Last week we changed scenery to the northern coast of Colombia to visit Santa Marta and Tayrona National Park. The Colombian coast is quite a bit different from Bogota and Medellin. For starters, it’s at sea level, and feels distinctly like the Caribbean. The climate is hot and humid as you might expect. The town (city?) of Santa Marta also has a distinctly Caribbean vibe. It also feels more run down than Bogota and Medellin seemed to me. Santa Marta looked a bit like it was being constantly eroded by wind, sand and salt water. It was charming in its own way, but it was a bit of a let down in comparison to the beauty and vibrancy that we’d experienced elsewhere in the country.
The main attraction of this part of the country is Tayrona National Park, which we had read on many blogs was the “most beautiful” national park in the world. I’m going to flat out disagree with that assessment. Tayrona is certainly beautiful, but to my eyes it paled in comparison to Rocky Mountain National Park, Arches National Park, and Yellowstone to name a few. This is partly personal preference. I’m not a big fan of jungles, despite being a huge fan of seeing monkeys. Tayrona is a very large jungle park with a lot of beautiful beaches. However, as jungles tend to be, it is stunningly humid, and hot, and there were people everywhere. So, it felt much less like a preserve of nature, and more like a giant tourist trap to me. It also didn’t help that both Farrah and I had come down with a cold/flu/covid/something-unpleasant. I learned pretty quickly that if I don’t like jungles under good conditions then walking for hours through a jungle while feeling decidedly poorly is pretty close to my personal hell.
The park, as I mentioned, is quite large, so to get to any of the beaches and be able to spend any time at all we stayed overnight in the park at a small jungle hostel. The place we stayed was very very very basic. The hosts were really pleasant, and the food in the tiny restaurant was decent. The shower in our “cabana” was effectively a wall mounted hose that sprayed cold water in a single dense stream. This sounds worse than it was, since we were very hot and sweaty the entire time we were there, so hosing ourselves down was pretty ideal. A hot shower would have been really unpleasant.
To get to the park we took a bus which conveniently stopped 4 blocks from our hostel in Santa Marta. The bus took us directly to the entrance of the park, and then we spent thirty minutes waiting in crowded lines to get our entrance tickets. After that we walked for about 15 minutes to get to our jungle hostel. By the time we had gotten checked in it was about 11am. We decided that the best plan since we only had two days in the park would be to go to Cabo San Juan, the most distant beach in the park from our location. To get there we took a shuttle from our hostel to the trail heads in the park. Walking would have taken close to an hour along a rather boring paved road. From the trailhead we walked to what we thought was the trail that would take us to Cabo San Juan, but instead turned out to be a quiet little beach called La Piscinita, more about that later. We reluctantly turned around in search of the trail to Cabo San Juan, and luckily ran into another traveler who was looking for a beach with a short hike, as she and her friends had been to Cabo San Juan the previous day, and decided that doing that hike two days in a row was not to their taste. After an entertaining moment of both of us exercising our limited Spanish it became clear that we both spoke English, and we were able to swap information about the beaches we each wanted to get to. She was delighted to hear that La Piscinita was only about 10 minutes from where she’d met us, and she guided us back to the trail that would take us to Cabo San Juan, where she had left her friends. From there our trek started in earnest.
The walk to Cabo San Juan took us 2.5 hours. I was loaded up on cold medicine, and only feeling kind of lousy, but Farrah was only starting to feel sick, and she only got worse the longer we walked. The walk through the jungle is definitely pretty. We saw quite a few monkeys, and loads of colorful lizards. There wasn’t much other wildlife to speak of, unless you count tourists, which I don’t. The trails were busy. I don’t think we walked a single stretch for more than 10 minutes without running into other tourists, and often the trails were completely congested. Along the way there were little stands set up providing water, beer, gatorade, and popsicles. Many of the trails also had extensive boardwalks. Definitely a back-to-nature experience. I have to admit we took advantage of a popsicle stand at one point, because Farrah was overheating, and we were almost out of water, so they had their purpose. There were also first-aid stations at several points along the walk, and fairly busy restaurants near every beach along the way. We also saw a number of horses ferrying tourists to and from the various distant beaches.
When we finally arrived at Cabo San Juan we found it to be damn near packed with people, and we took advantage of the restaurant there to eat a large lunch. The only thing we’d eaten so far that day was a very small breakfast, so we were grateful to get a serious meal in our bellies. The beaches at Cabo San Juan are pretty, and covered with vendors selling food, beer, and other random stuff. It was also packed with people. Finding a space to put our towels down was manageable, but only just. We only had about an hour and a half to spend at the beach before we had to head back since we didn’t know how late the shuttles back to our hostel would run, and we were both damned if we would walk 3.5 hours through the jungle, rather than 2.5, if we could avoid it. Sometime during our brief stay at the beach Farrah suggested that taking horses back to the trail head might be a better idea since she was exhausted and feeling lousy. We talked to a fellow who explained the cost of the horse ride (50,000 Colombian Pesos, cash only, about $12) and the last departure time (4:30pm). However, he failed to explain that you could, and should, reserve your horses in advance. So, we relaxed for about an hour secure in the belief that we would have an easier return trip with the horses doing the hard work. This turned out not to be the case since when we arrived at the horse rental stand all the horses were gone, and the last three there were already reserved. The gentleman at the rental booth called to see if additional horses would be coming, which was kind of him, but unfortunately none were on their way back to Cabo that afternoon, so we set off on what we expected to be a truly exhausting trudge back to the trail head. We had a bit of luck however and about 30 minutes into our trek we ran into another horse stand and we were able to rent a couple of horses to take us back to the trail head, much to our mutual relief. I was still doing “OK” (thanks to my cold medicine I would have only hated the trek a little), but Farrah might have been considering sleeping in the jungle rather than walking any further.
We arrived back at our hostel that night completely whipped. I’ve been more tired for sure, but I’ve not often been as tired, sweaty, and dirty all at once. I remarked to Farrah that my shower under our “hose” might have been one of the most satisfying of my life. We had a pretty filling dinner in the tiny restaurant at our hostel, and I downed a couple of cheap beers, then we collapsed in bed. I spent the night tossing and turning in the heat while listening to some damn critter scratching at the wall behind our bed. The fan in our room just seemed to push the hot air around and did very little to cool me.
The next day we decided to go to La Piscinita, the beach we’d accidentally stumbled across the previous day. In all honesty, I was ready to leave the park behind and go back to Santa Marta to get a real shower and lie around an air conditioned room for a bit. The walk to La Piscinita is not as picturesque as our previous day’s trek, but it’s also only 15 minutes from the trail head. We spent several hours there lounging and playing in the surf. In my opinion, this is the beach to visit in Tayrona. It’s close to the trail head, the scenery is every bit as lovely as Cabo, or Arrecife, and it’s not nearly as busy. Plus there aren’t a billion vendors, just one food stand and a restaurant set far enough back from the beach to be somewhat discrete. The water was also much more clear than I recalled from Cabo. At around 2:30 or 3 that afternoon we called it a day and made our way back to our hostel in Santa Marta where I got my air conditioning, and a proper shower to get all the sand out of those hard to reach places, like my hair.
Overall, I can’t recommend Tayrona National Park. Just outside of Santa Marta is a beach town called Tagunga, which includes zero hikes, and by all accounts has incredibly beautiful beaches, which are adjacent to the park. Sadly, we didn’t make it there.
The remainder of our stay in Santa Marta was spent lounging in our hostel, and nursing our illnesses. This has to have been one of the least enjoyable legs of our adventure thus far. Alas, into every life a little rain must fall. It was still better than working the old 9 to 5 by a large degree, and it made me that much more excited for the next leg of our trip, Peru! More about that in a later post. Until then enjoy the pictures, if nothing else Tayrona was quite Instagram-able.