Arriving in Santa Marta to hot, tropical sunshine was a welcome relief after a freezing 15 hours on a bus. There´s not a lot to find charming about Santa Marta, but the main reason I´d ventured back up to the Colombian coast was for the Betfair sponsored Ciudad Perdida (Lost City) trek. Well, not really sponsored as I had to fork out the $300 myself, but it was a nice little reunion of Betfairians past and present.
The trek itself is a 45km (ish) round trip to an archaelogical site of the ancient city of the Tairona. We walked through dense jungle, with steep ascents, several river crossings and some fairly treacherous terrain. Add the fact that it was about 90% humidity and the mosquitoes treated me like an all-you-can-eat buffet and you get the idea that it wasn´t a complete walk in the park. The trek is normally done in 5 or 6 days, but as our little team was 3 guys and me (not known for my competitive streak at all obviously) we opted to do it in 4 days which meant a good 7 hours of walking each day. Tough going at times, especially when ascending the 1200 narrow, slippery steps to the city itself, but definitely worth the effort.
After 4 days of cold showers in the evening and being coated in deet, sunblock and sweat during the daytime, it was a relief to return to civilisation and a few days by the beach seemed in order. We headed just out of Santa Marta to a town called Taganga, which is touted as a party town but given that everything shut at 1am and the only place we could find that was actually lively was a hostel bar that largely seemed to be frequented by coked up Israelis it was a bit of a disappointment.
In fact the most memorable thing I found about Taganga is that the French run hostel we were staying at (Casa Felipe) had some of the best food I´ve eaten on the trip so far. Filet mignon, chicken with blue cheese salad, roast salmon - and all around the 5 quid mark. Heaven.
Oh wait, there was one other memorable moment in Taganga. The morning I fell out of a hammock, stone cold sober, in front of 3 random guys....that was pretty memorable. Anyone who knows me will know that this sort of thing is actually almost expected of me as I am a bit of a natural disaster. However in my defence, the hammock was not a nice loopy crescent shape, but was stretched quite tightly between two trees meaning there wasn´t a lot of give in it. I didn´t quite manage to get in properly and instead of getting out and trying again, I tried to pull the edges of the hammock up and around me and ended up just flipping myself out of said hammock, landing with a loud crack as ankle bone met concrete and also giving myself an excellent rope burn on my upper arm - I looked like a battered wife for about a week. To their credit the guys who saw me tried very hard to suppress their laughter while asking if I was OK. All I could do was get up, nonchalantly (and v carefully) get back into the hammock while pretending like I wasn´t in quite a lot of pain and try to hide my burning red face. The only silver lining was that Freemo, Green and Brains were not there to witness my humiliation - I would never have heard the end of it.
Anyway, moving on. My last couple of days in Colombia were spent in Tayrona national park with F and G, as Brains said farewell and headed off to Chile. The park is on the northern coast of Colombia, near to Santa Marta and is home to some beautiful beaches. In short, a very relaxing place to spend a couple of days reading, sunning, swimming and drinking.
The only slight blip was that when we were there it coincided with Semana Santa- holy week - where basically every Colombian flocks to the coast on holiday. So when we arrived at the campsite we had to wait for about 30 minutes to ´check in´ and get a hammock or a tent for the night. Sadly Colombians do not have that innate British ability to queue in an orderly fashion so by the time we forced our way to the front, all the hammocks had been allocated and our only option was for the three of us to share a tent. And quite clearly a 2-man tent at that, as there was not even enough space for 2 mattresses to lie flat next to each other. Being the only girl I was obviously nominated to sleep in the middle, which meant sleeping ON the ridge where the two mattresses met. Cosy. And stiflingly hot.
The next afternoon I said goodbye to the boys who were staying another night, but I had a flight to catch the following day and needed to get back to Santa Marta (and a proper bed). 21 day tour through Peru starting in a couple of days which I am looking forward to but I just don´t want to leave Colombia, it´s been an amazing month...
