Checkout was 13:00 and we stayed at the hotel until almost that time doing a variety of packing, computing and shopping chores.
On the road the first challenge was to get out of Cartagena, not as easy as it sounds as the old town is an island with a series of bridges, some of which are one-way. Also today is some kind of public holiday in Colombia. So we did not know what that would do to the traffic. We had no trouble finding the correct road, thanks partly to pre-planning with GoogleEarth, partly to a free map I found for our Garmin, and partly to Nina's good reading of a very inadequate paper map. The roads out of Cartagena were packed, and in a number of places passed by local markets that were total traffic chaos. But the Central American experience had prepared us well and we took these in stride.
Out on the highway the land was drier than we expected and mostly given over to cattle farming. The road was OK, quite variable with some good sections but always with the possibility of big pot holes - 3ft wide and 1 ft deep. Interestingly the highway is a toll road - we had to pay to drive on a 2 lane potholed road!!.
Traffic was in keeping with the later sections of the Central America experience. Lots of trucks, overtaking everywhere and vehicles with all kinds of loads.
The villages seem poor, but tidy, with the streets often showing signs of recent sweeping. Today is the first time in the entire trip that we have seen palm leaf roofs being used frequently on homes rather than tourist or ceremonial buildings.
In one town we were confronted by a very large fire, never did get to see what was burning, but the locals directed us and all the other traffic through a detour which gave us an interesting tour of the town.
We stopped for the night at an old gas station in Sahagun. We learned of this spot from the questconnect folks. Their directions and GPS coordinates took us right to it. A pretty run down place, but seems ok. Lots of fire flies in the grass area behind the gas station. Practiced my poor Spanish on the pump attendant, asking if we could stay the night.
