Buenaventura & San Andrés

Now that I safely returned to the start point I decided to take it easy to not jeopardize the second stage of this trip. There was a thing I was still missing, so I decided to go take a look at the Pacific. I read and heard a lot about Buenaventura and that it was a place not worth going to but why not have a look by myself and get my own mind about it.

In Colombia you have a lot of fruit stands along the road, with different kinds of fruits, between Cali and Buenaventura, once go over the pass, it's all about pineapples, every single fruit stand around here has only pineapples to sell.

The road to Buenaventura is also under construction with new tunnels being built to improve the connection to the Pacific, in one of these tunnels, the truck in front of me stopped and as couldn't see much I waited for a while behind it, then as nothing was moving I decided to ride past it because I started to feel bad due the amount of carbon dioxide and other exhaust gases. This was quite a long tunnel and all trucks and cars in the queue kept their engines running while waiting, even when not knowing how long they'll have to wait for.

Buenaventura is indeed a place you don't need to visit, I couldn't even managed to get all the way to the water, the port at the end of the road is closed and as I tried to get around there where some guys trying to sell me stuff and running after me, so I did not felt very comfortable there either.

This is a tire art shop, it's amazing the stuff they make out of used tires.

In the evening I went to this live music bar with a couple Columbian friends.

The next day it was time for the second stage, fly to San Andres and do a Open Water diving certification do some snorkeling and relax. At the airport took a taxi to my hostel, not surprising they don't have taximeters here, it seams that touristic places are all like that in Colombia and they charge you accordingly, in my case 3 times more than the normal rate for the same distance. San Andrés was very disappointing as it is quite dirty, with a lot of buildings falling apart and some only partially constructed and then abandoned. The promenade around the center is partially an exception to that, where you've landscapes like this.

But once you leave the promenade you get to see things like this and a lot worse.

I had a very funny moment once at breakfast, this lizard jumped from the vegetation near the promenade and run to and then between the tables, everyone stood up very quickly, started shouting a some run hiding into the restaurant, very amusing.

I'm still waiting for a couple of pictures of the diving course, will post them at a later time, but for now this one trip is over :-( more to come later this year ;-)