Santa Marta Colombia
Day 1
Would I recommend Santa Marta for your next vacation? Well, I have mixed feelings about doing so. During the day the city is hot, muggy, and a bit boring. It is also not a particularly beautiful tourist location no matter what time you are up and about.
It is definitely a little rougher than I expected: my hotel is one of the best rated in the city, yet it sits on a street lined with crumpled sidewalks and feral cats. The government also hasn’t spent a lot of money on streets or bridges. As a result traffic has found a way to be simultaneously chaotic and constipated. Crossing a street if traffic is moving even a few inches a minute can be an adventure since impatient drivers take this move as a challenge to their independence and impediment to their progress. You are no safer on the sidewalk with motorcycles climbing up onto it and jumping along around confused pedestrians to get by the stalled traffic.
Most of the city appears to be tired, worn out and a bit poorly maintained. The city fathers HAVE spent considerable money on the waterfront area with a wide, new esplanade and public beach. There are also new condos and hotels at one end of the esplanade, but these quickly fade away a block or two from the bay into a landscape of the more typical peeling one and two-story buildings.
The beach itself is also not particularly charming. There is little shade, a busy port unloads cargo ships beyond the (non-condo) end of the beach/esplanade, and the ocean doesn’t look very clean and blue here. I wouldn’t swim in it, though some people did. It sounds awful.
So why the mixed feelings? First, It’s a good jumping-off spot for treks into the mountains that tumble into the sea here, (more about that in a future posting).
Secondly, it is a very, very inexpensive resort town. While there were a few European tourists here, most of the tourists are Colombians seeking an affordable vacation.
Medellin may be very cheap for me, but Santa Marta was much cheaper. Finally, when the sun sets, the city perks up and is anything but boring. It’s a three-ring circus!
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people come out from wherever they have been resting during the day and pour into the streets to eat in the numerous restaurants, drink in the bars, and dance the night away.
There are two large parks located a few blocks in from the waterfront. One is more family oriented. It contained all of the Christmas decorations, living Bible scenes, Christmas music, light shows, and tents selling hand-made toys and other crafts. This is the park Colombian families gravitate toward. The other park also sells souvenirs but is surrounded by bars, restaurants, and discos. There is a long alleyway that crosses several streets and connects the two parks. This narrow alley is packed with more restaurants, ice cream shops, and tour offices. Walking down the alley is a lively experience with the sounds of street musicians and the savory odors of food vendors tickling the senses. The alley, of course, also harbors vagrants begging for money. One guy asked me for 5000 pesos, ( about a dollar in US currency). When I turned him down, he immediately asked if I would buy him an ice cream cone. This was such an unexpected and innocent request that I agreed to buy him one. The girl behind the counter of the ice cream stand rolled her eyes as he turned to leave. I hope he ate it rather than try to sell it for beer money, but at that point, his sobriety was out of my hands. My favorite musical group in the alley consisted of a violinist, a drummer, a saxophonist, and two playing electric guitars. Their music echoed pleasantly off the walls which provoked several young tourists and probably a couple of the band’s girlfriends to start dancing, jumping up and down while waving their hands in the air, blocking the alleyway. I watched and listened for a few minutes wishing I were young again. There were several rooftop bars around the “adults” square, and I spent the rest of the evening having a beer and watching the ever-changing scene in the street below.
The night was a lot of fun, and for this reason, and another that I will describe later, I recommend Santa Marta for your next vacation despite its many drawbacks.
Day 2
Those who know me well, understand that, unlike most people, I would not be happy sitting on a beach sipping a pina colada. I was born during the Chinese year of the dog, and coincidentally, enjoy moving around, investigating this curious world, and sniffing in its atmosphere, much as a dog would. Since Santa Marta is the jumping-off point for excursions into Ciudad Perdido, “The lost city”, I thought I might see what it was like. It is supposed to be Colombia’s Macchu Pichu. It would be a wonderful experience – I told myself. You can only access Ciudad Perdido as part of a group led by a native guide, so I visited the outfitter that organized these treks. He said the trip took two or three days going through the jungle and up into the mountains depending on the average fitness of the group, and two days back out. I had no problem with the distance since my watch had been telling me that I run/walk 8 to 16 miles a day just moving around Medellin each day. (I have an unnatural aversion to taking taxis and I like to see what is happening in the streets). The outfitter looked me over and warned me that it was next to impossible to avoid mosquitoes and ticks on the way in and out, and that extra dry socks were a must. He did not admit, however, what I later learned from a couple of backpackers who had taken the excursion, that some of the hammocks in the overnight huts were infested with bed bugs.
Now I know, I know! Bedbugs carry no diseases. That is the job reserved for the mosquitoes and ticks. Still, they did provide another annoyance that I’d rather not experience. I told the outfitter I needed time to think about signing up, and went back to my hotel to conduct an internet search to see what kind of photos I could take of the “lost city”. I think I would have paid what seemed like a lot of money for the discomfort I would have experienced and made the trip anyway if the photographic payoff was worth it. Unfortunately, Ciudad Perdido is no Macchu Pichu. It consists primarily of a series of cleared terraces that climb up the top of a high ridge. Apparently, all the buildings of this “city” were made of organic materials that have long since rotted away.
Soooo….. I left the exploration of the lost city to twenty-somethings who could brag about their sufferings to gain access to the city’s “ruins” to the girls they would meet at the next hostel they stumble into. Me? I guess I’ll have that pina colada after all. 
Day 3
You didn’t think I’d be happy sitting by a pool, did you? I lasted one day, and then boredom started to make me itch for some sort of movement or change of scenery. I need to complicate my life to be happy. So the day after I sat by the pool I found a vendor selling day trips to Colombia’s Tayrona National Park which is about a 45-minute drive from Santa Marta. It looked like a good location for some typical tropical photos.
A small bus picked me up outside my hotel at 6:30 am the next day, and after picking up other passengers in Santa Marta, we arrived at the park entrance at about 8:00. On the way there, the group leader stood in the aisle and made a long speech in Spanish, most of which I didn’t understand, though the words “playa” and “caballos” were repeated several times. Yes, even early on I knew that somehow beaches and horses were going to be part of our day. Only one other person on the bus spoke any English: a businessman with his grandchildren. He filled me in much later that day about what I hadn’t understood on the bus.
Tayrona National Park includes mountains that drop as a series of peninsulas into the sea. 
Between these stoney fingers long stretches of beach run beside the ocean.
The hike into what turned out to be our “destination” took only about two hours of going up and over the peninsulas and across the flat beaches.It was a hike of only moderate difficulty. I took a lot of nice pictures on the way in:
.
I had thought we were going to spend the whole day hiking and exploring the mountains and beaches of the park. Silly me. When we reached a beach called ” Cabo San Juan de Guia at around 10:00, we stopped. I was informed that we would spend the next 4 hours there and then return to our bus. It was certainly a very photogenic beach, but it was also quite obviously a serious tourist trap. It sported two restaurants, a bar, and numerous hot dog and empanada stands.
Tents were set up that could be rented if you wanted to stay overnight, and a young Dutch/Moroccan lady, (She said), told me that there was a masseuse in one of the tents.
The porta potties cost twice as much to use as clean, permanent public toilets would cost in Medellin. The restaurant food was also more expensive than what I would normally pay in Medellin for similar fare, and much more than I would pay in Santa Marta. This expense really didn’t bother me much since all the food had to be carried in by horseback, and I didn’t have enough money on me to buy lunch anyway. When I left my hotel I didn’t see any need to carry any more money than the price of the excursion. I had water, bread, and some candy bars in my backpack and saw no need to carry large amounts of money into the jungle. I had about six dollars on me for porta-potty money, so no problem, right? My English-speaking fellow traveler from the bus informed me that other than me and two Venezuelans, everyone else on the bus was going to rent horses to carry them back to the parking lot.
I didn’t have enough money to even have my picture taken with a horse, much less ride one out. Around 1:00 the excursion leader figured out that I wasn’t going to rent a horse and recommended that I begin to hike back on my own. I didn’t see the two Venzualians and set off. This was an hour before the others would start back on their horses. Fair enough. The hike wasn’t difficult. It should be a snap.
I don’t know where I went wrong. I had been lost in my thoughts for a little too long when I suddenly realized that I hadn’t seen anyone else on the trail for the past ten minutes. This was unusual since Tayrona Park is very popular and I had often encountered people walking in or out on the trail. I also couldn’t hear or smell the ocean, and the trail in had followed the coast. I was lost!
I didn’t want to backtrack my steps to find the original trail, so I told myself that the trail I was on was wide and well-used and must also come out at the car park I came in from. I continued onward. Still, I saw no one. As I normally do in similar circumstances I began to overthink my situation. Tayrona Park is one of Colombia’s largest national parks. What if I walked for hours and missed my group’s bus? what if I came out at a different entrance? After using the toilet at the beach, I only had $4 on me, which wouldn’t be enough to hire a taxi for the 45-minute ride back to Santa Marta. Walking back would take me more than a day. I continued further and further on the trail. I thought I had made a big mistake and was getting myself deeper and deeper into trouble, but I had been walking for so long that my only option was to continue moving forward and hope for the best. Eventually, I heard some noises ahead of me. Some men were hauling in supplies on horseback. I was on the horse trail! To be sure I was on the right track I asked one of the men as they passed by, “Esta es la salida?”, ( Is this the exit?), he nodded. I was no longer lost, but I was still confronted with several obstacles. I think the horse trail was shorter than the coast rail, but it was also steeper since it climbed the arms of the peninsulas higher up the mountains. My biggest problem was the mud. It had rained the day before and the horses had stirred up the trail into a deep quagmire. I had already been navigating the muddy trail by jumping from rock to rock, but the trail kept getting wetter and wetter, and eventually, I had to give up avoiding the mud and just slog through the morass. Hiking boots are made to withstand mud and my feet continued to feel relatively dry. This came to an end when I reached a narrow chasm between two high cliffs that was only wide enough for a horse to pass through. Muddy water of unknown depth lay at the bottom of the chasm. I tried to inch my way through the chasm by cantilevering my hands and feet on each side. At one point the opening became too large. I couldn’t retreat and had to drop into the mud below. I was now covered with mud up to my knees, (I hoped to God it was only mud. It smelled awful), but since the trail climbed up and out of the gap a little beyond this point, I was able to make it out of the mud without losing my shoes. The remainder of the trail resembled a chewed-up swamp, but I no longer cared. I couldn’t become any more filthy than I already was.
As I entered the parking lot, the rest of the group came up behind me on horseback. The two Venezuelans who also walked out were already on the bus.
I took a long, hot shower when I got back to the hotel and brought my boots into the shower with me to clean off the caked mud that had collected both inside and outside of them. I walked around the hotel in my stocking feet until they dried. The hotel never complained. Apparently, I wasn’t the first to do this.
