Amazonas and goodbye Columbia

When we arrived in Leticia I felt immediately like coming home. It’s hot and humid here, the streets are busy with people, motorbikes and a lot of small shops and restaurants. If I wouldn’t know it better I’d say we’re in Thailand.

We’ve given ourselfs a day to accomodate, organise our tour to the Amazonas and roam around a little, see the harbour and the noisy perrots which return every day around sunset from jungle to a small park in Leticia to sleep.

Markus was especially keen on crossing the brasilian border. The special thing about this region being, that one can cross the borders from Colombia, Brazil and Peru without any formalities such as passport or visa contol as long as one stays within a 80km radius to the border crossing point. OK, we therefore crossed the Brazilian border and took the obligatory fotos…

What shall I say, if we are in Brazil I need to have a Caipirinha. No way I’m leaving this country without having tasted the most famous exported drink. Unfortunately it was around 10 A.M and all bars still closed. But with a bit of waiting and a lot of persistence and whining of mine we’ve finally found ourselfs a nice place and had one of those delicious drinks…

 Well, and that’s as far as our Amazonas experience has gone… On the way back directely in front of our hostel I was frontally hit by a speeding motorbike. Our receptionist Daniel helped Markus to bring me to the hospital and did a lot of translating and assistance work for us, once again thank you!! Summarised, I was lucky, nothing was broken and no head insurances in sight. I was just bruised and scraped everywhere. The worst thing is that my big toenail had to be removed to avoid an infection. Meaning, I spent the remaining days in Leticia sitting on the balcony of our hostal, eating antibiotics and painkillers, kept my wounds clean and tryed to heal. It’s a big pain in the ass and annoying as hell, but I’m basically fine and you all don’t have to worry about me, Markus has been doing an amazing babysitting job over the last 4 days.

We’ve now reached the end of our six weeks journey trough Columbia and with very few exceptions we’ve found ourselfs only positively surprised by this beautyful country with it’s diversity, the lovely colonial cities and villages and most of all the very friendly people. If anyone is looking for an interesting country to travel to and wants something which isn’t yet completely spoilt by tourism, we can only recommend Colombia. And eventhough one has to watch out and beware of pickpockets when walking in crowded places, obviously don’t enter dark roads at night time or avoid certain really poor or fucked up quarters, according to our opinion Colombia isn’t as dangerous as we back home in Switzerland think or the Lonely Planet writes, we’ve never felt unsecure during our trip. Go ahead, fresh up your spanish knowledge and visit this amazing country which works so hard to change it’s reputation, puts a lot of effort into security and police presence and is doing a lot to please it’s visitors!

We’ve really enjoyed our time here in Colombia but are also looking forward to explore the next country on our list. We’re off to Panama now…