Colombia: Taganga and Minca

"How mad would you guys be if I told you our flight was actually at 8?" Reid asked. 

It was 5:30 am and the four of us were sitting on our packed backpacks with our eyes half open at the airbnb ready to leave for the airport. 

I laughed. "Better than being wrong an hour in the other direction." We ended up needing that full extra hour to get to the airport, it ended up being a blessing in disguise. We hit travel obstacles at every step of our journey to the airport.

Diego had been communicating with Ulyana (name changed), our airbnb host in Taganga. "She seems kind of sketchy," Diego told us. She offered to pick us up from the airport. When we asked the price and realized it would be about twice as expensive as a taxi, we declined her offer. "I already had plans to come pick you up. I'll be there at 11," she replied.

We wrote the first one off as miscommunication. She and her assistant picked us up in a beaten up suburban. "What time do you want us to pick you up tomorrow for your tour to Chengue Beach?" She asked once we were on our way. We looked at each other confused.

"Oh I just messaged to ask how to get to Chengue Beach. We were hoping to go today," Joe said. Chengue Beach was a beautiful 'secret beach' in Parque Tayrona that Joe had learned about through his research. There was little information as to how to get to it though.

"Oh that's fine, he will take you today," she pointed to her assistant and turned around.

"How much?" we asked hesitantly.

"200,000," she replied. Close to 65 USD. "200,000 total, everything is included."

This happened to us frequently toward the end of the trip. People would aggressively offer us a service or to book a service on our behalf at an exorbitantly marked up price. For example, Ulyana offered to get us deals with her friends to book us a MarSol bus for 80,000 per person (we later reserved it ourselves for 67,000) and offered to drive us to Minca for 250,000 (we street hailed a taxi for 65,000).

She let us drop our stuff off at the airbnb and we drove down the hill to the town.

We explained that we we needed food and water because we were not expecting to leave immediately for Chengue. The driver took us down to the town and we bought beers, water, and sunscreen at a market in Taganga. We asked where we could buy food and Ulyana said we could stop for food on the way. We got cash from the only one ATM in the entire town which only worked half the time. People queued to use the ATM. You go inside a room for security and its ungodly hot in there.

The Lonely Planet book had a warning on Taganga, "Over the past few years, Taganga has gone from a near obligatory stop on the gringo trail to a rather depressing place that looks in part like a bomb has hit it. Poverty is rife, the streets are unsafe after dark and it feels increasingly like a town divided." I do want to stress though I loved Colombia and that while this was the place I felt the most unsafe, we had no major issues. The Papaya Level sensors were going off though. 

"Can you snorkel at Chengue?" Joe asked Ulyana. "Yes," she disappeared for a moment, came back, and threw four snorkels into the car. "I just rented these for you. I got a good deal. 30,000 per person." She waved us bye and the car took off to Chengue. On our way to the park the driver took us to Subway. I accused Reid of having strong opinions on Subway. "I don't have strong opinions on Subway," Reid told me. "I just don't think you can count it as real food." 

The journey to Chengue was just beginning. We drove to the west entrance of Parque Nacional Natural Tayrona. Once there we drove on a jarringly bumpy dusty one lane dirt road for twenty minutes into the park. We paid the entrance fee to the park for us and the car and kept driving. We then got to the beach. "I read that you can't drive to Chengue," Joe told the driver. "Are we just like offroading?" "We're not going to Chengue," the driver told us. "You can't drive to Chengue."

At this point we were incredibly hungry, sleep deprived, and irritated at getting repeatedly ripped off.
We finally got to a beach. We plopped down in the gravely sand and inhaled our sandwiches in silence. The expanse of beach was pretty empty. There was a retired Colombian footballer and his family playing in the water and two fisherman in fishing boats. "So what should we do?" Joe asked. "I read that you can pay the fisherman to take you to Chengue. I'll ask how much."

After some wildly unsuccessful haggling, a smiling fisherman covered head to toe in loose clothing with a face smeared with zinc agreed to take us to Chengue for an additional 200,000. Once we got on the boat and on our way our moods drastically improved. And it helped that the beautiful beach was worth the journey.

Once we got out into open water the waves were insane. Our little tiny boat seemed like a piece of helpless driftwood compared to the giant rolling waves. The kind fisherman expertly navigated the huge swells. He pointed out religious sites of the indigenous Tayrona people as we boated around a jagged point.

"The Tayrona people believe that the ocean is the largest living organism on the planet," Diego translated to us. "I could buy that," Reid and I agreed. 

The boat cruised into an absurdly blue bay. There were mangroves lining the shore.

When we first arrived, there was a group of Colombians in a sleek motorboat bumping dance music. They didn't stay too long after we arrived.

 We splashed in the warm water and sat in the sand. 

The fisherman took us on a walk down the beach. He pointed out the fire coral and warned us not to touch it. He told us the reef was where the mama sharks raised their babies, but we didn't see any. There was a lot of plastic trash on the beach. The fisherman explained that it washes in from Taganga. Once the rainy season is over all the fisherman come to Chengue and clean up all the plastic together. 

Once we were ready to leave we boated back to the other beach. 

We weren't quite ready to leave. We asked Ulyana's driver to take us to a nearby beach to watch the sunset. "Too far," he told us. He reluctantly agreed to drive us to a halfway point to watch the sunset.

He then drove us and another fisherman back to Taganga. We napped in the car on the way back.

"You can leave at any time you want tomorrow," Ulyana told us when she stopped by the airbnb to collect the payment for the car rides. "That would be great! Is 1 okay?" we asked. "Eh... I will be there at 12," she told us.

I usually used the boys as my gauge for when I was appropriately worried. As a generally anxious person, I tried to be cautious and prepared in every step of what we did. However, luckily I had done most of my worrying before the trip and on the trip was totally fine. But as soon as the boys felt the need to be extra cautious I took it very seriously as they, especially Diego, tended toward the optimistic 'we'll probably be fine' attitude. The boys took absolutely nothing with them when we left the airbnb for dinner. It was the first time none of them had their phones on them, let alone wallets. We all carried about 20 bucks cash. I tucked my cash in my bra. 

To be honest I'm not sure if it's because we knew how dangerous Taganga was, but when we walked around at night I felt perpetually on edge. Diego corroborated my prickly feelings with a similar comment as we walked down the main road. We were getting a lot of attention walking through Taganga, but we had no issues. We were trying to be very alert and very cautious and we did not stay too long in the town at night. 

We got pizza and pasta from a restaurant in a dirt alley, chosen by Joe because it had a two for one happy hour special on drinks. The restaurant played a weird mix of American 80s music videos and contemporary Spanish music videos on a big screen in the restaurant.

Exhausted, we hiked back up to our airbnb. The air was still thick and hot even though it was past ten pm. My room had air conditioning. The room and shower looked very recently renovated. The only downside was that there was no hot water. It wasn't even that the shower didn't warm up, the shower basically just had an on off switch. The wind was aggressive and rattled the windows of the airbnb the whole night. 

The boys found a scorpion in their bathroom in the middle of the night!

We agreed to have a slow morning the next day. I was third awake after Reid and Diego. We sat around the airbnb just chilling in the hammock and laying about. 

View of Taganga from our airbnb

Ulyana arrived that morning and waited at the airbnb while we finished packing. 

We walked out the door and street hailed a taxi to take us the 45 minutes up the Sierra Nevada mountains to Minca. The closer we got to Minca the more military we saw. Many were standing off the side of the roads in full camouflage, with large guns slung across their chests. The taxi dropped us off right at the beginning of the town, which coincidentally was where the trailhead for Mundo Nuevo was. 

Dragging all our stuff, we hiked one hour up the mountain to Mundo Nuevo. 

We severely underestimated the hike and showed up drenched in sweat. "Agua?" the smiling staff asked us as we unclipped from our backpacks and pulled out passports to check in. "Cerveza," Joe corrected. She laughed and pulled out four bottles of Aguila.

One of the staff members gave us a quick tour of the hostel grounds. There was the main building and the kitchen with the outdoor eating area. There was a huge concrete area which used to be for coffee production. There was a building full of bunks for hostel guests. 

The guy took us through the garden and pointed out all the crops that they were growing. 

Then he let us be at an outlook. 

This is the bathroom.

When we got back to LA, my classmates would come up to me and say, "How was Colombia? I heard you guys took a shit in a really cool bathroom!" Of the whole trip, this is the only thing Diego felt was worthy of telling our classmates about. 

Once we finished our beers, Reid asked us if we were ready to hike more. We didn't take any time to settle in. We took off hiking up the nearest path. We picked the highest peak above Mundo Nuevo and made it our goal to hike to the top. The path went straight uphill and wound past a few empty hostels and some coffee farms.

The hike was stunningly beautiful. There would be moments when we would come around a corner and catch a glimpse of the giant mountains and valleys and we would just laugh because it was so beautiful. "This is amazing. This is crazy," we kept repeating and grinning stupidly.

We passed a lot of coffee farms on the hike.

We hiked by a house that had people sitting outside and Diego asked directions to a view and they smiled and pointed us up a path. We hiked and hiked and eventually the muddy trail gave way to a path of trampled bushes. Eventually that disappeared too and blended into just thick jungle. We could see the top of the peak, about fifty feet just out of reach. 

"Are we going for it?" I asked Reid, who was leading the way. We climbed/crawled straight up over dense foliage, ducked under branches, and got hundreds of tiny scratches from stray twigs. We crossed a giant fallen log, so damp it disintegrated under our feet when we stepped on it. We eventually got to a little ledge at the top, sweaty, filthy, and scratched. We could just see through the trees all the way down the Sierra Nevadas to the Caribbean Ocean.

Joe wanted sunset photos and we were cutting it very close. So we started to run down the mountain. We ran all the way back to the hostel back to the outlook.

We sat on the bench for a long time watching the last few rays of light reflect off the Caribbean from our mountainside vantage point. Minca was shades of pink and green.

The only thing we had since breakfast was a beer and some squished Chips Ahoy we found in my backpack. We had also spent the whole day hiking. We were ravenous. Mundo Nuevo is still working toward 100% sustainability. Most of the food was grown at Mundo Nuevo but some was brought in. All the food was vegetarian. There were lentils and carrots, rosemary potatoes, salad, garlic bread, and lemongrass and pineapple tea. We licked our plates clean. "Can we buy a second dinner?" We asked the staff. "Oh, no we have plenty of leftovers, come help yourselves!" They told us. With huge grins, we scrambled to the kitchen and piled our plates with extra helpings of everything. 

We sat around the table for awhile finishing our beer and tea and snacking on a bowl of nondescript cookies. One of the hostel staff was sitting at the table across from ours and Joe struck up a conversation. His name was Phil, he had a man bun, and he was formerly a gardener in Belgium. We started asking him questions about the business model and pillars of sustainability and philosophy at Mundo Nuevo and he had us captivated. 

The conversation particularly focused on food sustainability. He explained how extremely extensive and careful planning was needed to get to 100% sustainability for food. It included planning to ensure crops produced enough at different times of year and ensuring there was sufficient yield. Their goal was 'zero kilometer food sourcing'.

My concentration in my Master of Public Policy is in environmental policy, with a particular focus on renewable energy policy. I eagerly asked about their plan for sustainable electricity and was not disappointed. During the day Mundo Nuevo is powered by solar. Solar also charges their water hydro battery, which is used to power Mundo Nuevo at night. Phil stressed that they wanted to leave as small of a footprint as possible, so the water that powered their hydro battery was not even diverted from the stream, it was recycled.

We all loved Mundo Nuevo. Reid and I in particular. We half joked about never leaving.

After dinner I showered. The showers were wooden stalls with a 1" diameter PVC pipe in the ceiling. With the turn of a handle a heavy stream of ice cold water poured out of the pipe. There were lights in the stalls which attracted swarms of moths and other insects. The facilities were actually pretty nice though. It was still pretty warm outside so the cold water felt refreshing. 

After I showered I joined Reid and Diego on the back porch. Reid had borrowed a book from the small library inside the hostel and was reading in an Adirondack chair. Diego was laying in one of the hammocks. I grabbed the Lonely Planet book and laid down in the hammock next to him. Joe was exploring the property taking night shots. 

Minca at night

We went to the outlook and laid down on the bench and looked at the stars.

Some of the kittens kept squeezing their way through the wooden shutters on our window and jumping on my bed and walking across my stomach. It was a constant cycle of me picking them up and putting them outside. 

I was the last one up the next morning. As much as I wish I was a morning person, I really am not. I put my jacket on over my tank top and sweats and ventured into the pale mountain morning and tried to find my friends scattered around the property. They were all enjoying a slow morning and the views. I helped myself to the complimentary breakfast. I nibbled at some crepes and honey and sipped on a mug of just about the freshest coffee you could ever get. It was grown, roasted, and brewed within sight of where I was drinking it.

We packed up our bags and reluctantly hiked down the mountain to Minca. Hiking downhill was significantly easier than hiking uphill. Right where the hiking trail met the town was Cafe Minca. We bought 2USD bags of coffee grown locally and paid the friendly young lady shopkeeper 50 cents to store our backpacks under a table  in the middle of the shop for us. 

We grabbed our daypacks and then walked through the small town of Minca and onward and upward to Pozo Azul, a very touristy and very popular waterfall.

Pozo Azul was packed, so we opted for some falls a little downriver. We changed in the bushes and then waded into the pool. The water was brisk but the air was perpetually pleasant so it didn't take long for us to dunk under.

We hiked up to Pozo Azul to check it out. We had to do a bit of mild rock climbing to get up there which was fun. There were a bunch of guys trying to one up each other doing crazy jumps off rocks and trees. 

On our hike back down the mountain we stopped at this restaurant perched on the edge of a cliff. The menu was very laconic. The laminated cards simply read, "pollo, carne, chorizo, carnitas". The boys all ordered carne and I ordered pollo. The waiter shook his head. "They don't have chicken today. Just steak," Diego translated for me. I looked forlornly at the actual chickens clucking around the tables, spared their fate on my plate for the day. "That's fine, I'll just eat when we get down the mountain." I told Diego. "Hang on," Diego told me and asked the waiter if they had anything else. "Es vegetariana?" The man hacking at a piece of meat asked Diego. "Sí." The guy smirked and after some more back and forth they gave me a plate with half a potato and a piece of yuca which was quite good. "Muchas gracias," I thanked the waitress for being accommodating. Joe claimed this was his favorite meal of the whole trip and frequently referred to it as the 'meat sweats' place.

We continued our hike down the mountain back to Minca. 

We had asked Phil how to get to Tayrona. "Oh it's very easy," he told us. "Buses go there all the time. What you need to do is hike down to Minca and go across the bridge. Then wait for a collectivo. They will wait until they are filled before they leave. Tell them you want to stop at the gas station. It's right on the main freeway that goes to Tayrona. All the buses that go to Tayrona pass where they drop you off. Grab any of the buses going to Tayrona." 

We put our names down for a collectivo. They needed two more people before it was full and it could take off. They said they had no idea how long that would take.

Waiting patiently for the collectivo to fill. We idled time by buying water and packs of peanuts for Tayrona.

Diego, Joe, and I squished in the back of the collectivo and Reid rode shotgun with two other gringo travelers. We clung on to our backpacks as the collectivo whizzed around corners and the wind whipped my hair in every direction. 

We hopped out of the collectivo on the dusty shoulder of a moderately busy freeway. A large pink charter bus arrived around the same time and we mistakenly believed it to be our only opportunity to get east to the park. "¿A Tayrona?" we asked them. "Si, si," they told us, relieved us of our backpacks, and ushered us on the bus. 

It was a big dilapidated charter type bus that was uncomfortably warm and incredibly smelly. Diego leaned over the seat. "What do you think the Papaya Level is? I'm going to say it's a 4, 4.5." I scooted closer to Reid.

The bus idled indefinitely while it slowly filled. Buses frequently waited until they were completely full of passengers before leaving for their destination. Occasionally someone would come barreling down the aisle selling food. They would lap up and down the row shouting the name of whatever they were selling and then exit the bus. This happened several times with different vendors each time.

The bus would occasionally tease us by rolling forward a bit before sputtering to a stop again. Finally the bus took off rolling. We rode in silence to Tayrona, foreheads pressed to the window watching the mountains and greenery roll by.