Colombia's Caribbean coast is the number one tourist destination here. I have now been twice, in 2011 and this year, so this is a mixture of what we did on those trips.

Cartagena: The cheapest way to get to Cartagena is to fly with VivaColombia from Cali. In 2011, we got a taxi to our Hostel, called Hostel Real that we booked online. In Cartagena it is worth booking somewhere in the high season and around Christmas/New Year as it is the busiest weeks of the year. You can get cheap hotels or hostels a short walk from the historic centre in old colonial buildings (like the one we stayed at, cheap and cheerful). Or you can get hotels in Bocagrande (the modern beach bit with no character but.. a beach!). This year, we stayed at the Playa Club hotel which was a cheap and cheerful hotel but right on the beach and with a great pool. You can get taxis cheap to get to the historic centre easily from Bocagrande. Other hotels there are significantly cheaper because they don't have aircon or a pool but tend to be the ones that don’t have online booking so you can go in person and barter it down. When we returned to Cartagena for our return flight for a couple of days in 2011, what we did was book a night in a normal hotel then we went to a couple of ones that weren’t advertised to haggle some prices (they are the hotels that Colombians stay in and bartering is part of the deal). Then you can move hotel for the cheaper price.

In Cartagena you can relax on the beach (and buy delicious fresh mango from sellers!) which has a nice breeze or explore the Colonial centre which has some great museums but it is very expensive for restaurants and bars. From Cartagena port, just outside the big beautiful city gate, you can arrange a boat to Playa Blanca near Baru if you want a proper Caribbean experience. This was my favourite part of our stay in Cartagena, although the boat ride was particularly uncomfortable! Ask at the port or at your hostel for tickets. Here are some photos of Cartagena and the islands from our trip:

Taganga: You can get a bus from Cartagena to Taganga which is an odd little coastal town just north of Santa Marta (you may have to change buses in Santa Marta). On the one hand it is a cool hippy beach town, but that is just the beach front and behind it is a pretty impoverished town. For Taganga, don’t book anything in advance - go to the beach and book into a cheap hotel there, once again, they don't advertise online. We made the mistake of booking one online but it was very expensive and nothing special. For a day trip, you can take a little boat (negotiate the price) to the beach across the bay and you’ll get lunch included in the price. Also buy/rent snorkels before going to see fish over there. I would say to stay in Taganga for no longer than 4 days as there is not much to do, but it is nice to relax there. From Taganga you can arrange a bus to take you to Tayrona or you can get a boat but we were warned that the sea can be quite rough so maybe talk to some locals before deciding. Here are some of our photos:

Tayrona: Tayrona is the famous national park and is beautiful but we had a bit of an unfortunate experience. It is extremely physically demanding and there is very little guidance or signs for tourists, so you’re kind of on your own. When you get there you either have to walk on a road for an hour or pay for a minibus to get to the jungle, then you have an hour's walk mostly uphill on rocky surfaces until you get to the coast and a little (very expensive) restaurant. From there, the most popular place to go to sleep is Cabo Can Juan which you see in all the photos but that is another hour+ walk along the beach which is really demanding. Unless you’ve got money (to rent horses to carry you or to rent a little house), you’ll have to walk for hours carrying all your stuff and then sleep on hammocks. We trekked all the way there and were told that all the hammocks were taken. Unfortunately, there is no information when first arriving to tell you where to go or the availability of hammocks so we had to walk another hour back to the first beach - but this time through the forest on a path, which is much easier than via the beach, but once again there were no signs or guidance that the path existed when we arrived. 

Sleeping on hammocks is really uncomfortable and was quite expensive ($17,000 or £5 each a night) given that there were basically no services available and the hammock hut was falling apart. There were no cooking facilities and all the food and water for sale was very expensive. Most people end up enjoying it but it depends on your budget, and that that time we were on a very tight one. If you can rent horses, do it! The beach we were staying near was very dangerous with huge waves so we walked to the other one the following day to explore a bit and it was very pretty and we saw some cool animals but the whole thing was just tiring and badly organised. Although, as you can see from my photos below, Tayrona is beautiful, the girl behind the camera was absolutely drained. It is worth doing and you do get great photos, but we were not at all aware of just how physical it would be and that we might not end up sleeping at Cabo San Juan and just kept hearing such great things about it so assumed it all was well organised and goes smoothly, so just be prepared!

The Nirvana nature reserve is about an hour outside of Cali, on the other side of Palmira and costs $10.000 per person for entry. It is a 2-3 hour signposted hike up the mountain over streams and under bamboo and low-hanging trees to reach the viewpoint over the valley (above). The trek isn't particularly easy and is muddy at times so be sure to wear adequate shoes and take plenty of water. On our hike, we saw a variety of spiders and flowers I had never seen before. There is also a nice restaurant to have lunch at as a reward for all your hard work and, although prices for individual dishes such as trout or chicken are very high for the portion size ($25-32.000), the 4 or 6 person picada is actually a very good deal at $55.000 for 4, and is the best picada I've had in Colombia! There is also a butterfly farm right by the restaurant with so many butterflies that they often land on you and I found it much better than the one on Cerro de los Cristales in Cali.

Getting money out abroad is always a hassle. You don't want to fork out for a terrible exchange rate, bank and cashpoint fees, but fear not, I have done all the hard work for you so you can learn from my mistakes!

For the first few months I was here, I was using my Fair FX cash travel card that I usually use for trips, which charges 1%, £1 and then a mystery amount something to do with the exchange rate, normally between £1-3. However, once I started earning and needed to withdraw a lot more often (I get paid into my UK bank account), these charges seemed too much to I looked into other options. 

I started to use my Nationwide FlexAccount debit card which supposedly has quite good rates for withdrawing abroad but the trusty Servibanca cash points charged me around 8% when I used it and only allowed me to withdraw $300.000 (under £100) a pop. After investigating, the solution seemed to be to withdraw at Citibank which says it charges 3% and allows you up to $800.000 a go, but luckily I have only been charged around $12.000 and have managed to withdraw over $1m. The annoying thing about that though is that my Nationwide card seemed like it hadn't charged me extra but then the next day it adds around £5/6 charges to the withdrawal, so I actually ended up going overdrawn as I assumed all the charges would be all at once. So beware of this option! 

So, after testing out many ways to withdraw money, I now have a Halifax credit card that charges me nothing to withdraw so long as I put the money back on it within 24 hours. I ordered it from here and got it posted it to me, which is risky but it arrived safely a few weeks later. So I now get charged the $12.000 fee from Citibank and nothing from Halifax which is great!