I'm on a Boat!

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Last weekend Elizabeth and I went on an excursion to the San Bernardo Islands. Mission: get out of Barranquilla for a couple days and find turquoise water.

There seemed to be pretty limited information about the nearby towns in our guidebooks, but with the suggestion of our coworker we took a bus to Sincelejo. This was very helpful to us because my guidebook doesn’t say anything about Sincelejo (although it is on a map), and Elizabeth’s guidebook mentions it, but doesn’t show it on the map. So, after school on Friday we went to the bus station, and caught a bus to Sincelejo. Four hours later we arrived, just a little too late to catch a bus to the next town of Tolu. Although it was little disconcerting being in a town we knew nothing about, we found a nice taxi driver who took us to a hotel and told us where to catch the bus in the morning. From the very little that we saw of Sincelejo, it seemed pretty nice. There was a beautiful church next to a plaza with lots of Christmas lights. It was surprising that there was nothing about it in our guidebooks, although there probably isn’t much there to offer tourists. In the morning we took a 45 minute bus ride to Tolu and then were offered a short bicycle-taxi ride to purchase our tickets to go to the islands. All in all, things went very smoothly!
Soon we were on our way.

Turquoise Water!!!

The Islas San Bernardo are really an archipelago. The day tour included the boat ride near several islands and stops at two of the bigger islands. The first island we stopped at was Isla Palma were we went to an aquarium that was actually combination zoo, aquarium and pirate museum.

Here is the the island Islote. It's small and completely covered with houses, with just a couple palm trees still hanging in there. The lonely planet calls it a tropical shantytown. They may be right!

We had 3 hours to eat lunch, snorkel and enjoy the beach on Isla Mucura. It was amazing! I had really only been snorkeling once in Mazatlan, and it wasn't very good snorkeling. Here, I got to see coral, and lots of pretty, brightly colored fish. At the end of our time snorkeling, everyone grabbed onto a rope on the back of the boat and our guide pulled us slowly back to the beach. We saw lots of starfish as we "swam" back to shore. Amazing.

Life is good.

Mission accomplished.