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After the novel experience of sleeping in a hotel room, we were more motivated to fix the problems with the van. Having a late check out meant we had time to try and get things working better while the washing finished drying. A quick visual check led us right to the problem wheel, brake fluid poured out of the bottom of the drum and ran down onto the floor, making a nice little puddle under the rear wheel. Now we knew where to start and we also had a hard level surface to ja

Now we were staying at around 12,000ft, it was pretty cold. The heating was on and it was raining. We got our woolly jumpers out and made a hot chocolate. By the time we had finished drinking that we decided that we’d stay another night. After the rather stressful events of the day before, we needed a day to relax. The friendly owners had invited us up to the house last night, but we had politely declined. Today was not only a better day to be sociable, but to actually see th

Ruby had been running well so far, we’d driven over 500 miles on this continent and also for well over 24 hours, just in the last week. Apart from the niggly power issue, things were going well. We set off to put some more miles on the clock that morning as we left Gramalote, heading towards Cacota as we started to wind our way south now.  We made it about 5 minutes from the campsite when the engine died. We quickly realised that we couldn’t hear the fuel pump and after a che

After two rather peaceful nights but busy days, we moved on from Los Estoraques towards Gramalote. Having already used a month out of our three month visa, we had to keep moving, Colombia is a big country! We were also learning quickly that whatever time giving by any mapping app was always completely wrong. We reckoned we were about 10-20% slower than google, and any time given by maps.me, well you could at least double that. Google reckoned it would take us four hours, to d

After nearly two weeks of not driving, we quickly reacquainted ourselves with the van. The gears seemed a bit on the sloppy side, but other than that she was driving fine. That was good, because after leaving Barranquilla there are not many places to stop. The first town of interest with some decent camping is Santa Cruz de Mompox, but that’s a good seven hour drive from Barranquilla. After spending so long not living in her, we felt like we needed that days to get back into

We had already booked into a hostel for the next few days. We wanted to be able to move across the contents of our fridge as well as get the cats settled first, before we got to the garage. There wasn’t too much choice in affordable hostels that were close to the garage, but we found something at a reasonable price around a 15 minute walk away. This time too, we would have our bikes. The only bad thing was that we were back in the heat of a city on the coast, and our room did

After the stifling heat of being back down to the coast, we beat a hasty retreat back to our quiet spot in the hills. After negotiating the slightly sketchy access road, we arrived back in time to enjoy the end of the afternoon as the temperature began to drop. With the election of the weekend over, Monday was a holiday and the small town of Minca was pretty busy. We would wait for things to quieten down before we explored the little village, there was plenty of trails to wal

It’s always slightly scary to drive in a new country for the first time. You’re never quite sure how the police will be, if the traffic laws are different, or how your fellow drivers are. We had seen enough in Cartagena while we waited for Ruby, to realise that city driving was not going to be fun. In the brief day we drove her through the city this was confirmed. Bikes cut in from all sides and directions, cars drifted in and out across lanes dodging the local bus service. N

We arrived at the airport for our departing flight to Colombia a good two and a half hours before it was due to take off, allowing us plenty of time to check-in. Having never flown with animals before, we weren’t sure how smoothly this was going to go.  As is the way; when you're running late everything is slow, but when you’ve got plenty of time, you don’t need it.  We had cleared check-in and security within half an hour. We got plenty of stares as we walked around the airp