Colombia´s Caribbean Coast

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When most people think of the Caribbean they think of Bob Marley and weddings in the Bahamas, not the Colombian coastline that tips South America. From the romantic colonial town of Cartagena to the tropical paradise beaches that line the Sierra Nevada jungle the Colombian Caribbean is a sitting duck waiting to be grounded by cruise ships in their masses (they are already building the Marriott in Cartagena)!

My advice would be simply go now before it is overcrowded with tourists. Elly and I spent around three weeks along the coastline but you could quite literally get lost in time here as sun-drunk days lead into rum-drunk nights.



Cartagena

Just an hour and a half flight from Bogota (worth it to avoid an 18 hour bus journey) will take you to the postcard town of Cartagena. Begrudgingly quoting the Lonely Planet, Cartagena is undoubtedly the ´gateway to the continent´, as the Spanish used the walled city to store their seized indigenous treasure before shipping it back to Spain. Built to protect the loot from pirates, the fortress walls that surround the city now simply offer ideal viewpoints to sip on Aguila (cheap Colombian beer) and watch the sun set.

If you can lure yourself away from strolling down the colourful, cobbled streets you can take an arse-crunching speedboat to the storybook beach of Playa Blanca and the floating islands of Islas del Rosario. Don´t be pressured into paying 30000 Colombian Pesos (10 quid) to go snorkelling, Elly and I just jumped out the boat and swam for free and the water is clear enough to see everything anyway.

For a rough and tumble spa treatment with the air of a dodgy massage parlour about it take a bus to Volcan El Totumo. The ´gigantic´15 m volcano spews out mud instead of lava, and you can float around the lukewarm pit then rinse off the dirt in the nearby lagoon. Bewarned, additional costs are at every corner as you hand your camera over to the local photographer to take snaps of apparently everybody except you, while ageing male massuers will spin you round in the mud a few times for a bit of extra cash. The only value for money addition comes in the lagoon where local women strip you stark naked and give you a thorough clean in every nook and cranny for the grand old fee of 3000COP (1 pound) - and you don´t have to buy them a drink first.



Santa Marta

4 hours along the coast takes you to Santa Marta, which offers little other than some brilliant hostels where you can lounge around the pool and drink beers all night long (and worry about the tab in the morning). While the city itself is ugly and a little dangerous, Santa Marta is the perfect base to man up and make the 4/5 day jungle trek to Ciudad Perdida, ´The Lost City´, (this requires its own post). After the trek recharge the batteries with a trip to the party beach town of Taganga before beach hopping from Nacional Parque Tayrona to Costeño.

After 4 days hiking through the tropical rainforest we wanted nothing more than a nice bed, but it was Friday night in Taganga, which means only one thing - getting bounced around by Colombian locals to reggaeton on the bayview rooftop club of El Mirador. A word of caution though, if a Colombian ´chica´asks you to dance, she expects moves and stamina to be delivered.

Although I was cradling a toilet not knowing which end to face it having caught a delayed bug in the jungle, others have also told me Taganga is a great place to go scuba diving.

You can leave your big ruck sack in Taganga or Santa Marta (all hostels are fine with this) and just take a small bag with water, food and a towel to Tayrona where you can hike along the palm-fringed beaches (the further you go the more idyllic they´ll be) then rent a hammock or tent on the front. Although a downpur slightly ruined the paradise-feel (there is not really anything to do if the sun isn´t out), drinking rum with Colombians, Argentinians and a German over a game of ´arsehole´ lifted our moods.

Tayrona´s natural beauty is undoubted and Colombia have done a great job of preserving the park while rightly benefitting from its tourism appeal, but I can only imagine how nice it would have been ten years or so ago when it was completely wild and unkept.

From the park´s entrance you can take a 15 minute bus East and ask the driver to let you off at Costeño (don´t be alarmed when he ushers you out at the top of a sketchy looking dirt track). After a paradoxically nervous walk past abandoned hotels along an idyllic tropical beach you´ll see why you made the trip. Costeño is an eco surflodge tucked away in an old tourist spot for drug-money backed hotels. With the cartels now gone the owners of Costeño have found a little goldmine straight out of Alex Garland´s The Beach, where volleyball, surfing and communal dinners will make you forget the real world exists. All that said, Costeño is gringo-filled with staff a little more concerned with partying than getting you a beer, and not the place to experience true Colombian culture.



If you have time you can continure along infinite sandy beaches to Palomino and the wild, remote region of La Guajira, where the Wayuu indigneous group still rule, having been the only community never to be conquered by the Spanish. However, the lure of Medellin and Salento eventually drew us away as Colombia has even more to offer.

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