Where have you been?

Well that’s been some journey, to start with I’m alive and all fingers and toes are intact and accounted for!  There are plenty of stories which need to be updated but I’ve been preoccupied with Colombia.

Stories – well their are lots of them, surviving Caracas, getting wet for 3 days to see a water fall which is 1km high, discovering that coffee is more expensive than a tank of petrol and that doing anything the legal way in Venezuela is the wrong way!!

Then I landed in to Colombia where my eyes have been opened to a whole new world and that is where I have been stuck for the past seven weeks.  I’ve ticked the Indiana Jones box and walked in the Jungle for 5 days, signed up for Spanish school again, sat on a secluded beach for four days trying to answer ‘life’s questions’ and then seen two extremes where one group of people have ‘it all’ from their 4×4’s to cologine lips, tits & bums and boutique shops to shanty towns where crack whores and HIV are just part of day to day life, your clean water comes from the rain and children have to eat from the trash and sleep in door ways at night!

It sounds horrible and you must be thinking why on earth has he been there for seven weeks! Well you see their is something about this country that gets under your skin, it is a place of amazing beauty, where almost all of the people you meet are so friendly and helpful its hard to believe (crack whores and wanna be models included!)  Its going to transform itself into something of a wonder, suppose its kinda like taking the Costa Del Crime in Spain and turning it into a haven for Brits to buy apartments on golf courses and still enjoy a full English breakfast everyday.  However Colombia will be different they want to get rid of the old image of corruption and drug lords, they want to show the world that they have something to be proud of and want people to come and enjoy it, but if you want to buy a house or open a business then it will be on their terms and if that’s not to your liking or you see it another way then, well then – its just not going to work for you and your better off finding another Costa Del Crime! If it goes wrong there is no magic EU fund to bail them out!

So ditch your ideas and thoughts of Cocaine and guns, start thinking about a country who are learning from the mistakes from all the other ‘new’ countries, Colombians are very proud people who realise that they were doing it the wrong way but didn’t have a choice in it, but now this time they want to do it properly.

All I need to do now is figure out how I can help be part of the new Colombia.