Columbia's Caribbean

Up here in Santa Marta, the big attraction is the Tayrona National Park which sits alongside the Caribbean on what seems a counter-intuitive west facing coastline.  That is unless you really know your Columbian geography.  Anyway, it’s jungly stuff with lovely windswept golden beaches and about an hour and half walk to the first beach.   Caribbean is one of those words that makes me think of golden sands and gently washed beaches where you can frolic and cool off.  Well, not here.  Virtually every beach is dangerous with strong currents and warnings about how many tourists have drownded.  It is definitely a case of not waving but drowning, and yet people walk for hours to sit on sand and just about paddle.   We were quoted COL$160,000 for a taxi round trip, one hour each way and which included the taxi waiting for five hours, then COL$37,500 entry fee each.   So a total of about COL$235,000, about £80 (US$120).  We decided on the local bus COL$6,000 each (hour and a quarter) and when we got there, heavens a concession for us older folks.  We think the girl on the entry desk got confused because the concession she came up with was free entry.   We didn’t bother to argue.   Of course we decided to do a longer walk which included an unexpected and considerably more difficult climb/scramble over bus sized boulders for about two to three miles climbing 800-900 feet to a pre-Columbian abandoned village.  By the time we got back to the road we were out of water and it had taken five and a half hours in hot conditions.   Lunch had been a handful of peanuts washed down with water.   Anyway, a helpful policeman waved down buses for us until he found one with space for us to get on.    So it was COL$6,000 each back of course but including the taxi to the bus stand in the morning and back to our hotel on return, very satisfactory that the day cost us a total of COL$36,000 against the hotel’s taxi at COL$235,000, and we wouldn’t have been able to do the long walk  which we enjoyed.  The National Park was similar to Dr Johnson’s view of The Giant’s Causeway “worth seeing but not worth going to see”.

What we have noticed about Columbia so far is a surprising absence of both flies and mosquitos, even in the Tayrona Park.   We did hear lots of birds but tropical forest is difficult for seeing them.   This country apparently has the largest number of bird species recorded for any country in the world and with such an identification task we’re bird watching not bird naming.

While trying to get to grips with a little more than “two beers and the bill please”, I do think more about English and what we consider normal usage.   We would generally say “on a bus” but “in a taxi”.   “In a bus” would be perfectly OK even if slightly unusual but I don’t think any native speaker would say “on a taxi”.    Just the sort of thing a mind turns to during (or should that be enduring) a long ride within a bus.

The aforementioned bus being the one from Santa Marta to Cartegena, the main tourist spot on the coast.  Scheduled time four hours, actual time five hours so there’s that +25% again.    Cartegena’s centre is an island walled town connected by a few bridges to the mainland and surrounded by a huge sprawling city which can’t be avoided if coming by land.   The old city was one of the Spaniard’s main ports in the new world and the very impressive walls were only built after Sir Francis Drake had knocked the place about a bit.  If only his cannon had had a bit more range he could have knocked down some of the tower blocks that spoil the skyline to the south.   The old town is a fair size and very attractive in that sun-bleached, worn, peeling paint sort of way.  It also has some beautifully restored buildings in tip top condition and is well worth a visit.

Part of the old town is called Getsemani, an authentic local and non-touristy area that according to our book is not a place to wander round at night.   Our hotel is in the middle of an area called Getsemani.    It has been no problem at all and naturally we’re out at night for restaurants either locally or in the rest of the town.   One restaurant near our hotel looks just like a derelict building during the day but when opened up at night it is really impressive with whitewashed walls, a ceiling 25 or so feet up and half the seventy or so diners out in the open in the courtyard.   Good food too.   In fact, good food to be had in many restaurants in town.

The various tat peddlers come into their own here with a target audience of many more tourists than we’ve seen in the whole of Columbia put together.   This is a cruise port and yesterday there were eight ships in and some people we spoke to were on one of them which had 3,200 passengers.   These were the tourists who pointed a Columbian TV crew towards us (Heather doing a quick disappearing act) because they thought we should be interviewed as ‘proper’ travellers.   It was my 1.5 minutes of fame but hey that’s inflation for you.  The cruise passengers generally hunt in packs following a guide with a flag held aloft as if impersonating a hole on a golf course.   Others are seen in horse and carriage outfits clip clopping around town while a surprising number appear to have walking to the cruise buffet as their only exercise.  These are the ones whose buttocks have individual postcodes.

The peddlers are fairly half-hearted in that a no, gracias usually sees them off and all the usual stuff is on offer, t-shirts, jewellery (real emeralds), hats (even if you’re wearing one), sunglasses (even if you’re wearing them too), paintings, food and drink, Columbia football shirts (“not made in China, senor”), a taxi back to the ship plus more unusual things like boxes of cigars or big packs of cigarettes and the frankly bizarre items like padlocks.  I know they’re only trying to earn a living in a country whose support for the unemployed isn’t like ours but some do seem to have a poorly targeted marketing proposition.

Tomorrow we have an early flight the whole length of the country south to the Amazon where we’ll be off web for five days or so.   We cross the equator so I guess it changes from winter to summer.  It can’t be much hotter than here but I am a bit concerned about the humidity and I imagine we will see those mosquitos.   I tick off another year while we’re there, so while some people get a present from Amazon for their birthday, I may well be swimming in it for mine.