San Gil

Colombian drivers are crazy. This we experienced on our first bus journey from Bogota to San Gil (which took 7.5 hours). If our journey was a marathon the driver wouldn't have jogged or ran there but sprinted the entire thing hehe. We saw a few close car lights on occasion but we got here in one piece. We've come to San Gil as there is really cheap white water rafting and it breaks up the journey to Santa Marta (on the Caribbean coast).

At the moment you can do rafting here on Grade 3 rapids (25,000) or Grade 5 (120,000). Having not seen the river or the company operating it we decided not to do the Grade 5. We also hadn't enough numbers for the Grade 3 (min. 3 persons) so not wanting to do it in a glorified 2 person canoe we tried our handle at HydroSpeed. This is where you throw yourself into a Grade 3 river on a body board with handles, life jacket & fins and give it all you've got. Hard work it has to be said. Our guide as well only had Spanish so at times it was difficult to understand what the hell was going on. Overall, we were about 60-90 minutes on the river and for 30,000 or under $15 well worth the money.

1 day in San Gil..

In major need of a good meal afterwards, we went to the best restaurant in town, apparently, Carne de Carnes and had a lovely meal (20,000 each). San Gil looks to be a really nice town with a few things to check out. Unfortunately we don't have the time to do that, so instead we caught a bus at 7pm (with Berlinas - recommended bus company) to our next destination - the Caribbean Coast..