Getting ready to leave our hostel and say goodbye to ColOmbia. Just a couple of blocks past our hostel there’s a cemetery(pictures below) and a flower market for fresh flowers. On Easter Sunday it was very busy as families were visiting their loved ones who have moved on …… as I mentioned before family is very important. We were still really surprised to see all the activity at the cemetery and especially all the flowers. From a distance they all looked real but as we walked around it became clear that many were dried but a great number were placed their fresh over the Easter period. The cemetery is huge with extra land right beside the hostel, presumably for growth. It was also surrounded on two sides by a crematorium, but not sure you can see this in the picture, and those little boxes also had flowers attached. Our hostel/hotel days are coming to an end and we’re ready to leave it behind although overall it worked out find. Fortunately Jim and I never had to stay in a dorm but for a few nights had to share a bathroom. Dawn and Yves also had private digs and after Yves first left Dawn stayed with us in a shared room for five nights as we had an extra bed and private bath. Once we came back to the Dreamer in Santa Marta, however, we only had a double bed so she had to move into a four bed dorm where the four of them shared a bathroom…….a few challenges but overall it seemed to work out OK. One morning she was up early and having coffee with Donna, a friend we met on our day trip yo Minca who is close to our age from Salt Spring Island, and some of the younger people were still up partying. Actually one was the Irishman who never went to Church that I mentioned before…..drunk again! Anyway he was sitting with the old ‘geezer’ that I mentioned before as well who was older than us who impressed as a burnt out American hippie……maybe you can tell we never cared for him much and neither did the young girls he was always trying to chat up. Of course the hostels were usually full of young people but there was the occasional family(one from Edmonton) and some older adults as well who did not party quite so much. Anyway I digress, so back to my story about Dawn and Donna’s early morning coffee and their witnessing a cocaine deal going down with a ColOmbian man who came to the hostel with the drugs, the old geezer hippie and a few of the younger folks. One of the staff members seemed to become aware of what was going on and quickly kicked the ColOmbian dealer out of the hotel but probably not quick enough because by the time we got up a few of them were quite out of it. They watch pretty carefully here in the hostels for drugs and there’s a lot of signs warning you, in English, not to partake. Once our taxi was stopped by the police and we had to show our passports and the taxi driver had to show his license, ID, etc. and he explained that they check regularly with foreign tourists in cars re: cocaine and marijuana……..you’d have to be pretty stupid, or drunk, as a tourist, to get involved in that world here as police with guns and sniffing dogs are quite common. Anyway we’re ready to leave Santa Marta and hosteling to the younger folks and are heading to Bogota tomorrow. Touch base later!