Its not easy being an intrepid international explorer, forging new frontiers, breaking new ground, creating new barriers and discovering places and peoples that no-one else knows about! Its like finding out that there is actually life in Leicester, but in even more exotic and surprising places.

And the reality is, of course, that we arrive at an airport, grab anyone waving a placard around that bears our name, and they lead us onwards down the river bank, to the hillside, across the hostile native lands… to a hotel of sufficiently high standard that my wife may find happiness there in any of the first 4 rooms they show us.

We think; ‘we’re in Medellin’, that’s cool. Escobar country, most dangerous most murderous city the world had ever known, and we’re strolling round eating ice-creams as if it were the most natural thing to do. Which, on a balmy evening in the tropics, it kind’a is.

And then you realise that the place you’ve been wandering round for a few days is the most civilised, the most rarified, most upmarkety, middle-classy, super-softy region in a city made up of hundreds of regions catering to all types. And that’s when you go to the ‘centre’, where there are thousands of homeless, tens of thousands of drug addicts, multitudes of poor living on the breadline. And there are slums and ramshackle housing and shanty towns. And its great and its real and although a bit more ‘edgy’ it does make you realise how sanitised a version tourists usually get. Not that I mind sanitised too much.

Then the weirdest thing happened. We got on the plane in Medellin (altitude 2km +) and on the plane, as virtually everywhere I’ve sat for more than 3 minutes in the last 6 days, I fell into an exhausted sleep. 50 minutes later we arrived in Cartegena (coastal; altitude +1 metre) and as soon as the plane doors opened it was like a weight lifted off my head, the curtains vanished, the muzziness, fatigue and general ‘shit’ I’d been feeling just disappeared. Ok, I’ve still got a bit of a cough which I brought with me, along with my Spurs hat, for comfort, but the feeling of just ‘bleueueuhhhhh’ was suddenly no more.

Altitude Sickness. Never had it before. But it must have been. Which is such a relief. Because you can’t die from it So I can stop googling things that you really can die from which share the symptoms. Its sea level for me from now on. I’m moving our bed downstairs when we get home, first thing.

Happy clear-headed Friday

A xxxx