Advertisement
Published: February 17th 2013
Tirona Beach
Love the natural swimming pool here.From Bogota we made it to the Caribbean coast. Santa Marta was our first port of call and that's about all I can say about this town. There's little wrong with Santa Marta, but then there's very little worth going there for. There's the obligatory street vendors which do some good food and it's chilled enough for you to wander the streets supping a cool, refreshing beer. But the beach is not particularly clean and it's next to the busy port. There's a couple of decent restaurants, Lulo did great lunches and we had amazing coconunt lemonades at Tierra Negra (probaby the best non-alcoholic drink ever invented). We just used it as a base for doing the things we really wanted to do. THe first stop was Tirona National Park. It is amazing here as the mountains seem to drop straight into the sea. It's rather dramatic scenary; but it doesn't translate too well to camera unfortunately. The waters can be perilous for swimmers, the breakers were huge and violent for large sections of the coast. Fortunately there are natural swimming pools all the way through the park, breaking on to incredibly idyllic beaches. The fact that the temperature was pushing
Pozas Azul
Not particularly blue but very nice indeed. 36C made the bathing a necessity...it was a matter of survival, I think! The walking in the forest/jungle was sublime, but we failed to get any greeen coconuts. We did see an awesome iguana on the beach, which rocked up and just posed for ages for photos before running off to hide from the repressive heat of the sun! In retropsect we really wish we'd stayed here in the park rather than in our crappy hostel in Santa Marta, but hindsight is a wonderful thing!
There is, what is described as a fishing village by the guidebooks next to Santa Marta, so we headed there to go to the local beach and get a bit of the atmosphere of the Colombian coast. The town was more like Benidorm than a fishing village. Okay, there are no highrise, package holiday hotels, but it's a town geared up for people to get smashed and little else. The beach in the next cove was prtty busy by 10am but looked pretty nice. We just relaxed in the sun, and the shade when it got too hot. It was a rather quiet day, but people watching was pretty good fun. There's
Finca La Victoria
You walk for 90 minutes in 35C heat, what's more refreshing than a smoking hot cup of Joe? a guy who just walks up and down the beach all day offering massages...I assume he has a licence or something, otherwiseit'd be a bit dodgy. 18/19 year old backapcking girls seem to love to smoke. Well, at least they like to light a cigarette and then pose with it for a while. Whole groups of them were at it on the beach which gave off a wierd, Twilight Zone effect. Like they were chain smoking replacement robots, who were all just a bit too cool for the real world. Colombian's don't see to care about littering. The beach was immaculate in the morning, by the time we left it was covered in all sorts of rubbish. Poor show, I just can't understand why people do this; it's endemic in South America. The path back was the same and the smell at times was revolting. Again, we had wished we'd just stayed at Tirona and made the most of it; the park is nothing short of a paradise. But having some of these experiences makes you appreciate the really good things. Our final evening here we met up with Caitlin and Jack, had some beers and an unwise amount of
Santa Marta
View from Minca. street food. Simple pleasures such as these are every bit as integral to travelling as seeing the sites.
To escape the oppressive heat of the coast for a while we retreated to the mountains, spefically those mountains that fall directly into the sea. We headed up to Minca, which is not somewhere I'd heard of, even the guidebook was sketchy about the place. Eleanor assured me it was a place we "definitely" needed to visit, so I went along with her scheme. As it turns out, she was totally correct. We stayed at the top of the hill in the middle of the village, which was a bit of a killer climb with our packs on...it was also still unbelieveably hot during the day. There was a surprising amount to do here too, we visited a coffee farm (we missed harvest by a week!), twice...it was closed on the sunday as everyone had "gone to the beach, drank a lot of coffee in the awesome cafes and swam in the amazing pools that are formed by the ice cold water of the mountains. It was all rather spectacular and I didn't want to leave, but we needed to get
to Cartagena.
The city of Cartagena is a bastion of colonial arcitecture. The old town really is spectacular, but more colorful than its American rivals, Arequipa and Sucre. It can get a bit crowded in the high season, but we seemed to be there at the right time. It's pricey though, not much difference to major European cities. We forgot this and kept spending like it was still Bolivia! There are a bunch of museums in town, but we stuck with the Inquisition museum which was a bit pricey for what it was (they try to sting you by having guides at extortionate prices and varying the level of English on display...luckily I've become pretty adept at reading Spanish now, speaking is still a bit tricky though) and the Castillo, which was awesome, but you definitely need the audio guide. And sun cream, the Castillo has no shade...wow. The heat and humidity were about as inconspicuous as elephants in a small room, and it felt like the air weighed as much as a one too. It made it tough to do anything productive during the peak hours...in fact my most productive thing was watching Swansea get to their first
Museum of the Inquisition
Lovely building...grim exhibits cup final in a long old time (the Welsh Cup doesn't count Dad).
But just wandering around the old town, grabbing a bear on the city walls, having coffee or juice, snacking on the street food and generally stuffing our faces at La Mulatta's restaurant (Caribbean food which was such a pleasure for the tastebuds) made Cartagena a pleasure to visit. We even bumped in to Ellen from our Machu Picchu walk and had an impromptu dinner with her. This was almost thwarted by the fact that the Colombian President had decided to visit town, specifically the theatres, opposite Ellen's hotel and she nearly couldn't get out to meet us...security was very tight! I wouldn't be able to tell him apart from the next guy, so it's a good job we didn't meet him, I'd not know what to say...is he even doing a good job? Shakira hasn't been on much, maybe he's responisble for that, if so I'd like to thank him! We did meet a guy who used to be the Queen of the Netherlands' body guard though. He was pretty cool, got sick of being in the way of potential bullets and decided to
Horse & Cart
Apparently romantic...if you like the smell of horses and car fumes. set up a school in one of the city's slums...ironically while avoiding being shot by gangs! The bar funds that...brilliant, you can get blindly drunk and have an excuse for it...you were trying to help poor kids. Seriously though, it's a good thing that he was doing, and having the bar to create extra income for the project is a sound idea, especially considering the number of backpackers wanting to get lashed up here. Anyway...the food here was generally very good, although Eleanor's Sushi in a seaweed cone was probably the most bizarre and pointless thing I've ever seen on a menu...what's the point? And don't mess with sushi, it's fine as it is. Cartagena also happened to be our last port of call (literally) in South America. It had been a lot of fun, but we needed to push on to Central America, with a view to volunteering in Guatemala...we'd had so much fun here, we'd left ourselves 3 weeks to cross the Caribbean Sea on a yacht, and then overland it to Quetzaltenango...suffice to say that is supremely ambitious! So thanks for the memories SA, maybe we'll cross paths again soon...stay classy!
Advertisement
Tot: 1.219s; Tpl: 0.113s; cc: 7; qc: 45; dbt: 1.0916s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
