My transition back to the wintery developped world was helped by the facts that in places Colombia is very modern (certainly a big step up from Peru) and that, away from the hot Caribbean coast, the climate in November and December is relatively cool. Even so, once I got passed an incredulous US customs official ("You've been travelling for 15 months?!"), I felt a bit out of place during my stop-over in Orlando airport given its cleanliness and facilities, especially toliets where you can flush the toilet paper!
From there I flew onto New York, where I was joined the next day by Aileen and Nicole. We had the perfect week, which had the nice mix of seeing and doing a lot during the day without pushing it too much (like ice-skating in Central Park),
and then in the evenings enjoying some lovely meals out, followed by nighttime walks to soak up the Christmas atmosphere (like seeing the tree in front of the Rockerfeller building).
From getting the morning boat to Ellis Island, having a dim sum lunch in Chinatown, going to the top of the Empire State Building, to seeing "Wicked" on Broadway, it was a fantastic week.
But it wasn't too bad; it just meant that we visited a fair few museums and art galleries (I especially liked this painting in Medellin by Fernando Botero about the death of the other famous man from Medellin - the drug lord Pablo Escobar) 
and we did some muddy treks. In the end, we decided to embrace the mud by bathing in the mud volcanic pool outside Cartagena - a fun and truely unique experience.
During my last few weeks in Colombia, I was reminded of Alain de Botton's book "The Art of Travel". One thing I remember from reading it was his view that guide books' and other people's supposed highlights do not have to be your highlights. While the walled, coastal city of Cartagena certainly lived up to the hype, for me other so-called highlights failed to greatly impress. For instance, while we heard that going to the beach in Tayrona National Park was a "once in a lifetime experience", I much preferred the couple of days we (Ciaran, Elaine and myself) spent at the stunning and deserted beach a little further along the Caribbean coast at Palomino (where we slept in a hut on stilts literally right at the water's edge).
Similarly, for me what made our time in Salento in the Coffee Region so memorable was not the hike to see the famous wax palms, but rather our night out there. We started by drinking in a "wild west" type saloon full of men wearing ponchos and cowboy hats playing cards and billards, and then moved onto another bar where at the back you could play tejo. This game, which is free to play so long as you keep buying drink, is one of the best pub activities I've ever done. We had hours of fun throwing metal disks at a clay-filled target box about 15 metres away which was filled with little packets of gunpowder - there was such a great sense of joyous satisfaction at hitting one of the packets and causing an explosion!
Other personal highlights of Colombia, which don't get mentioned in guidebooks, include: going into shops that sell both motorbikes and washing machines;
seeing people on the street making calls from "public" mobile phones that are chained onto the vendor (the guy holding the sign, who is standing in Bogota's main plaza, has half a dozen phones chained to his belt - its common to see a bunch of people all making phone calls standing around these guys);
and seeing roadside posters calling the army today's heroes of Colombia. The army certainly are all over the country (it was the norm to pass through several army checkpoints on every bus trip). I just thought it was interesting to see them portrayed like movie-heroes.
My time in Colombia was a nice reminder to avoid the trap of blindly following the Lonely Planet or of putting too much faith in other people's recommendations. The fact that we did some of our own things made my time in Colombia a nice end to my Latin American adventures.
to several statue-filled sites;
to the "Lost City of Tayrona". 
I will remember this trip for our two hour stint in the back of the local milk truck as it did its daily rounds collecting milk from the local farmers and in the process bringing us and some locals from one village to the next.
and did a lot of swimming and animal watching - we saw monkeys, river dolphins, snakes (a boa and an anaconda), countless spiders (including tarantulas) and birds, and we heard a jaguar in the distance during a night hike. I also went fishing for the first time in my life, and I caught a piranha!
It was a very enjoyable trek and the Cordilleras Blancas rank right up there in my list of amazing places.
After the trek, I continued north with Ciarán and Elaine. First to Trujillo (a colourful colonial city near a beach and with fascinating pre-Inca ruins nearby)
and then to Máncora (a small beach town). Elaine left us to skip up to Colombia to catch up with her friends, so it was just myself and Ciarán left when we hit for the Peru-Ecuadorian border. I had overstayed my six-month visa but only had to pay a dollar for every day that I was over. So after paying the US$28, I left Peru having spent a very memorable seven months there. 
While I won't miss:
It was great to meet up with the girls and to hear their Cork accents (as far as I can tell, there are no other Irish people in Ayacucho).
and I got some nice presents - the kids bought me a wallet and the other volunteers gave me a jersey of the local football team, Inti-Gas.
Then on Saturday night there was a joint birthday party for me, Emilie (a French friend of mine) and her Peruvian friend Lorena (our birthdays fall within three days of each other). We made a brownie cake so that our faces couldn't be covered in cream - Emilie has lived in Ayacucho for a few years so was well aware of the custom involving birthday cakes! It was a fun night.
In between all these parties, I continued my work at Los Cachorros, which includes helping out at our chocolatería. This has now expanded to be a repostería, so I spent a morning in the home of a Dutch woman (picture a lovely, cake-baking grandmother type) who runs a nursery here as she taught a few of us (mainly Deysi, the 18 year old mother of two who used to live in our shelter but who we are now training to run the repostería) to make cakes. I hadn't done things like separating the whites and yokes of eggs since "helping" Mum, i.e. about twenty years ago (I realised in this week that I turned 29 that I can now say things like "I haven't done this in twenty years" and not be exaggerating). I quite liked making the cakes, although I learned that the nicest ones have loads of sugar, butter and chocolate in them!
The fact that I wore swimming shorts rather than just my underwear made me stand out - although it would have been hard to blend in given that I was the only white foreigner there (I didn't see any other non-Peruvians during this four-day trip). Washing myself in a river across from a topless old woman who was doing her laundry was one of the most "third world experiences" that I've had here.
I didn't go to the cock-fighting competition, and then we missed the moto-taxi race as we spent that day doing a great hike through a lush, fruit-filled jungle track
to six impressive waterfalls.
Note that Muguel is about the average height for Peruvians - in Peru I have often found myself in the novel position of being the tallest person in a room full of people.
A mirador overlooking the town;
Breastfeeding is so openly prevalent there is even a statue;
Several churches, big and small;
Adobe houses (I find the process by which a Hannah Montana poster ends up in the window of a house in a mountain town in Peru mindboggling);
Street art - the phrase translates as "The majority of people waste a lot of time talking about the problems that confront them" - I didn't realise that smurfs were such great sages!; 
Educational and instructive wall paintings;
Moto taxis - these three-wheelers are everywhere and for €0.30 will take you anywhere in the city. Many are pimped, though manily with religious quotes and pictures. Most Peruvians I know are shocked when I tell them that I walk the 25 minutes walk (at my fast pace) between my house and my work - the concept of enjoying walking doesn't seem to have caught on here.
After driving through amazingly scenic mountain valleys, we visited three villages. My job was:
I then had a great, relaxing flight - a nice way to spend a morning.
before swimming in a pool heated by natural springs
- it was a fun day out.