Sandra’s father hasn’t been well, and was due to have a heart operation soon. I wanted to meet him before then in case anything went wrong. He lives in a town a two-hour bus ride from Bogota, though to call it a town is an understatement. It felt as big as Wollongong, but without any tall, built-up areas. He lives with his wife in a townhouse in a gated community, and leaves the TV on all day whether they’re watching it or not. He was very happy that Sandra had a partner, and then very disappointed when the restaurant he chose to take us to for lunch didn’t live up to his expectations. The next morning I found him scrubbing my shoes to get some long-ingrained foliage stains out and, embarrassed at the servitude, I grabbed them back and finished wiping them down myself. This turned out to be the wrong thing to do because he thought I was angry at him for touching my shoes, but we got past that. Sandra tells stories of a wild man in her younger years, but now he’s a quiet, doting father and it was nice to see Sandra pouring affection on her dad.

On our return to Bogota, Sandra’s mum took us to play Rana (which means ‘frog’), one of her favourite games. The object is to throw discs or, in the case of this new version, steel balls at various holes in the top of a stand from about three metres away. Each hole is worth a different number of points, with the hardest requiring the ball to roll up a ramp between a frog’s legs with just the right force to jump over the second hardest hole, before dropping into another hole behind it. Sandra’s mother and her friend both achieved this regularly during our six games, while Sandra and I struggled to get half our balls into holes at all. Though we did improve.

I’ve started to get used to seeing pictures of half naked women everywhere in Colombia, usually advertising lingerie or sex shops, but seeing one on the backboard of a game like this was a shock. None of the women noticed until I pointed it out, and then thought it was funny that it bothered me.

We left Cartagena proper for three nights on Isla Grande in a fairly rustic island hotel. Sandra had been given the name of this one by a friend and assumed it was the only option, but we soon discovered that it was one of about twenty places tourists could stay on the island. Some were little more than a shack, while others were the full five-star experience. With our decent sized room, small beach and an array of hammocks, I was happy with our choice, but the food was sub-par and Sandra suffered a bit.

We enjoyed walking through the village in the centre, exploring some of the other beaches, and taking a boat out to snorkel among the coral, but the highlight was the plankton in a small harbour on the other side of the island. We paid one of the hotel staff to guide us one night around the island, through a couple of luxury hotels to a secluded inlet with a pontoon, where other tourists were already in the water making appreciative noises. I’ve seen phosphorescence before on canoe camping trips with my family. We’d swish the water with a paddle and the water would spark prettily. That was like a sparkler to the New Year’s Eve fireworks we saw on Isla Grande. And when we got into the water with goggles and dog-paddled the water lit up like the night sky.

All in all, our time on Isla Grande was the relaxing, bonding time we hoped our ‘honeymoon’ would be.

Sandra suggested that we go away for a ‘honeymoon’ trip when I got back to Colombia. I chose Cartagena as one of the places on our long list, partly because it was tropical and had that honeymoon image, and partly because it was central to a few places. In the end, we decided that it we’d both rather experience one place properly than rush around trying to get to other places, so we limited ourselves to Cartagena and Isla Grande, which is a separate post.

Cartagena is on the Carribean coast, and is a major trading port with a strong role in South American history. We typically spent our days at the beach and our evenings wandering around town, and of course a night of dancing salsa. We found the Cartagenans to be more money-focused than Paisas, which tarnished this beautiful town, but we soon discovered Getsemani, which was once slums, but has been reformed into a vibrant backpacker district with more reasonable prices and a wealth of incredible graffiti. We also discovered a tiny, unassuming ice cream shop that made a delicious, refreshing mandarin flavour.

With only hours left in the town, we came across a sloth with a baby hanging out in a tree. Years ago, I’d made a detour in my flights to Cochabamba to spend an hour in Santa Cruz, where I had read lots of sloths populated the central park. I saw nothing then, and had given up ever seeing one outside of a zoo, so watching this one crawl its way along a branch was a highlight of the trip, and I’m glad Sandra and I were together for the experience.

This was my third hike with Sandra and my fourth around Medellin, and once again, we failed to find the intended path. Sandra got instructions from a colleague a couple of months ago, but could no longer decipher her cryptic notes, to the point that we started at the wrong station, and no one we asked had any idea of where we trying to go. Again, we followed recommendations and took a bus up the hill to a path that led to a lake in the mountains. While there, a man guiding a group came from the opposite direction and suggested we go out that way because it was only a half hour walk. That half hour walk stretched to more than two hours, and when we finally did reach a road, we were stopped and told that we had been walking on private property owned by an adventure company and had to pay for using it for the day. We may have to pay a guide for our next hike…