I arrived in Santa Marta via the budget airline VivaColombia, which is proving handy in allowing me to avoid many arduous bus journeys around the country, and at a decent price. Yet, you get (or don't get) what you pay for - the check in lines are always huge and you aren't actually assigned a seat on the plane, it's just a free for all.

Yet I did arrive, in one (albeit bigger) piece following the excessive drinking and eating in Medellín over the festive season. Now in 2016, I was about to kick off the year with a 4 day trek to Ciudad Perdida (The Lost City). A good way to burn off those extra calories.

I could perhaps take the easy way out and describe the Ciudad Perdida trek as a poor man's Inca Trail. Let that create the picture for you, but it was much better than that. The trek wasn't as technically difficult, nor exhausting, but still tough. The humidity added a different type of discomfort, and in trying to pack light most of us wore the same pair of clothes (that never dried) each day. As it was high season, almost all of the villages along the way were overflowing with fellow trekkers, so we were resigned to sleeping in hammocks for all but the final night, where we were afforded the luxury of a bed. I say bed, yet mine was merely some planks of wood underneath a mattress the thickness of a slice of bread. Surprisingly, I enjoyed better sleep than I had had in the first 2 nights in Santa Marta. But that's another story.

Along with my ability to sleep in the most uncomfortable of positions, I discovered something else about my body - my bowels have a mind of their own. The sight of the not so welcoming toilets along the trail seemed to render my bowels inactive. I became a bit more forceful after it reached day 3 without a "movement", yet they remained stubborn. And it wasn't until I was back in Santa Marta, with some bathrooms I could actually relax in, that everything returned to normal. Well, I hope I was able to explain that as eloquently as I think I did, but to clean your mind of that image, here's the view we were treated to after reaching The Lost City.

Following the trek, I arrived back in Santa Marta on Thursday night. I had to make a few trips around the city to pick up my backpack, and my laundry from the previous hostel I was at, then I took a cab 20 minutes out of the city to The Dreamer Hostel. Only to dump my bags at reception and find out that I'd screwed up the booking. Not an ideal situation to be in when every other place in town is booked out, as I learned, as Colombians flock to the coastal towns for vacations during January.

I searched for hostels on my phone and found only one in town that had a bed free. So, I called the dive shop to rearrange my pickup for the next day's diving, then took a taxi to Color Hostel. Upon arriving I was promptly told they in fact had no beds available and HostelWorld was incorrectly displaying availability. Almost resigned to spending $80 on a hotel for the night, I sat down and, whilst playing with the hostel dog, searched for something cheaper on my phone. After about 10 minutes, Veronica, the owner of the hostel, came up to me and offered me a bed in their house at the back of the hostel, an extremely kind gesture that lived up to the reputation of Colombians and saved me a lot of time, money and frustration.

I spent the next day diving in the nearby town of Taganga, which, compared to the amount of incredible diving I was able to experience in Central America, was disappointing. I dabbled with some nice restaurants, cafes and ice cream shops around Santa Marta in the little time I had to relax in the city, but now it's time to tighten the pursestrings a little. Starting with foregoing a VivaColombia flight to spend 16 hours on a bus to Bogotá tonight.