Hola Beast Crew

FANTASTIC NEWS!  Greg is a published author.  For those of you that have given up reading these emails, you can read a summarised version of our first half of our trip then buy Greg’s amusing ebook online by going and buying the BEASTLY ADVENTURE.

We are back from our jolly jaunt around Ecuador, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and are now back in the UK for more weddings before heading back to Costa Rica to carry on our Central and North American adventure.  Here is a summary of the comedy of events that has happened up to the point we left to come back to the UK.

Arequipa (Peru) – Quito (Ecuador) – San Jose (Costa Rica) – Manuel Antonio – San Jose – Tabacon (Mt Arenal) – Monte Verde – San Antonio de Turubares – San Jose – Bogota (Colombia) – Cartagena de Indias – Playa Blanca – Cartagena – Bogota – Arequipa (Peru) – Lima – Tumbes – Manta (Ecuador) – Quito - UK

20th April 2007 – 2nd July 2007

Time was running out.  We needed to meet Alexis’s parents in San Jose, Costa Rica in 5 days.  We were nearly 4,000km away from Quito where we had booked our flight to fly upto Costa Rica for two luxurious weeks and we were still in Arequipa in south Peru.  We arrived at the garage after our loyal mechanics had been slaving all weekend to get the engine back in the car, reconnect all the pipes, tubes and electrics, run it, test all the compression and get the Beast back on the road.  We were very excited when Greg finally sat down in the driver’s seat again after almost a month of waiting for the overhaul of the engine damaged by high altitude, heat and salt.  The engine spluttered, started and then stalled.  Repeated trying and we still couldn’t get her started.  The mechanics took off the carburettors and worked out that there was no petrol flowing through and that the fuel pump had possibly gone as well. Grrrrrrrr.

After immense disappointment in not being able to drive up through along the dry coastline and through old Inca and Sipan ruins, we caught a taxi to the airport and flew upto Quito, the capital of Ecuador for a few days.  We staggered around the capital located at 2,800m, seeing the stunning colonial buildings and the wide plazas where we were hassled by street shoe shiners.  We travelled up to the centre of the world, the equator.  The magnificent monument that signifies that middle of the world, a huge statue constructed by the French was erected 200m from the actual equator where we could go and see water flow straight down the plug, balance eggs on the top of a nail and learn about the people for whom the capital was named, the Quitocamas who apparently located their town at the centre of the world, 20km to the south of the equator. 

We jetted up to Costa Rica via Bogota and Panama and arrived in the Central American capital of San Jose to meet Alexis’s parents, Pennie and Andrew.  We travelled over to the pacific coast and travelled down through lush forest that gave way to the palms that are used for palm oil and are responsible for some of the greatest deforestation in the world.  We stopped at the Rio Taracoles which is famous for the 60 alligators that lurk in the water and sunbathe on the sand banks before continuing on to the stunning Manuel Antonio.  The Mariposa hotel that we stayed in has been made famous in the book 1,000 places to see before you die; the view is stunning as you stare across the rainforest with occasional houses interspersed between the rainforest, across to the peninsula national park of Manuel Antonio situated in the sparkling sea.  We visited the park with a tour guide who showed us the hermit crabs, the iguanas, the agoutis (tiny deer), spider monkeys, howler monkeys, coatimundis and racoons who all accommodate the tiny green peninsula alongside all the other sunbaking tourists on the beach. 

We headed back to San Jose before heading north to the famous and youngest Costa Rican volcano, Mount Arenal.  The mountain erupted in July 1968 after 400 years of dormancy and killed 87 people.  We stayed at the fantastic Tabacon Springs where you can indulge in the hot springs created from the heated waters from the volcano that range in temperature from 27oC to 42oC, with a swim up bar and offer amazing views of the erupting volcano that spurts every night every 5-10 minutes. We decided to indulge in one of Costa Rica’s specialities a cable car that took us up into the hills where we were rigged up in helmets, harnesses and a metal bar that enabled us to go down the 1.5 km stretch of cable that was suspended a few hundred metres up over pristine rainforest with the imposing Arenal spurting rocks and lava as we sailed down the terrifying wire.

From Arenal, we headed around the lake to the famous Monte Verde where several biologists grouped together to save one of the most important areas of rainforest in Costa Rica.  The cloud forest was home to the now extinct golden tree frog that through changing climate from global warming died out in the space of a year.  We were lucky enough to see four of the rare, elusive and colourful Quetzal birds.  From Monte Verde we took one of the worst roads in Costa Rica to San Antonio de Tubares where two Chinese bridges had been constructed in the 1960s but no road had been constructed around them.  We stayed at a yoga relaxation hotel, Ama Tierra where we met a US ex music executive and wife who had set up a fantastic hotel over some prisitine forest.

Our time in Costa Rica had come to an end and we had to bid sad farewells to Alexis’s parents who gave two grubby overlanders a touch of luxury travelling around the world.  Thanks Mum and Dad!

We decided that we would change our flight plans to travel back to Peru and stop off and see one of the most reputedly dangerous countries in the world, Colombia.  We arrived in Bogota, the capital situated at 2,600m above sea level, and headed to the historical UNESCO area, Candelaria where stunning cream sandstone buildings all crowd together with machine gun toting guard protecting every corner.  There are noisy and colourful protests every week and all the protesters are surrounded by riot police with machine guns.  Although there seems to be an air of violence about Bogota you actually feel very safe due to the presence of the police.  The law was changed, however, a few years ago to allow you to drive through red lights at night time. 

We met up with an old travelling friend, Jason Homewood who was following us around South America on his KTM motorbike and we were then joined by Greg’s French friend Jean-Christophe.  Alexis chose a beautiful platinum and emerald engagement – how many people can say they have an emerald ring from Colombia (besides Colombians!). We visited the gold museum that boasts the most golden artefacts in the world with over 34,000 pieces displayed, many from the tribes across the country who used gold as a common metal.  No wonder there is so much gold, since the fabled El Dorado is located 50km to the north of Bogota.  We also visited museum for Colombia’s famous artist, Botero who creates pictures and sculptures of fat characters, human and animal. We bid a fond farewell until the next time, to Jason and jumped on a 20 hour bus trip up to Cartagena de Indias on the Caribbean coast.   The most frightening thing besides the breakneck speed that the bus travelled at was the legally required signs that indicated how many accidents, injuries and deaths there had been on each particular bus line over the past month.  We managed to choose a bus line that hadn’t had any deaths in the past month!

Cartagena became a walled city after Sir Francis Drake decided to ransack the city, it was the main town featured in the film Romancing the Stone and it really is a city you want to ransack and be romanced in.  The stunning cobbled streets are overhung by balconied buildings. Large forts, convents and military points all crowd together in the old town competing with the expanding tourist trade that offers hundreds of the best restaurants in the world, touts selling watches, paintings and hats and spontaneous dancing shows.  Definitely a recommended city.

We decided to get away from the humid heat of Cartagena for a few days and headed to Playa Blanca, with restaurants on the beach competing with the hammocks full of sleeping tourists. The sad thing was that the beach idyll with mangroves, beach huts and peace will all be ripped up at the end of the year to make way for ‘progress’ and be replaced by some ugly Sheratton and Hilton hotels…. Progress doesn’t escape even the most beautiful places on the planet.  We took a day tour to the Volcan del Totumo, a volcano of mud that formed 6 years ago and spurts warm therapeutic mud up through 300m.  A very strange experience to be floating on top of so much grey sludge.  Colombia maybe considered one of the most dangerous places on the planet by the media but the 45 million people that live there have managed to make it a fascinating and beautiful place to visit.

We left Jean Christophe and flew back to Arequipa via Bogota, Quito and Lima and headed back to the Beast where she had been laying disembowelled for 2 months.   Fully reconstructed we were ready to start on our epic journey up to Manta where we were shipping the Beast up to Costa Rica to continue our journey.  We dropped down from the highlands of Arequipa to hit the hotlands of Nasca and were looking forward to the drive to the Nasca lines where you can see the strange petroglyphs carved into the sandy desert.

When we were climbing up the hills, lorry and bus drivers were all waving at us telling us that we were losing water.  We stopped to check our water levels when we got to the summit.  We had again lost another 5 litres of water.  Shit!  A blown head gasket again?? We topped up again and found we were losing about 5 litres per 5 km. We were stuck in the no man’s land and had to splutter on to the next dusty mechanics.  He did all the tests for a blown head gaskets and said that it was the thermostat that had stuck closed.  So we went on a quest to get a new thermostat in a part of Peru where there is a town only every 100kms and managed to find an oasis town that had radiator water and oils as well as a mechanic.  The mechanic came out from his bamboo encased yard, conducted the usual head gasket tests and proclaimed that we had a blown head gasket.  So we waited for the afternoon and made a phone call to Richard, our mechanic in Arequipa, to see if he could get hold of some head gaskets for us.

Richard and his magic mechanics, turned up a mere 2 hours later and came to rescue us from the mechanic as they thought he was ripping us off.  Richard’s father was convinced that it was not the head gasket as he had tested it so many times.  We then all formed a convoy and spent a spluttering 5 hour journey to travel the 100km back to Arequipa stopping every few kilometres to check our water levels and top up.  We arrived back into Arequipa at 11pm, a mere 12 hours after we had left it! 

Our mechanics took out the thermostat, changed the radiator cap, checked all the seals and found that we were still leaking a little bit of water from the water pump.

We decided that we were running out of time to reach the port; 5 days is not enough time to drive nearly 4000km to Ecuador.  So we chartered a lorry company to drive the Beast up to the Ecuadorian border on the back of a flat back lorry, a nerve racking experience as the lorry did not arrive at the designated destination until 2 days after the prearranged time.  When the lorry arrived, they had no ramps to get the car off, had left the keys in the ignition and flattened the battery and had managed to scrape all the way down the side of the car.  After searching for some wood, the drivers decided they would dig out the embankment at the side of the road and encourage several people passing by to help push a 3.5tonne deadweight back onto the main road.  After a pull start from another passing lorry we managed to splutter across to the border post that we had been waiting to cross for almost 3 months and then we were released into Ecuador for the mad dash up to the north coast.  We arrived in Manta, having only lost a few millimetres of water from the radiator and headed to the port where we parked the Beast up to hopefully meet up with her again in Costa Rica (see next blog for irritation, annoyance, arrogant customs officers, flouting of laws and downright discriminations against British vehicles).

After a total of 22 flights from Arequipa we said a sad goodbye to the most amazing and diverse continent of South America and flew back to the UK for a month for more weddings in Italy and France.  A very big congratulations to Elena and Andrea and Henri and Julie. 

Notes on Ecuador:

Notes on Costa Rica:

 Notes on Colombia:

• The capital of Bolivia is Bogota.
• The population of Colombia is 45 million.  Colombia is the third-most populous country in Latin America, after Brazil and Mexico.  Colombia is the 26th largest country in the world at twice the size of France.
• The word "Colombia" comes from the name of Christopher Columbus (Cristóbal Colón in Spanish, Cristoforo Colombo in Italian), who never actually visited the country.
• The mythical El Dorado was fabled to be located in Colombia… a lake where the locals would make sacrifices to their gods by throwing gold into the lake.  A lake that fitted the description, Guatavita, was found 50km to the north of Bogota but excavations of the lake bed has resulted in very little gold.  An attempt was made to drain the lake in 1580.
• Simon Bolivar assembled a group of rebels to liberate Colombia from Spanish rule.  The rebellion finally succeeded in 1819 when the territory of the Viceroyalty of New Granada became the Republic of Greater Colombia organized as a Confederation along Ecuador and Venezuela (Panama was part of Colombia).  Simón Bolívar had become the first president of Colombia and Francisco de Paula Santander was vice president.
• Colombia is the largest producer of Emeralds in the world and are mined at Muzo, Coscuez and Chivor.  The Gachala emerald was found in Colombia
• Colombia is located at the meeting point of 5 continental plates and has lots of active and inactive volcanoes.
• Bogotá was then made the capital of Gran Colombia, a federation combining the territories of modern Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador.  This is the reason that all of these countries (except Panama) have the same three tone flag (horizontal stripes of yellow, blue and red).
• FARC and ELN are active rebels who make Colombia the second most dangerous place on the planet for risk of being kidnapped.  Between 1992 and 1999 a total of 5,181 kidnappings, two-thirds of the world's reported, occurred in Colombia.  According to present day rumours, over 3000 people per year are kidnapped.  The most dangerous place for kidnapping at present is Mexico.
• Colombia had the highest murder rate in the world at 62 murders per 100,000 people for a period.  However, it has descended in recent years to 39 murders per 100,000 people, bringing it down in the ‘list of countries by murder rate’ below the levels of South Africa.
• The Ciudad Perdida, located near the Caribbean coast was only discovered in the lush rainforest in 1972.
• Coca cultivation is a major illegal business in Colombia. In several rural regions, large tracts of land have been used for coca plant cultivation. According to U.S. figures, in 2004 an estimated 281,947 acres (114,100 hectares) of land were used to grow the plant and the nation had a producing potential of 430,000 metric tons of cocaine per year.