagena for santa marta on the 31st of december! we stayed with my brother's ex colleague's family by santa marta somewhere, and i very well enjoyed being taken care of, fed and all the nice stuff! we were shown around, visited the tayrona national park, spent 2 days at 2 different super nice beaches (guayraca, playa concha), spent new year's with a bunch of people, ate some good food and got interesting insight on the life of an upper middle-class colombian family!
last night we left santa marta and through bucaramanga we arrived in san gil where we're staying now. during the afternoon we visited the nearby colonial town of barichara, i had two "paletas", we walked around, visited some nice churches to escape the heat, then made it back here for some colombian fast food (fried arepas filled with mushrooms)...tomorrow we're visiting the parque el gallineral here, maybe going somewhere else before we take off to go to villa de leyva, another town in the colombian highlands. i like it here very much: it's very relaxing, people are very friendly and nobody is trying to sell you anything!!!