Columbia

I´m writing this in Bogota, the capital of Columbia, where I arrived a couple of hours ago. Outside thunder is rolling around the skies, which seems to fit with the city´s fearsome reputation. On first impressions it doesn´t seem as bad as I´ve heard it described, but it´s certainly a big ugly sort of place. There seem to be heavily-armed police on almost every corner - I even saw one guarding the municipal cemetery.

It´s seems a long time since I wrote my last report in San Jose, and since then I´ve been in and out of Panama and travelled to a new continent - Central America is now behind me and my South American adventure has begun.

After a more-or-less restful couple of days in San Jose I headed out alone to the Panamanian border. My first stop was a very touristy Caribbean town called Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. I had a quiet night there and then headed towards the border the next morning.

When I arrived I bumped into the intrepid Serbian grandmother again, with her shopping trolley suitcase and pink floral hat. She was giving a large group of tough-looking touts and conmen a good telling off, and they looked thoroughly ashamed of themselves as she stood in their shadows wagging her finger at them.

From the border it was off to a water taxi for Bocas de Toro, Panama´s rival to Puerto Viejo over the border. The ride was mainly along over-grown canals that were built to transport bananas, but a couple of times along the way the boat zipped out into the sea to crash through the roaring surf before returning to the still waters of the artificial channels.

From Bocas I got another water taxi to a little island called Bastimentos, which has a quiet village populated by the descendants of Jamaican slaves, who still speak the sort of English that was once used by pirates. Within an hour of arriving at a little hostel by the water I saw Lydia and Sarah approaching in another boat, smiling and waving as they came. It´s nice when a plan comes together. We spent the evening at the hostel talking to the owners, who were a strange pair. They told us that since they left Potsdam ten years ago they had never been back. Lydia asked if they had become part of the village community. "Oh no," said the wife. "They are all negros. You can´t trust them, they would steal from their own brothers." I wondered if the name they had chosen for their hostel had anything to do with the lack of trust - with a stupendous lack of tact they had named it Uncle Tom´s Cabin.

The other guests were an interesting bunch. There were a couple of young surfer dudes from Argentina who told us that their boards were like wives to them. When asked to elaborate on this frankly startling admission they said it was because they always get lost at airports and they need waxing to make them slippery. I was sharing a room with an Austrian bloke who makes a living photographing tropical frogs. We saw him a couple of times over the next day or so creeping around the undergrowth with a fierce concentration as local children pointed and giggled at him.

The following day we headed over the water to Bocas for Lydia to get tattoo. She said she´d always wanted one but had worried it would affect her acting career. I´d never thought of it, but it makes sense that you can´t play Juliet or Cinderella if you´ve got a skeleton riding a Harley Davidson up your arm. She opted for a small design on her back based on a seashell necklace she´d bought in Belize. It was fascinating to watch the process, but I did find it quite a squeamish experience.

After another night chatting to various guests at Uncle Tom´s we set off back to Costa Rica and Puerto Viejo. As this was to be the girl´s last on the Caribbean (and mine also as it turned out) we decided we should go out dancing. Soon after arriving we bumped into the Scottish-German girls, Katherine and Marion, and their friend Emmanuel. They recommended a place with live music, which was so awful it was almost good. A man with very strange teeth was playing guitar and forcing the audience to accompany him with maracas made out of rice-filled water bottles. After every song he provided his own echo effect by saying: "Gracias! Racias! Cias! Ias! As! As! As!".

Also brilliant in its very badness was a meal Lydia, Sarah and I had suffered earlier. It was a little Chinese restaurant with a staff of one bloke, who seemed to be stoned. He left us with the menu for half an hour before wandering out to take our order. "Beef please," said Sarah.

"No beef," he said.

"Pork chops?"

"No."

"Fish?"

"Not today."

"Do you only have chicken?"

"Yes . . . and calamare."

Lydia misheard him and thought he said camerones, which are shrimp-type things, I think. She was horrified when a plate arrived with rubbery old tentacles sticking up out of a tepid grey sauce. I thought I would be safe with fried chicken, but what arrived was a dried-up husk of pure carbon - perhaps fried on several occassions over the past month or so. Sarah´s dinner wasn´t too bad, as long as you didn´t look at it too closely or speculate on the strange gelatinous consistency of the sauce. The sublime awfullness of it was accentuated in the way the dishes came out one at a time, each one more repellant than the last.

The next morning was the last full day for the girls, so we headed off to a town near San Jose and the airport called Heredia, which promised to be a more laid-back option than the capital with plenty of bars serving the town´s substantial body of students. What we found was a sprawling ghost town where all the bars closed at seven. Instead we went to a supermarket and got a small bottle of rum and some coke and with my radio reproduced a bar in our hotel room.

We couldn´t get too silly as we had to be up before five to get to the airport. When we arrived I saw that there was a flight leaving for Bogota that morning and . . . well, here I am.