Day 17 - Cartagena [2]

Cartagena is a historic UNESCO town, on the northern coast of the Caribbean, founded in 1533 by the Spanish.  The fortification walls are 18m thick in some places...

added in the early 1600s at great expense after Sir Francis Drake had attacked and sacked the city in 1586, including trashing the cathedral (we poked our noses in earlier there but a service was in full flow so we'll have to revisit)

The walls give a fine view both down into streets of the town and over the Caribbean beaches

Cartagena was looking very lovely today.

Note the colourful city flag above

And we recognised a sister statue to the lady at the Broadgate Centre at Liverpool Street!

When we went out for sunset, very lively too. It turns out that the Cartagena version of the Hay Festival has just begun (no wonder so many hotels were booked up!) which also explains the crowds.

Day 16 - Cartagena [1]

The Museo Del Oro Zenu (the Zenu were, and still are, skilled craftsmen who live on marshlands not far from Cartagena) contains some spectacular gold work, particularly small pendants and adornments to spears and staffs.

Plus some more fine clay figurines and stone carvings

and early printing "bracelets" - apparently, if you marked your skin with an animal's particular spots or scales, you'd take on its powers...

The museum itself in a fine old colonial building, one of many 

One of the symbols of the city is its clock tower - the Torre del Reloj

and, around the pretty Plaza del Coche, vendors sell fruit

Day 15 - Quito to Bogotá to Cartagena, and stage 2 - COLOMBIA!

A travelling day so an early start before the 500 miles/730 km from Quito - over some gorgeous Ecuador mountains

and then a quick layover in Bogotá airport for our first glimpse of Colombia 

before we connected to a domestic flight about the same distance again for the first of our five nights in lovely historic Cartagena

Day 14 - Quito - last day in Ecuador

Last Ecuador day - in Quito.  First stop was the National Museum (no pics allowed sadly) for exhibitions of gold and silver fashioned into jewellery, death masks, weapons (cue oodles of security guards, armed to the teeth!) and lots of groovy clay pre-Colombian artefacts in the forms of jugs, inkwells and other pots, shaped like real or imaginary animals and people, plus the odd vessel to pound or mix up your narcotics to present to the local shaman.

We managed to navigate up to the "TeleferiQo" cable car for super-high views of Quito

though sometimes you can be too high. We decided to try the slightly lower view from the Madonna statue.  We'd spotted her up on high from town two weeks ago

but now, with a car, we could access the statue - up on a hill called El Panecillo ("small piece of bread", oddly) which is a 200-m-high, its peak is at an elevation of 3,016m above sea level, and on which stands the 41m-tall stone monument of a madonna assembled on a high pedestal from 7,000 thousand pieces of aluminium. 

We rose upwards via a sweet little white-walled town

to the top of the hill, where Old Quito unravels before you.

The Madonna stands on top of a globe and is stepping on a snake (apparently "classic madonna iconography" (!) - less traditional are the wings and locals claim that she is the only madonna in the world with wings like an angel)).

The view from a short way up the madonna is spooky

and free - the perfect last Ecuador picnic lunch spot.

Last stop in Ecuador was dropping off the hire car and totting up... we've done 1,643km/ 1,020 miles and spent a princely total of £31.62 on petrol! Of course it helps when it's only US$2 per (US) gallon - ie 34p per litre!

Day 13 - Baeza to Quito

Time to head back towards Quito.

It took us almost as long to find the place, north of Quito, but eventually we found the Mitad del Mundo monument (slightly Disney theme park-y,

but I suppose there are probably souvenir shops at the Greenwich Meridian).  A nice spot to picnic for lunch, with photogenic flags around the monument itself (we wondered whether they were the other "equatorial countries" but I haven't yet checked)

and a line "marking" the equator - so you can stand in both hemispheres

  

Day 12 - Oriente to Baeza

Quitting the Oriente, we pootled along the Amazon trunk road

via rainforest rising with mist

and babbling streams
 

to quiet, pretty Baeza

where our room had cable TV to catch up on the Australian Open tennis and the restaurant next door proved to serve a magnificent (local speciality) trout

Day 11 - Oriente at Jatun Sacha Biological Research Centre

We wanted, if we had time, to see a very little of the Amazon.  So we chose Jatun Sacha which is close to the Rio Napo, a tributory of the Amazon - a thin band of the tropical rainforest (and, boy, wasn't it wet), connecting the Andes and the Amazon river basin, apparently labelled one of the world's most biologically diverse areas (and an "Alpha Biodiversity Hot Spot" - certainly for flowers and foliage

though sadly not for birdlife where we were walking!). Though there were some lovely butterflies - when they'd oblige by staying still!)

After slithering along the paths,

we were less than keen to try climbing the precarious-looking ladder 

to the 30m-high viewing platform, even though it apparently affords a majestic canopy view. Maybe tomorrow.

Our cabin was basic (some might say a little spartan) but snug

but who cares - you can't beat falling asleep to the tune of the millions of insects who seem to wake up (any time after the sun sets around 6.30pm!).  Though first, one of the kindly volunteers pointed out to us two VERY large and VERY hairy tarantulas who were hiding in the darkness

LOOK AWAY NOW, ARACHNOPHOBES

Needless to say, no one was going far at night for the loo...