Fun times two

A quick hello to Becker - hope your mouf is healing up.

After two months of traveling solo I got an adventure buddy when Aimee came for a 10 day scramble around Colombia. After a night in Bogota we flew to the beachside town of Santa Marta and then a day later took one of the most rickety collectivo (privately owned local) buses to Parque Nacional Natural Tayrona. The park is approximately 15000 hectares of jungle along the northern coastline of Colombia with immense biodiversity and strong offshore currents. The air is thick with humidity, creeks form in any low lying area, and the bugs are abundant to put it mildly - but that’s about what I expected from a jungle.
About 5 km into the park our shuttle van came to a stop and opened the door. As we climbed out we realized this was the one and only departure because the road just doesn’t go any further and the only way to access the park is by foot - either your own or a rented mule’s. Opting for the more hearty option we slung our packs over our shoulders and started walking.
Seven minutes into the hike Aimee predicted rain and almost if on cue thunder started rolling. There is so much vegetation in the jungle that we heard the rain and the humidity level was ridiculously high, but oddly we seldom actually got hit with water droplets. Having no other choice we kept walking - sometimes the trail was as wide as a dirt road, sometimes it was winding single-track though dense vegetation, but what every single part of the trail had in common was mud. Thick, sloppy, slick mud.
When we arrived in Aricifles, the first designated camping spot, we dropped our bags and spent the evening hunting toads, frogs, and lizards, and even got to see two praying mantises. We went looking for sea turtles which lasted until Aimee told me to watch out for alligators in the shallow pools. I cannot convey the primal fear I felt on a deserted jungle beach when the thought of alligators was introduced to my mind. We made a bee line for the campground.
Hammocks with mosquito nets are the en vogue place to sleep and having never spent an entire night in one we thought that would be cool. Let me tell you - hammocks are great spots to relax and read a book or doze off for a midday siesta, but they are less than comfortable when used for an entire night. For this reason as soon as the sun rose enough to see Aimee and I got up and started hiking along the coast to Cabo for breakfast. Along the hour and a half hike we saw a couple cool beaches, lizards, people collecting coconuts from the ground, and hundreds of what we dubbed “jungle crabs,” a beautiful multi colored variety of the species that lives pretty far inland and borrows into the soft jungle soil. Aimee thought they were awesome.
We ate breakfast and hung out on the rocks around Cabo for a while before starting our hike back. In the middle the trail we stopped for a minute and as I looked up not 3 meters above us were a group of monkeys. Completely wild monkeys just chillin in the trees above us!
Shortly thereafter we swam in La Piscina, one of the few beaches without strong offshore currents attempting to drown unsuspecting tourists, jumped off some rocks, and then continued our hike out.
Overall it was an amazing experience. We saw some awesome animals in their wild habitat, experienced a thunderstorm in the jungle, explored some deserted jungle beaches, and escaped with a (relatively) minimal amount of bug bites.

Leaf-cutter ants on the move.

Jumping into the Caribbean.

Not a bad place, I could get used to this.