Lazy Days and A Scary End to Our Time in Colombia

The last four days we’ve spent chilling by the sea, mostly because it’s hard to do anything in this heat and humidity but also because it’s the last few days in Colombia for the two girls we’ve been traveling with for the last month and they wanted to work on their tans before they head back to England.

So most of our days have been spent spent sunbathing and our evenings dancing on the beach and drinking too many cocktails. Now it’s September were starting to notice that it’s the rainy season a bit more, every other evening there is a downpour that lasts for an hour or two, unfortunately the hostel dog doesn’t like the storms so if you forget to put your mosquito net down you sometimes end up with a bed smelling of wet dog. Although on the positive side if you’re not caught in the storms and are tucked up inside dry and warm they’re really fun to watch, the other night we go to see a really cool thunder storm out to sea, it was lighting up the sky as if it was daylight.

We also got to see some really cool bioluminescent phytoplankton in the evenings if you splashed around in the wet sand it would all light up, which was especially entertaining on the drunken walk back to the hostel after parties on the beach.

This afternoon we headed back to Santa Marta as we have to catch our flights to Bogota here soon, we got a bus from the coast to Cartagena and I ended up sat next to a woman and a super cute toddler who was fascinated by me, he kept was staring and giggling every time I smiled at him, he kept stroking my skin and trying to play with my hair, probably not used to gringos yet.

When we were about 20 minutes from our hostel the bus got stuck in traffic and we saw two police motorbikes pass us, we waited for about 10 minutes and then saw people running past the bus shouting. Suddenly the lorry in the lane next to us reversed backwards at about 50mph and slammed into the taxi behind it crushing it into another lorry. People started screaming and we heard gun shots, we all threw ourselves down on the bus floor as the noise got closer. It was horrible, I was trying to help the woman get her toddler underneath us to protect him, he was still smiling at me it was so heart breaking. There was a bang on the side of the bus and the driver of the bus decided to get the hell out of there, he sped us down the side of the road into a steep gutter to try and get around the other cars infront of us, the windshields were smashed and we didn’t look to see the fate of the drivers. The bus started to tip so me and Grace shouted to everyone to crawl on the floor to the other side of the bus to balance it, we managed to keep it stable and get passed the unmoving cars and then sped off. Were still not sure why it happened or what it was about, were just glad to be back to relative safety. It’s really weird knowing all of these things are regular occurrences here but we’ve just been so sheltered in our travelers bubble that you start to feel distant and unattached from it, it was a scary reminder of the reality here, we could have easily have been in the taxi that was crushed or have gotten off the bus and had a very different outcome.

Its a shame to have such a shocking end to a wonderful trip here.

I’ll keep you updated on out next movements,

Lots of love,

Alice x

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