Palomino, Colombia – July 2nd – 4th, 2017

After the hellish experience we had just endured, we were all ready for some downtime. In Palomino, a small touristy town on the coast, we sprung for a nice guesthouse in Palomino ($30/night for a triple room – big spenders!). Ironically, Chez Oliv (our guesthouse) was owned by a French ex-pat high-school teacher. He and my mom, also a French-born high-school teacher, enjoyed talking about the school system in Colombia (in French). While it was a relief for her to be able to speak and understand the language, it confused me. I understood the French, but kept accidentally responding in an awkward Spanish / French / English mashup: "Si. Oui. NO Si!? Ahhh sorry!"

Chez Oliv in Palomino. Still no hot water showers, but that's standard.

Although a tourist town has its downsides, the accessibility to comfort food and western hospitality more than makes up for it… especially after spending the last week sleeping in hammocks and eating strictly arepas, queso, and pasta without sauce (aka plain boiled noodles). In an outdoor restaurant with live acoustic music, we enjoyed pizza, lasagna (with sauce), and a veggie sandwich with a large side of brownie and ice cream! The next day, we chowed on banana pancakes, fresh fruit juice (the fruit in Colombia is unmatched by the way), and more pizza. Fair to say, we did not go hungry during our short stay.  

Food and lazy cats in Palomino. There was even a Vegan Burger bike vendor!

Apart from sleeping and lounging around at the guesthouse, we also walked the beach and went tubing down the nearby jungle clad river. To get to the river, we each hired a motor-taxi which transported us and the inner-tube to the drop off location. Quite obviously, the safest way to achieve this was to place both people in the inner-tube hole, that way if you fall off on the single-track dirt path through the jungle, you’ll fall together and have a nice donut around your torso to cushion the fall. The river float was a lot of fun, except for the fact that my tube seemed to have a magnetic attraction to the foliage, giving me plenty of opportunities to make friends with spiders and miscellaneous bugs. The river ended at the ocean, where we dropped the tubes off with the tube collecting child and walked back to Chez Oliv.

The views around Palomino. 

We got up early the next morning, had a traditional breakfast of arepas, eggs, and tinto (the “coffee” drank by locals that essentially consists of the reject beans that the rest of the world won’t import), and hopped on the first bus we found heading to Santa Marta. After stowing our luggage under the bus, we realized that it was not a tourist bus, but the local bus. Taking the local bus is really no big deal (it is, after all, very budget friendly), but the downside is that you are crammed in like sardines and worse than that, the bus literally stops every 3 feet to let someone on or drop someone off. In hindsight, it should have been obvious that it was a local bus based on the interior, which resembled a run-down school bus with handles for standing passengers. A second give-away could easily have been the deluxe charter buses that passed us on the road while we waited for the bus to fill up. The 50-mile journey ended up taking over two and a half hours. Oops.