Carnival! Feb 21st 2009

Barranquilla! We spend 17 hours on a bus(more about my companions in a bit) and arrive sometime in the afternoon, at lunchtime. The first thing that strikes me is that the weather is so hot here, and the general atmosphere is so so hot and dusty. Barranquilla is not a pretty place, by any stretch of the imagination, and it is evident everywhere. As the hometown of Shakira, perhaps one would wonder why it wasn`t a bit more…bustling, or touristy, or something…I am not really sure what I would expect!

The people in Barranquilla are very poor. The homeless people are much more aggressive, which is partly due, I am sure to the fact that they never see gringos of any sort here, so they are super-hardy in trying to get cash. A couple of occasions are particularly hairy, with one guy trying to climb inside our taxi, screaming to give him money til the police come and take him away!

We manage to find a `hotel`(we are warned in advance that the places in Barranquilla bump their prices up for the carnival crowd) end up in a dingy, 5 bed room with a horrid bathroom and damp beds, oh well, it`s not like we are gonna spend much time sleeping anyways…my friend Fanny from Sweden comes(and manages to get here own double, en-suite room for the same price we are paying…booo!) and then a dude I met called Vlad from the coffee region and we go out the first night to some stadium where there is an opening night semi-extravaganza.

It ends in a pool of booze, as the drunker we get the better the idea it is to just buy cans of beer and tip them, all over each other, including bags of flour ands cans of `spuma`which will be the party staples of the weekend.

The next 5 days are a crazy blur of beer, rum, cans of foam and boxes of flour, as the parades continue for the next 3 days! Floats covered in dancers, singers, and every colour of feather and bead you can think of, boobs that don`t move when the girl does, boys who look better as girls than some girls do and the carnival theme tune…mama ron!