Colombia
For many years the name Colombia has mainly conjured up images of drug dealers and kidnappings; hardly the best advert for any country. It’s the only South American country with both Pacific and Caribbean coasts and by all accounts is not as bad as it used to be.
As this is our last day in South America I will bring you two tales. First we have an out of place animal, the Hippopotamus; hardly a creature you would expect to find running loose in South America, and of course if it hadn’t been for Pablo Escobar and his drug-funded animal collection it would never have been there. Following the death of Escobar, his menagerie made a break for freedom and somewhere out there in the jungles of Colombia there are rumoured to be up to twenty of these big lumps running amok, or at least lurking in the lonely rivers, avoiding capture.
So what could I come up with to trump that? Well, how about a dinosaur? Way back in 1921 travellers along a river in Colombia reported an encounter with a large reptile that looked for all the world like an Iguanodon; that’s about as good as the report gets so in this case I wouldn’t really expect one to be spotted again any day soon. Perhaps it is better to look for the Hippopotamuses then.
Well there you go: we’ve managed to travel all around South America looking at a different animal in each country and with the exception of Suriname, I think it went rather well. So let’s grab our packs and head north into Central America.
Next stop: Panama.
No comments:
Post a Comment