The eagle(s) have landed back in the USA. Sorry for not blogging, but Puerto Rico is not the land of travel I am used to. American prices, no hostels, and no internet cafes on every block. Here are some interesting takeaways from the trip:

• Windy Mountain Roads: A Puerto Rican highway away from the coast consist of about 40 hairpin turns stuck together in a row. They will intersect with 2 or more highways with the same number of turns.
• Highway Signs: Always misleading, will tell you that a 'road will eventually lead to Highway 149', but certainly isn't the most direct route. Best to work on your spanish and start asking for directions at each intersection
• Broken Down Cars: Turns out that broken down cars in the front yard slash street serve both as a place to put your extra potted plants and as a social status symbol. The nicest neighborhoods and properites always had a borken down car in front. I guess it says: 'I'm rich enough to have bought 2 cars in my lieftime, here's the proof!'
• Puerto Rican Bookstores: The just don't really exist except in the capital San Juan. Well really that's not entirely correct, they have Christian bookstores but nothing else. We litterally went to 2 towns, a Wal-Mart and a WalGreens and found a whopping selection of 50 books. (total). About 40 of those were in Spanish, and useless to me.

Fantastic trip. You gotta see the pics - they will be up as soon as I get time to sort them and post 'em :)

Claudia and I landed after a long but uneventful day of travel from Austin to San Juan, Puerto Rico. This place has been a cool surprise for me. Turns out this place is way more USA like that i had previously thought. But the latin influence (and the constant spanish) is a reminder that we are definitely not in the 51st state :) Things are really pricy, probably like 1.2 times the cost of typical US stuff. But everyone here has gone out of their way to be super friendly which totally rocks.

We've spend the day recovering from our hangovers (Tio Danny's had strong drinks last night) and walking around Old San Juan's cobblestone streets. Some really amazing architecture, statues and colonial era stuff going on -- like La Morra (sp.). There was this group of families flying kites right on the ocean shore up on near La Morra which was really cool...

Also, we have a plan. Renting car tomorrow and catching a ferry to the Island of Vieques to do scuba and kyaking. Should be really cool. Also, my cell phone actually works down here if anyone needs to get ahold of me. I'm leaving mine off so the real world won't haunt me too much. email or claudia's phone is the best way to get ahold of me/us!

Well the trip ended fast and furiously, as we didn't exactly sit on our butts in Bogota to finish the Colombia trip. First we used the public transit to get to Monserrate, a really cool monestary on top of this mountain overlooking Bogota. It was a bit smoggy, but it was still a spectacular view from the mountaintop about 3x as high as the tallest skyscraper in the city.

The next day, we rested up (sorta) for a big family dinner with Claudia's aunts and uncles and and sisters and brothers and me and chuck. Some fantastic meals were had on this trip (thanks Aura!) and here are some: Ajiaco (potato soup), Arrepes (fried corn patty), tons of pan y queso (breads and cheese), barbequed pork, about 10-12 different fruits i've never seen before (my favorite was jugo de lulo con leche), and plum cake and oh my gosh tons of great stuff.

Then our last day in bogota, the whole group of nine people (Aura y Luia, Claudia y yo, Paula y David, Andres y Alexis, y Chuck) went in 2 cars to a place called Villa de Leyva, which is a premier Bogota getaway about 3 hours away from the city. They are filming the telanovela (soap opera) Zorro there right now, seen on the spanish channel :) It was a really chilled out old spanish style town, w/ mostly white walls and tons of tiendas selling all sorts of trinkets. Suffice it to say i spent a few thousand colombian pesos there...

Anyway, I just got back to Austin after a job well done, it was another sweet trip and i'll work on getting thos photos together ASAP! ~cheers, Darin (ps - thanks a lot to all of the Lorente-Rodriquez family para todos)

We are back in the city of Bogota after a stunningly beautiful trip to the Parque Nacional Tairona on Colombia´s NE coast. Amazing rainforest and stunning beaches with rocky terrain you have see to believe. And mosquitos that love gringo skin...

We took a short set of busses and trucks from Tagonga to Tairona Wednesday and got to the start of our hike. The trees reminded me a lot of those seen in Costa Rica near Osa, though I did not see much in the line of wildlife. So we walked 2 or 3 km to the beach which was just stunning! Funny too, because i had a hard time enjoying it due to some gastro-intestinal troubles that sprung up during the hike (the way back, i actually appreciated what i hustled by the first time). Past the beautiful Arricefes beach we made our way to Cabo (de la San Guia...?) where we all got hammocks and slept under little lean to´s for something like $4 per night. Great, except for those bugs.

On the way back i tried a little snorkelling (couldn´t find the reef) and a little geocaching (couldn´t find the cache) but had tons of fun along the way! We took the busses back to Tagonga to crash for the night and grab some pizza listening to the music of Renaldo Sanchez (and and his son Pipe?). Then this morning, Paula and David, Chuck, Claudia and I all hopped a plane back to Bogotá and here we are again at The Lorente Casa. We plan on spending the next few days (including my birthday) checking out the city before I head back Mar 20th...

The Colombia Trip has begin! After a quick stayover at Jenny (Alejandro´s wife) apt in Houston we went to the airport for our 6am flight to Miama and ultimately for Bogota. Turns out, we would not get that to happen as planned.

Instead, our Miami flight got cancelled and we missed our scheduled flight to Colombia. We hopped a later plane to Miami which left us 5 hours to burn in Miami. Claudia's Tio Jamie to the rescue! Her uncle took a half day off work and came down from Ft. Lauterdale to take us out to lunch and take advantage of our new long layover! It worked out pretty well really, because after lunch we pretty much got on the plane to Bogota.

So 9 hours late, we roll in Bogota to find a good chunk of Claudia's family there to greet us. Her folks just finished treating me to an amazing dinner and some great spanish practice and whatnot. Anyway, we´re wiped-and need to get some rest before our trip to barranquilla tomorrow to meet Chuck and continue our adventures. Viva Colombia and will blog again soon!

Now this second reef (which we visited two consecutive days on the dive boat) was freaking amazing. All sorts of marine life here. We saw sea turtles, sting rays, unicorn fish, barracuddas, clown fish swimming in the anenome (sp), cuddlefish, and of course, white-tip reef sharks. Check out some of these photos!

Here we are swmming with a sea turtle (blow up the pic to see both of us there).

And here's the shark we 'hung out with' for awhile.

But really all that matters in the end is that there's a hot tub on the front of the boat, no?

So Ryan and I ended up on this sweet boat called the 'Reef Encounter' for 3 days and two nights in order to scuba dive the great barrier reef. The first chunk of reef we got to visit was Hastings Reef. Not really a hotspot for animal life, it still had some really good coral and some neat fish.

Like for instance this cool pic i took of a Lizardfish! Pretty neat, looks very repitilian, no?

And here I am picking up a sea cucumber. How does that joke with the sea cucumber go again?

Well here is the beautiful view from the swimming lagoon in Cairns. This city is a tourist mecca - and i don't see much else here besides tourist services! Every street corner has a souvenier shop or a bar or a dive shop or an internet cafe! Really, a pretty great town to laze around in for 3 days.

Here we are, partying it up. Turns out this was about the last drink I've had for awhile due to some stomach problems I've been having. (bummer) What a lousy time to find out you have acid reflux problems. Oh well, not getting tanked every night can only be good for one's health.

Perhaps my buddy Dustin said it best: 'if you cannot get leighed in Cairns, it is not gonna happen'. The spelling is key on that phrase. Here is Ryan's look after getting leighed in Cairns. Myself? I had to leigh myself. Go figure.

Our last official act in Bicheno was to try out scuba diving in the icy waters off the coast of Tassie. The water temp was 14 degrees Centrigrade, which is something like 58 deg Farenhieight... Really f'in cold. We wore 7mm wetsuits that really made it difficult to dive. Our first dive was a mess. But we were ok, and decided to try again - and we got to see some cool stuff.

Check out this cool white fish that has black stripes! Also seen but not photographed - Ryan spotted a seahorse and I spotted a puffer fish. Too hard to scuba dive and photo at the same time though :)

And check out this little creature called a 'sea dragon'. Looks a lot like a seahorse to me. It was really deeply purple with orange spots on it, though without a light on it the picture's color can be deceiving.

After the hike, we drove up north to go see the biggest waterfall in Tassie. That waterfall was St. Columbia falls (sorry Claudita, I really think its spelled like that in this case :P). Since it is summer here, the water volume was only 1/5th what it is in the winter time. Look at that photo and picture 5 times as much water coming down! Pretty impressive. After the waterfall, we had the chance encounter with the Pub in the Paddock. A strange little bar restaurant that is reknown for having a pig named Priscilla that drinks beer. I had some kangaroo patties for dinner there. Delicious!