Santa Marta, Colombia

On the morning of Christmas Eve, I completed my journey to Santa Marta (a 4.5 hour bus journey from Maicao). Our bus was stopped repeatedly by soldiers who more than once made all the men on the bus get off, leaving only the women and children. Then the men were lined up outside and we all had to turn over our documents (for me, a US passport, for everyone else, an identity card and Colombian passport).


A soldier checkpoint -- I had already been permitted to return to the bus, so I surreptitiously snapped this photo.

I’m not sure why it made me so much more nervous to have the men separated out from the women and children for these searches, and I’m not really sure what these soldiers’ goals were. (I thought they were looking for drugs, but later someone told me they were searching for bombs, which I am sort of glad I did not suspect at the time.) But really, it didn’t cause all that much delay, and I felt so relieved to be getting so close to my destination, that I was in a pretty upbeat mood overall.

I arrived in Santa Marta and met up with Lucinda (from the Angel Falls tour). I stayed the next 4 nights in La Casa Familiar, which was where she was staying as well.

Santa Marta is a pretty cool, easygoing Caribbean town. It’s actually the oldest surviving colonial town in Colombia. It’s set right on the sea, and its waterfront reminded me quite a bit of the beach in Rio, because of the divided highway and busy promenade, gorgeous sunsets and mountainous islands off in the distance. I didn’t actually take any photos of the beach in Santa Marta, but it’s very pretty.


Me in front of the Cathedral in Santa Marta. Simon Bolivar was actually buried here in 1830, but his remains were moved to Caracas 12 years later.


Me and Lucinda enjoying some buckets of jugo naturale (fresh squeezed juice). I felt guilty because these buckets cost less than a dollar each, but took the little man in the café forever to make.

On Christmas Eve, Lucinda and I had dinner with Clem (from New Zealand) and Andre (from Sweden). We were entertained by this man and his amazing poodle-type dog who danced while he played guitar and sang.


On Tuesday, I took a day trip to Taganga, a small fishing village a few miles north of Santa Marta (the bus ride was only 40 cents each way, so I figured why not?). It was really beautiful and very low-key. It felt a bit more Amalfi Coast to me than Caribbean Coast, for some reason…

Taganga

Taganga and me

I also hiked along the cliffs to Playa Grande, a really pretty bay a short distance north of Taganga.

Playa Grande

Then on Wednesday, I did two SCUBA dives with the Atlantic Dive Center in Santa Marta: one reef dive and one wreck dive. Although the visibility wasn’t quite as good as it was in Los Roques, the scenery was amazing. I saw moray eels, lobsters, and a whole ton of sealife I don’t know anything about. It was also pretty crazy to be swimming through the hull of a wrecked ship on the bottom of the sea.

Next up, Cartagena!