La Casa De Felipe Santa Marta

Hi On Tuesday the 5th of Sept, I flew from Bogota to Santa Marta on Colombia's Caribiean Coast. As soon as I got to the plane door the heat and humidity hit me like a train. I got a taxi out to Taganga, a small sleepy beach town 15 minutes from Santa Marta and checked in Casa Feilipe Hostal. The views out over the sea were beautifull. There was a Dutch gril and Aussie guy staying at the hostel who were doing a diving course and there invited me to a party that some locals were having for one ...

Yes we finally made it, you enter Taganga over a mountain with a view of the little bay, the cristal clear water all nestled into the jungle vegetated mountains. This is what I had been looking for. Myself, Conor, Baz and Gav stayed in a lovely hostal where we got a proper apartment with view over the beach, private kitchen and everything. The people we had been traveling with before were staying there too and this place was perfect for socialising. Having the kitchen was great because we nev...

Well, its been some time since a good update, so here goes... After Bogota we headed for Medellin, former home of the famous Ferndando Botero and the infamous Pablo Escobar, known for cocaine, beautiful women, poshe culture, and not a whole lot else. But now the city seems to buzz with life, rejuvinated a decade ago when the drug cartels fell and the city once again became safe for the locals as well as the foreign traveler. Maura and I rented an apartment for a week in a laid back upper-midd...

Santa Marta is about 4 hours by bus from Cartagena, also on the coast but is completely different from Cartagena. The city is surrounded by hills and not far away you have the Sierra Nevada . People are a lot more Caribbean if you know what I mean.... It is not very big but definitely it is noisy and sadly very dirty, the beach and ocean are not much different, only the boulevard by the ocean is OK and that is stretching it. Rodadero is a little more upscale, more beach oriented, with a lot m...

Taganga is a small fishing village. It's dirty and from one story I heard on my trip, the locals like to mess with the tourists. According to one traveler, while walking on the beach at night a local, from his balcony, shot above the tourist's head. The tourist said he was terrified. The locals just laughed. We stayed at a hostel in the village which at 10pm went into lockdown mode. The only reason we went here was because we were told there were no hostels in Santa Marta. There is one bad h...

Finally arrived in Bogota (managed to get a stand by seat on a flight from Leticia)and rocked up at a friends place - Conor Colleary - whereupon I dumped my bags made a mess and headed off out to explore. Kate and Barry arrived the next day and it was brilliant ot see them! We headed off out on a days sightseeing. We went to the Salt Cathedral (yes it is made entirely of salt) and to the milk factory (which apparently does tours of the whole milk/cream/arecipe making process which we missed c...

In Taganga aangekomen gelijk maar op zoek gegaan naar opties voor de trek naar de verloren stad. Zo gezegd zo gedaan; gelijk maar geboekt voor de volgende dag voor 5 dagen.

Kwam echt dikke prima uit qua tijd; hoefde geen dag te wachten oid + ik was met een amerikaanse opgereisd uit Cartagena (had haar al eerder ontmoet in Bogota) en ik was haar een beetje zat. Terwijl zij volgens mij het idee had dat we wel mooi een duikcursus ed konden doen samen... Ze was dan ook enigzins teleurgeste...

Na mijn terugkomst van de Ciudad Perdida tocht ben ik nog 2 daagjes naar het national park Tayrona gegaan met een meisje van het hostel. Erg mooi, veel lopen, en eigenlijk heb ik er gewoon de puf niet meer voor :) Uiteindelijk in een hangmat beland en liggen lezen. Terwijl zij nog een nacht langer bleef had ik het wel gezien en ben weer terug gegaan naar Taganga. Een van de laatste dingen die ik namelijk wilde doen was een duikcursus, wat nogal goedkoop kan in Taganga (PADI OW voor zo`n 170 e...

The Mosquito plague of Taganga From Cartagena, we took a four hour bus ride over to Santa Marta, followed by a short ride in a taxi to Taganga, a small fishing village with a scruffy beach, but set in an absolutely stunning bay. The area around Taganga is fairly dry and the landscape is noticeably barren, but just some 30 or so kilometres away from here is a lush green tropical rain forest, weird! We check into our hostel, Casa Felipe, which is supposed to be one of the best budget places to ...

The Lost City is magical. It is in the middle of the jungle in the North East Corner of Colombia. It was discovered in 1975 and people didnīt really start to visit until the 80īs so it is in the beginning stages of tourism. It dates back to 400 A.D.. There were 800 families living there. There are a lot of ruins that havenīt been cleared yet and probably wont due to the indigenous people believing that it is sacred. There is a history of robbing the burial sites for gold and poetry. A lot of ...