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Published: January 6th 2008
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Well I´m hoping you all had a fantastic Christmas and New year too, but I bet mine will still make you jealous! I wanted to be with a fun group of people, on a beautiful beach, sleeping in a hammock and drinking lots of rum. Its always dangerous trying to achieve a fantasy Christmas and new year though because it doesn't normally turn out how you want. However this one couldn´t have gone more to plan.
When Marsha and I arrived at the park it was already getting late in the day and we only just made it through the mud with our heavy packs and only flip flops before it got dark so we hung up hammocks and decided to carry on to El Cabo the next day. The beach at Arrecife is not safe for swimming but we still managed a dip in the shallows after dark, much needed at the end of a long sticky hike in.
The next day we continued to El Cabo which is the second perfect Bounty advert beach that I´ve seen in my life. The place was even busier than it had been at Arrecife though but we eventually got a hammock space
and went for a proper swim.
We both agreed that the atmosphere was a bit strange in the evening at the restaurant, I think the gringos were out numbered by the Colombian families so there wasn't the kind of camaraderie we were expecting to find at a beach side campsite for Christmas. The next night though a big noisy group of English with a few Colombians turned up with a huge bottle of rum so we decided we´d try getting in with them to liven things up. They turned out to be a fantastic group of people who were all living and working in Cali in the south and had come away together for the holiday. After dinner the staff brought out an accordion, guitar, drums and a cheese grater and I was delighted to find that the local dance here, Vallenato, is basically the same as the dance I had so much fun with in Bolivia with the Brazilians!
Christmas eve itself was not too wild, just plenty of rum and some sitting around on the beach....ooohhh yes and some skinny dipping!
But on Christmas day we spent the whole day competing in what we named the Park Tayrona
Winter Olympics, which included an opening ceremony with two-tier rollypolys and synchronised swimming, followed by events such as the coconut shot put, self burial, dizzy ducks and dodgeball all interspersed with refreshing plunges into the sea and shots of rum. Absolutely hilarious and exhausting at the same time!
After all the excitement I was sad to leave these new found friends after Boxing Day but I knew that there is a good chance I will see them again when I get down to Cali so I left Marsha with Connor, Patrick, Kyla, Wisely, Lina, and Ian to look after her until she had to leave for Bogota to get her flight back to New Zealand on New Years Day.
My next mission was to try to meet up with Gareth, a nice Australian guy that I met in Bolivia and had my eye on. The last details I had was that he was in Taganga not far from Santa Marta but he wasn't answering his phone so I decided just to head out there. Yet again I arrived at the hostel to be told he had left that morning and no one knew where for so I decided to go
chill out by the beach and try to decide what to do next. I gave him one last try at a phone call and luckily he answered and told me that in fact he was still in Taganga, he´d just moved into an apartment instead.
He introduced me to two friends he had just met in his apartment and told me that the owner of the apartment had another room spare for me. So we all hung out together the next day but it was obvious that Gareth had the hots for Mayra, a dark haired Colombian beauty. So I was a bit disappointed to be playing gooseberry again, that is until I met Mayra´s very nice brother Antonio, so all´s well that ends well!
I was also very happy when the lot from the winter Olympics team turned up on the beach with Marsha the next day, having all changed their plans and decided to come to Taganga for New Years Eve.
It couldn't have been better really, a big group of friends, an open air bar called El Garage with a dancefloor under a thatched roof and only one or two CDs of music at most (but it
seems to be the only disco here), salsa dancing, more rum. I cooked dinner in the apartment for all 12 of us on New Years eve and then we all danced, drank then went back and played dominoes until the sun came up. Actually it was well up by the time we went to bed and almost setting again by the time we woke up.
Since then it has been hard to drag my self away from the daily routine of going to the beach, picking up some beers on the way back and sitting in the apartment watching the sun set and playing more dominoes. I have managed to do a few dives and have booked my next trek to a lost city in the jungle in a few days time, otherwise I feel like I might never get out of here!
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