Bogota - Tayrona

While Salinas is hailed as having the most beautiful beach of Ecuador, I don’t really like it. It is a town beach with a busy road and high rising houses right behind. I feel much more at home in La Libertad, which is built together with Salinas and where the locals live and shop. The marina of Puerto Lucia is quite luxurious with restaurants, swimming pool, gym and internet café. It better is, because it is surrounded by mostly empty high-rising apartment blocks with nothing in the vicinity. I am mostly biking during the day and going for dinner with other cruisers by taxi.

Most sailors came to Puerto Lucia to haul out and work on their boats. So I feel a bit awkward spending my afternoons at the pool while they are working in the blistering heat!

After a week I am flying to Bogota to be finally with Monica and help her in her last preparations for the move to Blue Bie. She stopped working two weeks ago to complete her training as dive instructor. We are spending the majority of time in town to do errands and meet friends to say good-bye. I don’t really get comfortable in Bogota: While it offers a lot to live and go out, it is raining most days, the houses are unheated and have limited hot water only in the shower while the outside temperatures hover at 15-20°. Nevertheless, I am happy to be here, getting to know Monica and her family better in their environment and supporting her morally departing.

After two weeks in Bogota, we are going with her whole family to Taganga diving. It feels quite intense to me to travel in a group of seven people and I enjoy reading a book in the shade of a tree while Monica is instructing her family in diving. We are also spending a few days in the Tayrona National Park. When Monica and I were here in November, we were nearly the only tourists. Now in the ‘semana santa’ (Easter week), hundreds of people are camping and we wouldn’t have found accommodation, without bringing our own hammocks.

The last two days in Bogota pass very fast with visits of family and friends and in all our joy for our life together, Monica and her mother can’t avoid shedding the odd tear.

Back on board of Blue Bie, we are spending the hot hours close to the swimming pool and use the cool morning and evening hours to stock up our supplies, stow everything away and mount the newly galvanized anchor chain.