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I’ve had a chance to call home over the last couple of days and the one thing I hear from everyone is that “You’re coming up on your first full week away”. It’s weird because today marks exactly one week of travel, but it feels like it has been much longer than that. Since Saturday, we’ve had a 5 hour van ride from Encarnacion back to Asuncion, a 3 and a half hour plane ride from Asuncion to Sao Paulo, a 5 hour flight from Sao Paulo to Bogota and a one hour flight from Bogota to Cartagena. In the midst of it all, we’ve been fighting various infirmities and other issues. All of this has come together to make the last two days seem like a lifetime worth of activity. Luckily, yesterday was a much needed rest day. We all slept in until about 3pm and got out to see the city. When you do any kind of work that enables you to travel and do your job, you’ll find that although your passport has many stamps, there was never any time to make a connection with the city. Any kind of free time must be rationed so that you can actually feel like you’ve visited a place.

The second week of our tour brings us to Colombia. I have to be honest, the only thing that I’ve known about Colombia was that there was some great coffee here. On the short ride in I saw that the Juan Valdez coffee house is as popular as Starbucks back home. I’ve learned that Cartagena used to be a fort city that facilitated the slave trade. There is this huge wall that surrounds the city and was used as a defense mechanism for the many castle like structures that it in encompasses and also as a means to keep the slaves from escaping. The city sits on the coast and is on the same level as the sea. This means that during the rainy season, which is now, random showers and thunderstorms occur frequently throughout the day. It’s not uncommon for any street or major thoroughfare to be flooded. Check out some of the pics I’ve taken in the beautiful city of Cartagena:

Does this work for me?? The locals seem to think so!!!

The view from my hotel room:

Marc’s trying to negotiate with a cab driver…

A view from the beach, that is just across the street from the hotel:

Lastly, the rest are some pictures from Old Colombia, the area that was a fort for the slave trade hundreds of years ago:

Until next time!