Journey to the "corazon del mundo"...

  Santa Marta, Colombia
Thursday, October 16, 2008

We finally made it to Tayrona!

Just to make you all insanely jealous!! I've just spent the weekend in paradise ha ha!Yes, after a long wait, I finally got to Tayrona Park.  Turns out it's just as well I waited til I'd got used to the humidity here, because it was soooo hot!!  It was bank holiday weekend again (there are a lot of them here) so me,Monica,Andrea and Elise decided we would go camping for the weekend.  So 2 buses and what appeared to be a disused cattle truck later, we arrived at the point in the park where the tarmac ends and the real adventure begins.  Fantastic hike to the campsite, although you need to be prepared for the humidity and the mosquitoes, which are both super-sized and super-numerous!Luckily Andrea had to spend a week in the jungle with the Colombian army duing her degree so she found this magic soap that the soldiers use,and the little blighters haven't gone near me since!

After the tarmac ended...

    We got to the campsite around lunchtime and hired some hammocks in a wall-less hut for the night.  You couldn't get any closer to nature! The campsite was fairly rustic, (the "shower room" didn't have a roof or any doors so I had to quite literally shower in the thunderstorm which came rolling in front of four other naked women.No room for bashfulness here!) but it was situated right on the beach.  When I went down the beach and looked behind me up at the jungle, I could have sworn I was on the set of 'Lost'.
 

It really is paradise (in the rustic sense)!

So we decided to dump our stuff and hike to the 3rd beach, El Cabo which is about an hours walk from our campsite, both on the beach and through the forest, which was absolutely amazing! Andrea even managed to forage for some guava for us to snack on!  We reached the 3rd beach and were there for all of half an hour before the storm clouds rolled in (I'm really over rainy season now!).  So after sheltering in the local restaurant shack drinking beer for a while, we decided we'd have to head back before the forest track became impossibly slippy and impassable.  So back we hiked, our shoes getting suck in the mud every thirty seconds.  So in the end we just took them off and went barefoot! Well, it wasn't as if we were walking on rough terrain, it was a mud track!  Needless to say we arrived back at the campsite soaked and filthy.  I'd somehow managed to get bark stains on my butt and down my legs, and like everything else I manage to spill on myself, sit on or rub up against, I'm not quite sure how I managed to get it in these specific places!!  So I'm fairly sure I did look like a Lost castaway by the time we got back to civilisation, though not quite as glamorous.
    Me and Elise decided to treat ourselves to steak and chips for dinner at the wee restaurant, and then the four of us sat playing cards and drinking rum and tequila.  It was about then that I started to resent all the lucky backpackers who got to do this every day, and remembered that I had to leave the next day to get back to the city.  
Now, for those of you who have never had to spend the night in a hammock, it's really not as comfortable as it looks! My spine was in spasms by dawn and I'd spent most of the night being cold despite the long sleeves, trousers and what could not have been less than 25 degree heat.  Leading me to believe that I've been totally "wuzified" by the tropical heat and will die of hypothermia the moment I step off the plane in Belfast next year!  And be labelled a "big jessie" by dad.  Apart from that it was actually nice sleeping outside, hearing the animals and the ocean in the backround, and being able to watch the sunrise from my hammock.  At one point I thought there might have been a leopard in the campsite, before I remembered that there aren't any in South America, and on closer inspection it turned out to be just someone snoring very loudly.

Doesn't it remind you of Lost?

    The next day we were supposed to hike through the forest to one of the ruins of an indigenous village, but on account of it being such a fabulously sunny day, we decided to blow it off for a proper day at the beach.  I managed to somehow burn my right butt cheek and the tops of both my feet,but at least I've got some semblance of a tan now!!
    It took a long time to get home again the next day.  After we'd made it back to the park entrance we had to attempt to flag down a bus back to civilisation, which was hard since it was bank holiday weekend and a lot of them were full.  Eventually a bus did stop, I think it was coming back from the mine at La Riohacha and it was going past Barranquilla which was great, although it was full so there was no seats for half the 3 hour jouney, and as it materialised the bus driver was transporting us illegally (long haul buses are supposed to have everyone seated), so every time we passed a police checkpoint the driver yelled "al suelo!" and we had to hide on the floor of the bus until we passed it! All very cloak and dagger.  Got back to Barranquilla exhausted and more than a little grateful for my big comfy bed!!
    So that was my exciting weekend! Will leave you to browse the pics.  Hopefully my next trip will be soon.  There's another bank holiday in a couple of weeks and a couple of us are talking about hiring a truck and driving out to La Guajira, where some of the indigenous people live.  There's meant to be a desert and everything, sounds awesome!