So I realize that I have fallen far behind on my blog. I have done so many things in Colombia and haven´t written a thing…. So here I go. When I got into Colombia I was asleep so I almost missed Santa Marta completely. The bus let me out on the outskirts of the city and I had no dollars to change into pesos. It was a Sunday and pretty much everything was closed… My ATM card wasn´t working and I was getting kind of scared. I asked how much it was for a room at the nearest place and they told me $35,000 pesos. The exchange rate here is about $1,800 to $1 so to make things easy every $2000 pesos is like a dollar. So the room was between $17 and $20. The girl at the hotel told me that I wouldn´t find anything cheaper especially if I went into the center part of the city. That made my ears perk up… center part of the city… I needed to find this place. Well lucky for me my friend Urs from Germany gave me a $50 Euro note and so I had that with me. I asked a guy to take me somewhere in the Central to exchange it and then I would pay him. We looked at 3 different places before I finally had the money to pay him. He was a nice guy to take me around so many places on his moto taxi. 
At the 3rd place I spotted white people walking around a plaza. Something I have learned on my trip is that where there are white people… a hostel is not far. I walked down the same street I saw them go and sure enough I found a hostel called ¨La Brisa Loca¨ It is a nice place with a pretty fun atmosphere… the owners are a couple of brothers from San Francisco and they are cool guys… the only problem with the place is that all the employees they hired are crack heads… always high… and usually pretty rude guys. Me and my friend Joe were gonna work there cause some of the bad employees were leaving… but we decided against it.
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| our biker gang |
My first night at the hostel I met Troy and Robbie. They are 2 way cool guys from San Diego who were on a 3 week vacation to Colombia. They just got to Santa Marta from Cartagena and were waiting on Troy´s little brother and his Colombian girlfriend to show up the next day. So Robbie is like… a white rapper…. Lol but not like Eminem status… he gave me his CD and it is actually really good! So we start swapping stories and hanging out and they invite me to go to some waterfalls with them and some Colombian girls that they met…. They were leaving the next morning. So the next morning I wake up and well… I was a little disappointed. You see… when I think of Colombian girls… I just always think they are gonna be super hot… especially hanging out with Robbie and Troy…. Unfortunately …. They weren´t…. lol they were pretty nice though. So one of the girls says she has been to this waterfall like 3 times so she is like officially out guide. Well we take a taxi to some random corner and wait for 7 Mototaxis that take us up the mountain to where we will start walking to the waterfall. Well we rode around in the rain on these moto taxis… and they were crazy… my guy was always racing the others… well while we were on the streets he was… as soon as we hit dirt and mud… he was seriously the worst driver ever. So I had to get off the motorcycle a few times and walk through the mud while he waited for me… but one time he decides he´s gonna pull some crazy stunt and launch off a rock… well… like I said… bad driver.. the motorcycle turns sideways… I fly off and land on 1 leg in the mud… but I was holding onto him and so I ripped him off the motorcycle too…. Haha… If I fall in the mud… so does he. Anyway… soft landing… no injuries… and we make it to the first little river where the Moto Taxis leave us. So we cross this river and about 200 meters later I see a sign in Spanish that pretty much says…
this is the way to the waterfall. I point it out to our guide and she says… no no no… its this way. Wel… she has been there before.. I haven’t.. so we walk… and walk… and walk…. We did see some beautiful views… and goofed off to keep good spirits since it was raining… Robbie and Troy posed for a picture that I call ¨brokeback jungle¨ Anyway… it was all good fun… but it started getting dark. The moto taxis were supposed to drop us off 5 minutes from the falls and we had walked seriously over 3 miles uphill…. It was definetly the wrong way. So a Toyota landcruiser full of people makes it up there… I stop them and ask them where the waterfall is… and they say we are way way way way past it. So we turn around walk all the way back… in the dark… and I make our guide pose in front of the sign I showed her earlier. It´s pretty much the only thing that made me feel good about walking in the rain and riding in the rain for so many hours. 
So we walk back to this small mountain town and find that all the taxis are gone for the night…. 2 busses jammed packed with people went by and wouldn’t let us on…. We had a dilemma. We tried tons of different ways to get a taxi back to town…. In the end we finally did it…. But it took a couple of hours… and lots and lots and lots of frustration… we took a picture of the group… the funniest part of the picture is that the skinny white guy (from England) is the boyfriend of the girl next to me in the photo…. But for some reason…. She looks like she´s my girlfriend in the picture. I showed it to him laughing…. He didn´t think it was funny.
So during the trip Troy and Robbie are telling me how they met this beautiful girl in Cartagena and that Troy´s little brother Bret was now still with her in Cartagena but would be making it to Santa Marta sometime that night. So they are trying to describe her to me…. And all I can picture is the Colombian wife that Al Bundy is married to on modern family. I told them… guys… you are building this up way way too much…. Especially after who we went to the waterfalls with. But when I told them that… they said… no man… just wait you´ll see. Well… she walked in the door that night… and I stood corrected… wow… is all I could say about Beatriz. I found out later that the Miss Colombia pageant was in Cartagena earlier that week and that Beatriz is the director of a modeling school and had a girl in the competition. Her friend hector is some famous clothing designer and was making dresses for the beauties… or queens.. or… whatever you call them…. Anyway… that´s why she was in Cartagena… and well… Bret Robbie and Troy were in the right place at the right time.
We had a fun time that night and decided that we would all go to the beach the next day. I´ll save that for my next post… it was a really good time.
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