Around the world in 78 days

Sitting here in the Avianca lounge at El Dorado International airport in Bogota awaiting the final leg of our journey home. When we arrive at Heathrow late tomorrow morning, we will have completed 78 days of travel. We have visited 8 new countries for us: Japan, Hong Kong China, Vietnam, Laos, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and here in Colombia. In addition, we have also visited Cambodia, Australia, the USA. We have transited through Switzerland, Thailand and later tonight, Canada.
We have flown on the following airlines : Swiss x 2, ANA x1, United x 4, Vietnam Airlines x 4, Thai x 2, Copa x 3, Nature Air x 4, Air Panama x 2, Avianca x 1 and Air Canada x 2....a lot of airport experiences. We got to enjoy the great delight of train travel in Japan and to a lesser extent in Vietnam. Our lives have been held to ransom by numerous taxi drivers with the vote for the worst drivers being won handsomely by those based in Panama City.
It has rained on just 4 days of the trip and never for the whole day and we had 2 substantial snow falls as well, including the blizzard when in the Japanese Alps. Mercifully, we have remained well throughout, apart from the occasional tummy bug and Tess' cough brought on by too much air con.
The vote for the best hotel pool goes to the Pilgrimage Village Hue. 30m of swimming joy. Of places by the beach we loved Casa Cayuco on Bastimentos Island in the Panamanian Caribbean the best followed closely by Copa del Arbol at Drake Bay in the Pacific South West of Costa Rica.  We stayed in 27 hotels, the best for friendliness and service being Pilgramage again in Hue, My Boutique resort in Luang Prabang, Casa Cayuco on Bastimentos.
We loved the food in Vietnam in particular but the best restaurant award goes to Carmen in Cartagena here in Colombia. Fantastic, clever and delicious fusion food at a very reasonable price. The beer in South East Asia beats that offered here in Central America for taste. After travelling through some of the biggest coffee exporting countries in the world we finally found the best coffee...by a long way...at the Devotion cafe at the Hilton in Bogota.
The best airline network? Not Star Alliance on which we are ticketed. If only One World had better connections in central America then we would have been able to retain our silver status with BA.
The best country ( excluding Australia of course !!!) For Tess it was Laos followed by Vietnam. For me, Japan and Vietnam, followed by Colombia.
If we could have spent more time in a country, we both agree it is a toss up between Laos, Nicaragua and Colombia.
Finally, if we had to be stranded in one place we visited for the rest of our lives, then it would be Sydney of course. How lucky we have been.

Salt cathedrals and buckets of rain

The traffic here in Bogota is bad, very very bad indeed. It took us almost 100 minutes yesterday to get 25kms north of the city. The locals grin and bear it. Yet despite this impediment which does limit one's ability to get around the city, we have really enjoyed our brief stay. Up here in the northern Andes, the countryside is green and lush and we have seen our first dairy cows on this trip. The temperature ranges between 16 and 20 degrees year round. In some months it rains more than others. I got drenched on Friday walking the 7 blocks to our office here. The water pours down the streets from the nearby mountains. The upper reaches of the eastern part of the city have gated communities and favelas side by side. Like all of the Latin countries we have visited on this trip, there are gaping gaps between the rich and the poor. There is very little hassle here though. The old city has been partially preserved and the Museum of Gold is extraordinary. So too is the Salt Cathedral, built into the side of a mountain to the north of the city. And finally, we have had fantastic coffee. Fix the traffic and we will be back, slightly breathless given the altitude and prepared for rain.

New Granada

Simon Bolivar is certainly the most revered American in this part of the hemisphere. His statue is everywhere and he was one of the world's first globalists. He believed in a greater Latin America though died at age 47 not far from here knowing that his dreams of a united continent were already in pieces. When he arrived in Cartagena a few months before he died, the glory days for both him and the city were over. However, both his reputation and the fortunes of the city have recovered over the last 184 years. Our hotel has been given a deliberately distressed look but this look is itself becoming distressed. Across the road the ravages of time show in the building opposite our room and are more reminiscent of the streets of Havana than the modern Cartagena amply evidenced by the the modern hotels and apartment blocks just to the south of the walled old city. What is even more reminiscent of Havana is the ballet school we can see not with it's piano accompaniment clearly heard in our room and half a block away. These older building are gradually being guttered internally and replaced with modern and useable rooms with just the old facades remaining. I suspect it won't be long before the ballet school is relocated out of the old city and replaced by a boutique hotel or an upmarket shop. That will be a good thing for Colombia as it will be a furthere sign that the country is leaving the divisions of the guerilla war in the past. Tomorrow we fly to Bogota a city over 7000 feet above sea level and with a population of over 7 million. Bolivar hated the fog and the cold. We go with a lot more optimism.

True and false facades

Cartagena in winter is hot! 32 degrees Celsius hot tempered mercifully in the afternoon by fresh sea breezes. It's old centre is blessed with most of the same buildings that were constructed in colonial times, usually 2-3 storeys high with very large wooden doors to keep the outside world at bay. We are lucky enough to be staying in one such beautiful building, on the corner of Calle del Estanco de Tabaco and Calle La Estrella. Our hotel is owned by a Frenchman and is perhaps suitably named La Passion. Once off the narrow cobblestone streets, where the midday sun bears down mercilessly and you start to understand the benefits of siesta, you enter a cooler and certainly quieter world. The house has a central courtyard filled with magnolia where the general theme of the place is more Moroccan Spanish than Carribean. Our junior suite hugs the first floor corner with a long verandah looking along both streets. A few blocks away are the walls of the city, tested on many occasions by pirates, including those like Drake, who would be knighted for his plundering. The sizeable roof top pool, which sits directly above our room's 14 feet ceiling, is a godsend at all times of the day.
Colombians, like the Cubans, are a mixture of an indigenous, African and European heritage, and with many shades in between. How I envy their black and brown skin! Spanish is unsurprisingly spoken with a vengeance here: English is of little use. It is the land of the emerald, fried food and the best beer in this part of the Americas. Already feeling that I should have allowed more time in Colombia.

Peanut butter cheesecake in Panama

We are about to head for the last country in our world adventure, the home of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I am madly reacquainting myself with the delights of One Hundred Years of Solitude in preparation for the experience.
Here in Panama this week we have enjoyed the beauty of the Bocas del Toro islands in the Carribean north. We stayed on Bastimentos island at an ecolodges run by a young American couple. It is in an idyllic setting on white sanded beaches with turquoise blue waters. We stayed in a beach hut and snorkelled around mangroves where underwater branches were like exquisite garden, full of colour. We even found a bright yellow seahorse. Our journey back to the lodge was accompanied by dolphins jumping through the wake of the runabout.
This is a funny country that runs west to east and is the only place in the world where the sun rises over the Pacific and sets over the Atlantic. Panama City looks remarkably like Singapore as you come in to land with Tocumen International being about as far out of town as Changi. Perhaps the similarities end there. While democracy is clearly alive and well here with multiple presidential candidiates, I am still left with the feeling that it is more Miami vice. The taxi drivers are variable and very willing to take gringos for a ride, whether at breakneck speed or in arguing afterwards as to what price was agreed in advance. The traffic in Panama City is pretty diabolical but is growing very quickly and there is a lot of construction work ongoing. Americans are being encouraged to retire here and given the income generated by the canal, being expanded to allow the biggest cruise ships and supertankers to journey through the middle of the Americas, I am sure this place will continue to have a sunny future. It has been a frustrating week at times but the trade off has been a beautiful Carribean island.

Flying High and Low

My lap top has packed it in, well at least my ability to fix the problem that is preventing it from attaching to the internet. I am at the beck and call of airport lounges for access to a computer to log on and type.
We are in San Jose airport in Costa Rica awaiting our flight to Panama City. We should be in Panama City now but as we sat on the plane about to push back this morning, the plane was quite violently jolted as a baggage truck crashed into the side above the pilots, making a large and what will no doubt be an expensive hole in the fuselage.
Chaos of course in the short term as we were pushed from pillar to post and ended up reentering Costa Rica to be given new boarding passes. Back through security etc and back to the Copa Air lounge where they are at least giving us a complimentary salad for lunch.
We have had a week of flying. Mainly in Twin Otters and little Cessnas on Nature Air, CR´s own domestic airline that lands on strips not much wider than the plane itself, in jungles, pineapple plantations and here on the wide runway at Juan Santamaria Internacional Aeroporto. Being able to tap the pilots on the shoulder, if we wished, has been one of the stories of the week, as well as being at the vagaries of their loose schedules, where they might decide to take you backward to one landing strip before taking you forward to the right one. Yesterday we were due to fly the 20 min hop over the central ranges from Arenal Volcano to San Jose. However, they decided to take us right past San Jose, frustrating as we could see the runway too, down to the Pacific Coast, for another pineapple plantation landing and another bumpy trip through rain clouds at 8,000 feet. At least the views are superb.
Anyway, we have enjoyed the beauty of this green lush country. The weather has been hot and sunny and we have snorkelled in the Pacific, walked in the Corcovado National park and seen slouths, crocodiles, hummingbirds, toucans, macaws, lots of different monkeys, tapirs as well as a humpback whale and her calf with dolphins jumping exuberantly in our wake.
It is a stunning destination. The great challenge will be to manage the increase in tourism, one of the main contributors to GDP, with sustaining the greatest biodiversity in the world. I hope for the happy people of Costa Rica that they can get this right.
We will be spending most of this coming week on Isla Bastimentos off the east coast of Panama, enjoying the delights of the Carribean. Whether I can get the chance to blog again will depend on access to a computer.

Sulphur dioxide

Nicaragua is a country full of inland lakes and active volcanoes. As we descended into land over the northern part of the country on Monday evening, we could see lava flows in volcanoes north of Managua. Here in Granada, the extinct presence of Mombacho looms large over the city. Nearby, is the larger town of Masaya, whose volcano of the same name, is very much active. Like many volcanoes, it consists of a number of bowls, some completely overgrown with vegetation and seemingly dormant, and at least one large one which spews out a heady mix of nasty chemicals. We were up there on Volcan Masaya on Wednesday twilight and were treated to a magnificent view stretching north over Managua to the volcanoes of northern Nicaragua and to the south over Granada and Lake Nicaragua. We visited caves in the dark swarming with bats and ran up to the precipitate edge of the active bowl in search of glowing lava only to be forced back almost immediately by sulphurous fumes that caused prolonged coughing.
Yesterday was a lot less strenuous as we potted around the 365 isletas on Lake Nicaragua just off Granada. Wealthy foreigners and Nicaraguans (including Presidents present and past) own a number of  individual islands of up to an acre or two in size, and have built holiday houses of varying splendour. One boasts 8 bedrooms, an infinity pool and a helipad and another a tennis court. Some are more modest and a couple are even for sale. You too can own your own island paradise for c.$300,000. The setting is idyllic, apart from the tourist boats that come to gawk.
More and more North Americans and Europeans come to Nicaragua either to retire (perhaps risky with the state of the health system) or more commonly overwinter away from the frost belt. We have met people who summer in Cape Cod and winter in Granada  (life could be a lot worse!). The Nicaraguans are very gentle people and for a country of such modest means, there is precious little hassle or begging. Like Cuba, you would not come for the food. However, the landscapes, lakes, colonial towns and perfect weather in the winter, along with the genuinely friendly people, means it is a place we would be happy to revisit.