Oren and Brae in Colombia

By Brae:

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

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.

Malaria 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.

The 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!

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:

 

By Brae:

In 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.

There 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.

By Brae:

It’s much much hotter in Colombia than in England. It’s so hot that people don’t even have hot water in their houses in Santa Marta (the city where we live). So that means cold showers every day! It sounds really bad but we’ve kind of got used to it now. There is cold water for washing up too and cold water in the washing machine. It’s not a big problem to clean clothes as there is absolutely no mud here. There is just dust.

Because of the hot temperature the sea is really warm. It’s so hot in the daytime that most people go to the beach in the evening, just when the
sun is going down. Here is a picture of the sunset. We also have a swimming pool that the people who live in our building can use but it’s on the shady side of the building so the water is really cold. That can be quite useful if you need to cool down.

One more thing about the heat is that there are lots of cacti around. Opposite our school the hill is covered with them. This next photo is for Mrs Ward and Sapphire class because my mum told me that they are doing their topic on the Sonoran desert. I remember doing this and learning about cacti.