Woke up at 6am needing to catch the 7am ferry to Turbo. I had planned on getting to the dock at 6:30 but didn't arrive till 10 minutes to 7. It wasn't a problem at all, I doubt the boat even showed up until after 7:30. A little more than half of the group on the tour was also leaving on the ferry that morning. Getting situated and on the boat was a madhouse. They wanted to charge us for the weight of our bags so we had to hang it on their scale device and hand over the money.
I'd had my giant backpack packed away in a plastic garbage bag and wrapped up with tape. So I decided to just rip a hole in the top. After it was weighed it was whisked away to be put on the boat. I chased after the guy because I'd wanted to tape the top back up but he misunderstood and started ripping the bag open. Ugh!
In the middle of this, they wanted me back behind a line and they started calling people up to get on the boat (we had to purchase tickets the day before and they'd written our names down). Since I'd bought my ticket late in the day the day prior I was one of the last ones called. Luckily, I'd been one to already have my bag weighed so I was able to go straight to the boat. Even still, it was already packed totally full! Not anything I'd define as a ferry in my world, more of just a motor boat stuffed with 50 people or so. Somehow they managed to find a seat for me, and then we also squeezed another person into my row as well.
At first it was a relatively nice boat ride and I wasn't getting wet at all. But then it seemed to go on forever. Finally we arrived at the dock in Turbo and were bombarded with men asking where we were going. After getting all the plastic off my bags and getting them situated I was the last one left on the dock. I was thinking "Oh, great, here we go, back on my own again, now I've got to figure out how to get a bus to Medellin in this madhouse!" Luckily, the girl next to me, Julia, had known I was going to the same place and waited for me with another guy up higher on the dock, I just hadn't seen them.
Of the giant group, there were just 3 of us headed to Medellin, the rest of everyone else was going to try and get themselves to Barranquilla for carnival later that month. The Spanish of the Belgium guy we were with was quite good and he ignored the hoard of locals following us and "trying to help" and asked a police officer where to catch a bus to Medellin. In the end, one of them stuck around and rather than showing us where the ticket office was, managed to rip us off by telling as the tickets were 60 Colombian Pesos when in reality they were only 50, and he took off with the other 10!
The bus ride was quite long and over windy dirt mountain roads for part of it. From the looks of the countryside, Colombia appears poorer than Guatemala. It is vast and large with very few inhabitants. However, I was pleasantly surprised when we arrived in Medellin, a beautiful large metropolis full of energy and life. We took a taxi from the modern bus station and were easily able to find a hostel with dorm beds for the 3 of us.
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