More Minca

By Brae:

Even though we’ve already explained to you about some great things we did in Minca, we have not told you about all of it yet. There was too much fun stuff to tell you in only one go, so here are a few other things we did there that we haven’t mentioned yet.

In Colombia, it is so hot that you can grow things that you can’t grow in England, like chocolate! more minca-7When we were in Minca we went to have lunch one day. It was kind of a restaurant but it was really just two small tables in the garden of someone’s house in the middle of nowhere. We had some yummy food that the family who lived there made and we bought a necklace, to give to our little cousin, that the daughter of the family had made out of clay. For pudding we had some fresh chocolate and the lady showed us that it grew from her cocoa tree in the back garden. The case of the chocolate (called a cocoa pod) is green instead of brown like I imagined it. Here is a picture of one if you do not believe me. The chocolate tree had bags over the pods so the squirrels did not eat them.

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Another thing I remember from Minca is when we were finishing one of our tours Niall said he knew a nice place for lunch and our minds changed to a nice air conditioned room with walls to escape the boiling temperature. more minca-5We were all taken by a big surprise when we arrived.
We were staring at a little shelter with no walls. There were four wooden tables with wooden benches, and one of the tables had huge chunks of ribs laid across it. There was no proper bathroom as it was just a bucket of water for washing your hands. Also, there was a little oven made of bricks with all sorts of meat being cooked. The floor was just made of mud and lots of stray chickens, dogs and cats were wandering around all over the place. more minca-4The owner was really nice and he started to cut up the cooked ribs and said we were allowed to try some for free! It was really tasty so I had some ribs just like that for lunch as I liked it so much. As you can see, restaurants in Colombia are very different to ones in England! But we had a really nice meal with Niall and our new friends Sarah, John, Karen and Darren and they had beer and fizzy drinks too so everyone was happy.more minca

When we got back to Niall’s house,
we were looking out of our balcony and in the distance my mum and dad were quite surprised to see Oren wielding a machete around, cutting off a bunch of bananas. Most grown ups don’t give you a massive machete and ask you to chop through the jungle but Niall isn’t like a normal boring grown up! Of course I thought it looked fun so I ran out there to have a go too!

 

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So you can tell how many amazing memories we have of Minca, so you might not be surprised that before we go back to England, we would really like to go back there and do another tour with Niall where you cover yourself in mud and wash it off in a waterfall. So this might not be last you hear about Minca so stand by!

You can read the original post here

Free diving

By Brae and Oren:

In our last few posts we told you about statistics and school, but now we want to remind you how many really, really fun things we’re doing in Colombia…in case you forgot!

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Our friend Maryline, who is my mum and dad’s Spanish teacher, helped us go on an incredible diving lesson on Sunday. Her boyfriend Camilo, and his cousin José are both diving teachers. And because we are friends with Maryline, we had an extra special experience!

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dive1-13We went to a beach called Playa Blanca (white beach) and the only way to get there is by boat. When we arrived, no one was there and so we had the whole beach to ourselves, apart from a little dog and its owner, who has a restaurant on the beach.

dive1-8First we climbed up a hill so we could see the view. From the top we could see black smudges in the water. José told us that they were schools of sardines.

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For our lesson, José took us into the water and gave us our masks and snorkels and told us important things you need to know if you want to go free diving. Free diving is when you can dive right down underwater with your snorkel, not just staying on the top. We practiced all the tips he gave us and he said we were doing really well so we set off to the other side of the beach, got our flippers and he told us how to use them.

dive-17We went diving near a rocky cliff and there was amazing coral and all kinds of incredible fish and sea anemones. We were amazed about all the different colours of the fish. It felt like being in an aquarium.

About half way along the cove José spotted a puffer fish swimming around among the coral. He dived down and gently urged it up towards the surface by putting his hand near its nose but not actually touching it. We were lucky enough to touch it, extremely gently, and it felt like silk because it wasn’t frightened or puffed up. When they’re puffed up they have spikes that point out so they’re like a balloon with spikes on. We would have liked to see it puff up but we didn’t want to make it frightened. While we were diving we didn’t touch the coral as we didn’t want to damage it and also José told us that the orange parts of the coral would really sting if you even put one finger on it.

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We feel really lucky to have this great experience and to have friends like Maryline, Camilo and José to help us do something so extraordinary that we will never forget.

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World famous!

By Oren and Brae:

We have a page on our blog that shows us the statistics. It tells us how many people are enjoying our blog and where they are. We didn’t have the statistics on the blog before 4 February so we don’t know how many people looked at it before then, but since 4 February we have had 323 visitors, 1,467 page views and 149 comments! We also know that at least one other school apart from Colby is looking at our blog to learn about Colombia. It is a school in Scotland and we don’t even know the children there. We think this is really awesome because now we know that our blog is useful not only to Colby but to other schools too – ‘hola’ to our readers in Scotland!

The other thing that is so incredible is that we can see all the different places where people are reading the blog. We have a map and every time someone looks at our blog, the country they are from goes blue! And it keeps getting darker and darker blue the more people look at it in that country. So, England is very, very dark blue by now and Colombia is dark blue too.

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Here is a list of countries that are blue so far:

  • Europe: UK, France, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Switzerland
  • Middle East: United Arab Emirates, Qatar
  • Americas: USA, Canada, Colombia, Brazil
  • Africa: South Africa
  • Australasia: Australia.

Isn’t that brilliant! We are world famous now!

Our top 4 countries for readers are UK (178 readers), Colombia (78 readers), USA (23 readers) and Australia (12).

Now we have a mission for you! If you know anyone who is in another country please tell them about the blog because we would love to see more countries on our map going blue (especially Russia, China or India because they are so big, or Africa as we only have one country there so far)! Please send them our blog address www.everettsincolombia.co.uk and tell them to take a look!

If you give someone the address, don’t forgot to write a comment below saying you’ve done it and then we can tell you when that country goes blue (or bluer) on the map.

Thank you very much for your help!

Carnival!!!

By Brae:

Last weekend we went to Barranquilla, the fourth biggest city in Colom…OK, enough of that, let’s get to the important part: carnival!!!!

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Every year Barranquilla has a completely mental party that goes on for 4 days and nights. Nearly 2 million people go to the ‘Carnavales de Barranquilla’ so it’s pretty big. The second biggest carnival in the world after Rio in fact.

We had tickets for seats in a stand which meant we were high up and had a really good view. There are thousands of people performing in the parades with lots of dancing, people pretending to be zombies, cannibals, animals and other stuff and the most incredible costumes ever. carnival-2carnival-35

The parades went on for at least 4 hours every day but we never got bored for one second because of the interesting things that they were doing and the party music and atmosphere.

thumb_IMG_7696_1024One of the things that made it so much fun was that you were given little boxes of flour
and you could throw it at each other or squirt people with foam. Everyone was wearing weird carnival clothes and funny hats and acting completely crazy! Here is a picture of some kids that threw flour at us, but then they gave us some of their flour so we could throw some at them and at our parents!

 

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I hope that the photos and videos we took help you imagine what it was like to be there.

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Did you notice the ladies balancing bottle on their heads? These are full of aguardiente which is like whisky. People drink it a lot.

Wedding

By Oren:  

One of the main reasons we came to Colombia was to see our good friend Diana, who looked after me and Brae when I first started school in London. She lives in Bogotá now, the capital of Colombia, but she was living in London then. She looked after us for two years and while she was in London we met her brother Luis Fernando and her cousin Angelica. Also, when my mum went to Colombia with work, Diana’s family looked after her really well and made her feel at home. So you can see why Diana became like family to us. This is why we were so excited about being invited to her wedding to Ernesto. 

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The wedding was in a church by the sea and it was really beautiful. All the men had to wear special shirts called guayaberas which were white and they had a pattern on the side. These are traditional so we all had one. My dad and I bought one to keep and Brae rented one from a special wedding shop. It was so nice to meet some more of Diana’s family while we waited for the ceremony to begin. When we saw Diana arrive everyone started taking photos because she looked so pretty in her wedding dress.

wedding-12The party was at a beautiful house with a swimming pool and garden on the shore. We had delicious food and drinks, but the best bit was the disco. They played Colombian music and in Colombia everyone knows how to dance and they do it really well. As well as the disco they had Colombian musicians playing music to dance to. Brae and I got taken up to the dance floor by Diana and her cousin and also wedding-6my dad got taken up to dance in a circle with a crowd of ladies! We tried to copy people’s dance moves to try and dance like a Colombian doing ‘salsa’. Throughout the night I danced with a lot of people. 

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At midnight, when I was first starting to get a bit tired, everyone went absolutely crazy! Angelica said it was called ‘la hora loca’ (the crazy hour) 

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and everyone dressed up and the band put some crazy music on and everybody danced until I thumb_IMG_7625_1024was really tired (it was later than one o’clock in the morning!). Brae and I fell asleep
in the taxi on the way home. Over all, the wedding was a huge success and very different to an English wedding. 

 

Transport update

By Brae:

minca and transport-14The other day we went up the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. This is world’s highest coastal mountain range and we went there to see the sunrise and the rare mountain birds. We had to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning! The mountains are so high and steep the only way to get to the top quickly is in a jeep. I got travel sick. So on the way down the mountain Oren and I went on the roof of the jeep! We enjoyed it more than when we were inside because we didn’t get travel sick. minca and transport-19It was scary at first because the road was super steep and full of great big holes, minca and transport-12
but after a while
we got used to it and we started to concentrate on what was around us. There were loads and loads of coffee trees planted in between the tropical fruit trees and jungle plants. We were surrounded by them. Everywhere we looked there were coffee trees.

We didn’t only go on a roof of a jeep but we also went on a motorbike taxi. They took us to a waterfall in the mountains. Each bike had a driver withminca and transport-25 me and Mum on one bike and Oren and Dad on the other. It was a bit squished but we got through. The ride was very bumpy but fun at the same time. It was amazing watching all the birds. There were all sorts of different kinds. We saw bright yellow fly catchers and scarlet tanagers.
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At home, I have to be in a booster seat with a seat belt so I can’t believe what we are doing in Colombia. Perhaps my mum and dad have gone a bit mad. But they say that we are on the adventure of a lifetime so the rules are very, very different. I think that this is the kind of school trip that Mr Brown would like to take Emerald class on!

The first transport post can be found here

Minca

On Monday I went to a mountain town called Minca, where we stayed in a very nice house called Emerald Green. We had a cozy room with a big double bed and bunk beds. We also had a balcony, which had a lovely view of the river and an enormous, ancient tree. The host of our guesthouse was a man called Niall who was the best! He was Irish and he was very kind and fun and made us do things during our four days in Minca that seemed scary but they turned out to be really thrilling and we didn’t want to stop. Niall has been living in Minca for six and a half years because he went travelling there and didn’t want to leave (don’t worry, I do like it here but I will come back!). When we arrived we dropped off all our possessions in our room and found out he had a dog and two cats who were all adorable and mostly really friendly (but one of the cats was a bit scratchy!).

After a while my family and I went on one of Niall’s tours to the lost waterfall, which he and his friend had discovered, with his dog Ishka running ahead. When we had been walking for a while Niall spotted a kind of palm tree that had very vicious looking spikes all over its trunk, which Niall said were poisonous and we definitely should never touch one.minca and transport-7minca and transport-6

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then we hiked uminca and transport-8p the mountain through the jungle for a little bit more and we came to what looked like the most ginormous clump of grass you’ve ever seen. It was more than ten meters high and Niall said it was bamboo and it was a grass (so I wasn’t wrong thinking it looked like grass).
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This kind of bamboo is a very useful material for constructing houses and scaffolds in Colombia, and also when they plant it by the side of the road on a steep bit of mountain, the roots act as an anchor preventing land slides and erosion of the road or path so it doesn’t get destroyed. It was fascinating to minca and transport-30discover that houses, which were made out of bamboo, have been known to survive earthquakes when brick and concrete houses have been falling down. We also discovered that the only time you can harvest it is after a full moon at four o’clock in the morning because it makes all the water go to the bottom of the plant, and when it gets cut it can re-grow itself! It is against the law to cut it down at any other time.
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We continued to trudge up the mountain path, higher and higher, feeling sweltering hot and sweating all over. Finally we emerged through the jungle and saw an incredible waterfall. We slipped into the freezing water. It was like swimming in a bowl of ice! Niall said we’d get used to it though. We also leaped off a huge rock into the pool.

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Then it was time to follow the river back down the mountain so off we went. When I say we went, I don’t mean we walked. I mean we were swept down the river for a long distance, down waterfalls and mini waterslides with Niall. We climbed over rocks and my mum and dad had to get washed down a really powerful waterfall and Brae and I went down a smaller one. That’s when Niall gave us the nickname chickens because Brae did the funky chicken when we were supposed to be tucking our elbows in while we were going down a waterfall! Then Niall told us to clamber across some rocks and we stood under an amazingly strong waterfall and it was so strong that my trunks almost came down! ☹ When we finally reached the house we were soaked! After that we had a very laid back afternoon because we were exhausted.

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Bugs, creams and medicines

By Brae:

So far I bet you think Colombia is amazing because it is. But there are a few annoying things.

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First, we have to have 3 sun creams every day (1 at the beginning of the day, 1 in the middle of the day and 1 at the end of the day). We don’t only have to have 3 sun creams. We also have to have 2 mosquito sprays (1 at the beginning of the day and 1 at the end of the day).

Another quite annoying thing was when we went to Palomino on the Caribbean coast, in the night we had to sleep under mosquito nets to make sure we didn’t fall ill. They kept us really hot, which was annoying, but kept us safe from malaria.

mosquito netsMalaria is a very serious disease. To keep us safe from malaria we have to have some malaria pills every day after dinner. When we very first started it was quite annoying but we have got used to it now. Mosquitos also carry other diseases that have quite funny names like chikungunya and Zika. You might have heard about Zika as it is in the news.

waterThe last frustrating thing that I can think of is that we can’t drink water from the tap because it is not clean enough to drink. So we have to carry heavy bottles home every day. We can’t even use tap water for brushing our teeth.

Colombia is still an amazing place because you find annoying things wherever you go. The sea is warm in Colombia all year round, whereas in England the sea is pretty cold even in summer. Also, it never gets dark here really early like in the winter in England. Things are just different around the world!

Weird stuff: shark oil

By Oren:

When we went to Palomino we had an incredibly friendly driver called Javier (pronounced ‘Havier’) and as we were going along I spotted what looked like some old fashioned milk bottles hanging in a small, wooden stall under a roof of cloth, standing by a MASSIVE banana plantation. I asked him what was in the bottles thinking it might be something to do with bananas but he said that it was shark oil!

Shark oil is an oil made from shark liver, and people sell it in their little stalls by the side of the dusty road. Colombian people believe it cures asthma and flu. I thought nobody would get flu (because it is a type of cold and it’s really hot here) but they do.

Lots of Colombian medicines are made out of plants and animals, and many of them were discovered by the tribes of Indians living in the mountains. People from all over Colombia use these medicines instead of, or as well as, buying them from pharmacies.

On the way back from Palomino we tried to buy a jar to take picture of it, but all the stalls hadn’t got any left. But as I mentioned Javier is really nice so he sent us a photo of a jar he bought, for our blog. Here is the picture he took of the oil:

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Transport

By Brae:

BusIn Colombia the transport is different. For example, the buses drive with their doors open, there are no bus stops and you just tell the driver when you want to get off and on. The buses are blue.

The taxis are yellow, so Rachel [Hare], Mae and Lily will understand that the ‘spot the yellow car’ game that my family plays in Norfolk is a very different game in Colombia, because almost half the cars are taxis! Also the taxis don’t have seat belts.

TaxiThere are not only normal taxis in Colombia, but also some of the motorbike riders offer to give people a lift so there are also motorbike taxis here. I can’t decide whether to go on one or not because it doesn’t look very safe to have something like three people on a motorbike.

Sometimes, a horse or a donkey with a cart comes along the road. We’ve figured out why they have those covers by their eyes. It’s so they can’t see the cars, taxis and buses all whizzing by. If they did, they would become scared and then it would be chaos.

There is a lot of beeping everywhere as the cars beep their horns a lot.

The roads are normal mostly, but in some places the road is completely made out of dust, like the road our school is on. Here is a picture of it.

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