Goodbye to Dragoman

So after 80 days, 6 countries, 2 trucks, 4 group leaders, and 36 fellow passengers, the 11th November saw us finish our stint with Dragoman and get off the truck.

It has been an interesting two and a half months, and we have enjoyed it.  Naturally there are always some people whose company you enjoy more than others and a few that are harder to get on with than you’d like, but generally the groups that we have had have been good and there are certainly some people that we have met that we would like to stay in touch with.  I don’t want to write much about the people here, but we have met some great characters.  From those who complain regularly that this ‘wasn’t what it said in the trip notes’ or that the price of a beer was too much despite being half what it was in the UK, or who could never quite accept the manana concept that things don’t quite work the same in South America, right through to the ones who were always up for ‘algo mas’ in the beer line, those who competed with Nic to make the smuttiest innuendoes, those who valiantly kept playing us at Bananagrams despite English not being their first language, or those who made foolish bets and ended up dancing on the top of the truck!  We gained something from everyone, and our travel experience would not have been so rich without them.

Our four Drago crew were all brilliant.  Generally they all were slightly crazy one way or another, but brilliant nonetheless.  They were all great drivers, getting us safely round some dangerous and half made roads sometimes requiring some very tricky manoeuvres.  They took it all in their stride, whether it be lost hotel reservations, dog bites, road closures, lost tent poles, truck breakdowns, mini tornadoes, or fires.  They made our lives easier that we give them credit for, or than they get paid to do, so we forgive them the occasional devil-may-care attitudes, the tendency towards intoxication, the dodgy physical contact, and the simple fact that their job is to travel the world!

We have seen amazing scenery, so much so that shockingly we have not even bothered to look at some of it.  We have tried things like white water rafting and canyoning, which we might never have done on our own.  We’ve had some excellent food in some unlikely places, and we tried guinea pig which is probably best remembered only to avoid doing it again!  We’ve stayed in some surprisingly good accommodation, and thankfully only a couple of hell holes.

We have stayed ahead of most of the trouble, the fire at the Los Potreros Estancia just after we left, the shooting of an official in Popayan a few days before we arrived and the military raid killing the Farc leader just after we left, the drug raid netting 936 kilos cocaine while we were on the same San Bernardo island, and the mudslides that took out the water supply in Manizales before we arrived and the one that killed 24 people the day after we left.  And those are the ones we know about.

We didn’t escape them all though.  There was the mini tornado that hit us while we were having lunch on the way to La Paz, picking up our stuff and dropping it 200 metres away, and most notably the fire that burned down our jungle lodge in the Amazon.  But we all walked safely away from both of those, and aside from a few dog bites, bruises from the snowboarding and white water rafting, and someone having their arm in a sling after coming off their bike on the death road in La Paz, we all survived the whole trip largely unscathed.

We would certainly do a Dragoman trip again and would happily recommend it to anyone else – just so long as you know what you’re letting yourselves in for!