Santa Marta, Colombia – June 22nd – 24th, 2017

Leave it to Mom to make friends with some locals on the bus to Santa Marta. With the extent of her Spanish being, “Vaamooos” (meant to mean “we go,” but said with a Texas drawl... why, with a Texas drawl? No idea.) the conversation was hilarious for both us and the local kids. Unfortunately, our new friends got off the bus at the mid-way town and our free entertainment was over, leaving us to listen to the same Colombian dance music CD on repeat for the next 3 hours. For the record (pun intended), the Colombian music is actually quite good in comparison to the music in Asia, but anything on repeat will get old after a while and it’s not difficult to compete with screeching ear bleeding horribleness.

Once in Santa Marta, we settled in, got some grub (with delicious smoothies), and spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the vibrant city. We visited the ATM, Museo del Oro, a handicraft market, and the local beach. At the Museo del Oro (gold museum), we saw gold (obviously) and learned about indigenous history, the suffering of the indigenous people thanks to the Spanish, and Simon Bolivar – the guy that has a park and statue in essentially every city in South America. Back at the hotel, we cooled off in the pool, relaxed in the hammocks, and eventually dragged ourselves next door for some delicious Arabian food. While Indian food is readily available in Asia, Arabian food can be found most everywhere throughout Colombia. YAY falafel!

Santa Marta! We wore Mom out! 

The coast at Santa Marta where a friendly local helped Mom out of the ocean.

The next day, we woke up early and arranged a boat tour to Playa Cristal in Tayrona National Park (to be fair, I should say Mom arranged our tour with Anna, her new receptionist friend, to whom she asked every question imaginable – I’m surprised she didn’t come back to the room knowing the meaning of life). With a few hours to spare before the tour, we attempted to find a place to drop off laundry. What we found instead was some random person’s living room on the 4^th floor of a residential building with a woman who’s Spanish we did not understand. Needless to say, we did not feel comfortable leaving over half of our worldly possessions with this random person who muddled all of her words together, so after grabbing some groceries, we returned to the hotel and grudgingly paid the premium for laundry service.

Our tour to Playa Cristal started with a taxi ride and then an amusement park-esque boat ride! There were so many waves, that the fiberglass boat full of tourists performed a series of jumps and belly flops over the rough seas. It was exhilarating! Unlike some of our other theme park-esque public transportation experiences (see Nepal bus ride from hell), this one actually ended in a timely manner, and after about 45 minutes we were chilaxin’ in paradise… well paradise crawling with tourists (but at least most of the tourists were Colombian). We spent the next few hours eating our packed lunch full of exotic Colombian fruits, swimming, and snorkeling. The fish and coral life was surprisingly decent (minus the crappy snorkel masks) and we were able to put our inadequate fish ID skills to good use to recognize trumpet fish, parrot fish, angel fish, and damsel fish. Back at the port in the afternoon, we spent 15 minutes attempting to convince the tour company that our return taxi transportation was included (go figure… taxis are my arch nemesis). After adequately pestering the tour company, they agreed to pay the return taxi fare and we arrived in Santa Marta just in time to find every restaurant closed at 5pm. After being in Colombia for over 3-weeks, we are still completely oblivious to typical opening hours, all we know is they are very limited! Now famished at 6pm, we settled on an ex-pat owned restaurant where we chatted with the young Canadian owner while waiting for our delicious tacos!     

Playa Cristal at Tayrona National Park. The avocado was the size of Andy's head... meaning the pit was the size of his brain???