Our final stop in Colombia: Santa Marta! And a super easy journey to get there as we just took a 45min taxi from Minca.
We only briefly explored the town, but Parque de los Novios was lovely and we saw the oldest cathedral in Colombia, which I could’ve sworn one evening was playing Happy Birthday…
Weather:
Unsurprisingly being on the Caribbean Coast, Santa Marta was hot! Felt like being back in Cartagena.
Where we stayed:
We stayed at a hostel that felt more like a hotel – with a really nice room and most importantly a beautiful courtyard area with a little pool. There was also a semi-outdoor kitchen that we used each night to cook dinner. The ‘reception desk’ was all remote/virtual and we didn’t see any other guests, so it pretty much felt like we had the place to ourselves! I found this slightly weird at first, but it did feel like we’d paid hostel prices for our own private villa so we can’t complain!
Best thing we ate:
As I said, we cooked dinner most nights so didn’t have any especially Colombian meals to rave about, but my tomato aubergine pasta was *very* good. On our final day we went to a cafe around the corner that had delicious GF banana bread and a very tasty tabbouleh salad.
Coolest thing we did:
When reading about Santa Marta, it is mostly pitched as a jumping off point to go to other destinations. One of these is Tayrona National Park, which was the main thing we wanted to do here.
The national park is home to some beautiful beaches, the only catch is a 2 hour walk to reach them! Once we’d taken a couple of buses, we set off on the wooden walkway and pretty quickly saw some Mico Titi monkeys. The scenery and wildlife was pretty amazing and fortunately we were protected from the sun for most of the trail. For any fans of the leaf cutter ants in the previous post, we saw many, many more here. How many leaf cutter ants does one man need to film? No comment.
We fiiiinally arrived at the beaches and we decided to stay put at La Piscina rather than continue walking to the popular Cabo San Juan. La Piscina is named as such due to its calm, deep waters that are great for safe swimming. It almost looked like a tidal pool, with rocks in the distance that broke the waves before they came to the shore, making it much nicer to swim.
However, before any swimming could happen, Chris had to get to work. No beach area is complete without a little engineering work – how else would we demarcate our space? After dragging dead palm leaves and branches over and essentially enclosing me within them, he felt he had achieved his goal. I can’t say I’m 100% sure on what that goal was, but he seemed happy and then we could safely leave our stuff and get into the sea.
We had a lovely few hours of beach time before we needed to start the 2hr walk to make it back before the park closed. On our return journey we saw more, different monkeys. These were bigger and more orange. Just call me David Attenborough!
Despite bug spray and 80 SPF, we came home burnt and bitten and feeling decidedly British.
Bonus:
Our lovely little friend: the hostel cat. She was a real sweetie and keen for some attention.
Our last day in Colombia involved a lot of rest, dips in the pool, tending to burnt feet and a big load of laundry. We were relieved to see that the weather in Quito, Ecuador – our next destination – is ~20°C and rainy, a bit of home from home.
Besos,
Florence & Chris