Colombia: Tayrona and Cartagena

We arrived at the east entrance to Parque National Natural Tayrona at four pm. 

It was actually pretty challenging to find thorough information on activities and accommodation in Parque Tayrona. I had done a lot of research to try to help book accommodation before we left, but it seemed like you could only make reservations in person. We decided to figure out transportation to and from the park, accommodation, hikes within the park, and everything else as we went along, which worked out for the most part.

"There are jaguars, howler monkeys, boa constrictors, and alligators here," Reid told us as we walked into the park. 

"Ah. So there are things in this jungle that can actually kill us." I said. "Yes," Reid confirmed. The jungle also houses some friendlier species and lots of endangered species. We saw lots of agouti (a type of rodent), a bat, and an iguana. All over Colombia we saw lots of feral dogs and cats and lots and lots of butterflies. 

We listened to a brief presentation in Spanish, paid the fees, got our wristbands, and hopped on a shuttle bus which took us to the trailhead. 

The hike to our campsite was about an hour. The hike was advertised to us as an easy walk. Even though we were all in pretty good shape by this point, it definitely did not seem easy. But it was crazy beautiful.

Carrying our bulging backpacks, we hiked at a brisk pace through the humid north Colombian evening. The hike began in the jungle. We hiked along a boardwalk through dense foliage. The tall trees formed leafy canopies over us. 

It was all so green. The boardwalks had stairs and we climbed up and down hills.

Then we reached the coast. We hiked along the loose sand parallel to giant greyblue crashing waves. 

The path wove back into the jungle where the paths turned into mud trails. The rainy season had just ended in Colombia. There were deep gouges in the trails, puddles, and human and horse footprints. Sometimes there were thin logs or planks over the sloshily muddy areas to help you get across. 

The hike led to these giant sandpaper boulders that we squeezed in between and climbed up and over. We eventually got to packed dirt paths with hand painted signs and low wooden fences pointing the way inland toward Don Pedro, our campsite.

We arrived at the campsite close to 7 which was after the sun set. All we had seen of Tayrona was the hike in, so we decided to take a five minute night hike to the beach. We asked the guy at the campsite if it was safe and he said, "Yes, but just watch out for the serpents." We backtracked onto the path we came in on. We brought flashlights to see in the pitch black. The jungle creaked and screeched and chittered and rustled loudly. 

"Do you see the eyes?" I asked, trying to keep my tone conversational. Almost as if in a cartoon, multiple pairs of blue eyes reflected the light from our flashlight. 

"Oh my God," I jumped and grabbed onto Reid's arm. A pair of eyes larger than the other ones reflected back at us. 

"This was a bad idea," Reid said and turned on his heels and booked it back to the camp.

"Cards and beer then?" I asked. We ordered dinner at the campsite. The trip got progressively more humid and more expensive as we moved through Colombia. Dinners were frequently chicken and rice in some form or another. We ate and broke out a deck of cards and the speakers and cracked open some watery beers. 

We played cards for awhile. Two German girls asked to join a little while in. They studied at the university in Munich and taught us a card game.

All the tents were rented preconstructed. They are essentially permanent fixtures, kindly sheltered under roofs on stilts. They came in a variety of sizes from individual to four person. The tents also all came equipped with mattress pads, which I do not believe have ever been washed. While we were hiking around with everything we had brought with us, that did not include sleeping bags, blankets, or pillows. 

The zipper on our tent was broken and so we kept having to pull feral kittens out. We used our bags as a barricade but eventually figured out how to fix the zipper. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to us, the kittens brought a bunch of fleas into our tent and when we woke up we were bitten up. 

I was surprised at how loud the jungle is at night.

We woke up early the next morning. We rubbed our chewed up legs with sunscreen, bug repellent, and anti itch cream. "Someone really should make a three in one cream," Joe suggested. We took off hiking to Cabo San Juan along the early morning muddy paths.

Cabo San Juan is the iconic campsite within Parque Tayrona. It is a magnet for unshowered gringo backpackers the world over. It was packed. "The facilities are pathetic" one review read online. However, there is a reason it is the most popular spot. It is absolutely gorgeous.

We got there too early to check in. Tents and hammocks are first come first serve. So we dropped our backpacks on the beach, changed in the jungle, and took turns watching the stuff while the rest of us wandered in short radiuses and dipped in the water. 

While there are some longer hikes in the area inland into the jungle, after some discussion we opted for shorter coastal hikes to explore the beaches. A lot of the beaches are not safe to swim in due to the strong rip currents. We checked in, dumped our big packs in the tents, and filled our day packs with beer and water. We first hiked east to La Piscina, which is safe to swim in.

We saw an iguana!

We hiked back past Cabo San Juan and further west to a nudist beach with no naked people on it. This one was not safe to swim in, and they had very threatening warning signs, so we didn't risk it. We just splashed in the swash.

Due to the giant boulders lining the shore and the dense jungle that creeps right up to the edge of the coast, you can't hike from beach to beach exclusively along the sand. You have to follow trails that wind back through jungle to get from beach to beach. On our way back to Cabo San Juan, we took a detour off the path and crawled our way out onto a rock outcropping to watch the sunset. Cabo San Juan faces almost exactly due north toward Haiti, so it's not the best place to watch the sunset. But it was still very peaceful to sit on the rocks and watch the sky darken in shades of blues and pale purples while the waves crashed on the rocks.

We made it back to Cabo San Juan just as it was getting quite dark. The campsite was packed. I felt filthy, so braved taking a shower. The bathroom for hundreds of people consisted of two women's toilets and two men's toilets. There were four shower stalls. I waited in line 20 minutes to take a cold shower and it was absolutely worth it. The stalls were partitioned by shoulder height tiled walls. Some people struck up conversations with me over the walls.

We swooped in on a table in the crowded dining area. We ordered dinner and broke out the cards and beers again. Once we were done eating, a mishmash group of Canadians and Australians asked to join us. We merged multiple decks and played a game of BS that got very out of hand.

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The tents here were quite possibly worse than the tents at Don Pedro. The mattress pads were covered in tattered sheets with creepy cartoon babies printed on them. During the day the tents baked in the sun and were unbreathably humid inside. At night they were not only too cold, but the mattress pads were damp and sandy. We wore all our clothes and used t shirts as blankets and balled up sweatshirts as pillows.

We woke up and almost immediately booked it out of the park. We left the campsite at 7:20 am and hiked hard and fast back to the entrance of the park. For the first half of the hike Reid played music from his speakers. It was very experiential listening to good music while hiking through the early morning jungle. We were dripping sweat by the time we got there (a consistent theme for the second half of the trip). Halfway through the hike Reid turned off the music. "No more tunes?" Diego asked. "Let's listen to the birds," Reid suggested.



We hopped on a tram to the entrance of the park and grabbed a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs at a restaurant right off the freeway. We had scrambled eggs for every breakfast on the trip. The scrambled eggs almost always come with diced tomatoes and onions mixed in and are really good. We would usually get a small cup of coffee. In Taganga and Tayrona the eggs were inexplicably served with slices of untoasted wonderbread and the coffee came with copious amounts of sugar.

We asked a guy at the entrance of the park what the best way to get to Cartagena was. He insisted we pay him 60,000 each and he would get us on a charter bus. We had heard that the charter buses stop very frequently and can drive around Baranquilla for hours trying to fill up with passengers. The trip can take all day and be a generally miserable experience. We asked our waitress at the restaurant. She was really nice and explained, "That guy is ripping you off. The charter buses cost way less than that. If you walk down this road about five shops there is a MarSol office. They're more expensive but the best way to get to Cartagena." The guy who was trying to get us to pay him to take the charter bus was furious.

We had heard MarSol was the best way to get from Tayrona to Cartagena. It went direct to Cartagena and seemed safer than other options. We had been without internet and service for the last few days so were unable to research or reserve anything. We even asked at the campsite to borrow their landline but they would not let us. We were mad at ourselves for not knowing that the MarSol office was so close, otherwise we would have booked it when we arrived at Tayrona.

There were only two MarSols leaving for Cartagena that day. One at 10:20 am and one at 4:00 pm. It was 10:00 am and it was our second to last day in Colombia. We had less than 24 hours in Cartagena so we were eager to get there. The lady kept on insisting they only had three seats and that they were unable to fit all four of us. Diego kept suggesting different solutions. We were so desperate we were basically pleading to be let on the MarSol. Thanks to Diego's Spanish skills and the friendly lady's willingness to work with us, we figured out what to do. The bus planned to make a few drop offs and pick ups. The lady figured out, that with some seat shuffle around, they would only be overbooked by one seat for the first part of the trip. Someone would be without a seat for the first part of the trip and we would have to shuffle around seats, but they would let us take the bus. We were thrilled and repeatedly thanked her. So Diego sat in the aisle for the first part of the trip and then eventually Diego, Reid, and I moved to an open three seats in the front row and sat very comfortably for the rest of the trip.

Buses in Colombia frequently will drive around looking for passengers to fill up the buses. People hop on and hop off any bus wherever. There was a Colombian guy standing on the side of the freeway by Baranquilla. The MarSol pulled over, gave the guy a price, and he hopped in the front seat. It's efficient, but disorganized. It must be a skill you learn, knowing which buses to hop on and where to wait and when they'll come by.

We heard the MarSol was supposed to take six hours, but the driver was booking it and we made it in four. The bus was air conditioned and stopped once to let people take a bathroom break.

I had no idea where we were staying once we got to Cartagena. Diego and Reid had booked the hotel and refused to tell us what they had booked. It became a running joke for the trip. They insisted where we were staying was a cockroach infested concrete jail cell with no beds.

Diego told the driver where to drop us off once we got close. "Did you hear that?" Diego asked me. "Yes, but I didn't recognize the name." "Good." The Marsol dumped us off right in front of Hotel Las Americas. My jaw dropped. 

It was a huge ten story resort. It looked like a cruise ship. It was right on the beach. I was afraid to touch anything in the lobby because it all looked so clean and expensive.

The four of us went up to the front desk to check in. We had just come from two days camping in the jungle. We were unshowered, wearing clothes that we had sweat all the way through multiple times and had not washed in a week, our shins were splattered with mud and red bites, and we absolutely reeked. Like I cannot even do justice to how bad we smelled.

The hotel room was clean and air conditioned and the tap produced hot water. There was a huge balcony and real beds with sheets. We dumped our backpacks on the floor, leaving a trail of sand and smell. We aired out some of our clothes on the balcony.

We quickly changed into our bathing suits and went up to the tenth floor to the rooftop infinity pool. We ordered cocktails and appetizers and admired the view of the Caribbean Ocean.

We showered with wonderfully warm water. It was the cleanest I had felt all week. Reid played music from his speakers and we got ready to go out.

We grabbed beers at the hotel bar and charged it to Reid's tab and then took an uber into old town Cartagena. We went straight to dinner at a restaurant called La Cevicheria. I ordered ceviche caliente, which was shrimps in a garlicy mozerella soupy sauce. We ate dinner at a table in the cobblestone alley. There were a lot of buskers. One guy set up a boom box and a girl belly danced.  People offered trays of bracelets. Guys would come up and freestyle rapped in your face. It reminded me mildly a bit of Rome in terms of climate, architecture, and culture.

"Joe made eye contact," I told Reid and Diego when the came back from the bathroom and wanted an explanation for why the rapper was so aggressively asking Joe for money.

We got coffee and walked around the town. It was very warm December evening. It was a Wednesday night and the town was packed. The Christmas lights in the Old Town were very impressive as well. Cartagena was uber touristy. The shells of the buildings were colonial but the shops were Pandoras, Guccis, and bougie restaurants.

Reid and Diego were sitting on a bench. "How are you feeling Kel?" Reid asked me. "Do you want to go out? We're kind of tired."

I was relieved. I wanted so badly to maximize the minimal time we had left in Colombia but I was tired and the ceviche wasn't sitting well.

"I'd be down for a beer or two but I also love sleep," I told them.

So we called an uber back to our hotel, changed, and climbed into our clean, clean sheets. This uber driver was the one who finally explained to us that uber was illegal in Colombia. "If I get pulled over say I'm you're uncle," the uber driver told Diego. "And we just happen to have three white people in the backseat."

The next morning we woke up with a faceful of sunshine.

We at the complimentary hotel breakfast.We changed into our suits and walked out the back of the hotel and on to the beach.

The sand was smooth, damp, and densely packed. It was a slow gradient out into the ocean. The water was very warm and very salty but not very clear. We waded out and body surfed and splashed around. We took a break and sat in some plastic lawn chairs. The equatorial sun is very strong. 

There were tons of people constantly coming up to us to sell everything from fruit, bracelets, and beer. There were a bunch of ladies carrying pails offering massages. Three of them came up to us and started poking our shoulders and trying to pick up our feet. "Demonstration, demonstration," they insisted. "No, gracias," we kept repeating and pulling our limbs out of their grasp. 

There were men renting out beaten up but sturdy boogie boards. Reid tried to haggle with them. "Veinte mil por dos por media hora," Reid offered. "Impossible!" the guy replied. Reid and I walked away. A few minutes later he came back and agreed to our price. The boogie boards were a blast. The waves were on the small side but very catchable and somewhat consistent.

We then went back to the room and showered and packed. 

Our international flight left at 2:30, so we left for the airport at 1:00 as per Reid's suggestion. We made it with plenty of time to spare. When people asked me how my trip was, my answer was always, "amazing." I loved Colombia. It is a truly stunning country.

Diego and I slept the whole flight back.

Bitten, sunburned, scratched, bruised, and possibly mildly concussed we made it back to LA.