Tayrona

After leaving the lonely and lovely Guajira, our next stop was Taganga, a small fishing village that has been overrun by tourists looking for parties and drugs and beaches.  It’s also used as a base for visiting the nearby national parks of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and Tayrona. 

The Sierra Nevada is a small mountain range in area but reaches 5,700m in altitude.  In fact, it’s the highest coastal range in the world.  The southern slopes of the park is home to la Ciudad Perdida.  This Lost City was the capital of the Tayrona civilization, a pre-Hispanic indigenous group and is now in ruins like its more famous Incan and Mayan counterparts in Peru and Mexico, albeit less impressive.   The real draw is the three-day hike (one-way) through the jungle to get there.  Unfortunately, the upper reaches are off-limits; the drug-growing indigenous are likely to kill trespassers.

Tayrona is perhaps the most-visited natural national park in the country.  It’s a Colombian juxtaposition of mountains, rainforest, and Caribbean beaches.  And it has monkeys.  And giant ants.  So you can see, it’s something like paradise.  Many travelers come to Colombia and spend the majority of their time bouncing between these three sites. 

Within seconds of stepping out of the taxi in Taganga, we were accosted from all sides by the hawkers hawking hotels, hostels, posadas, guided tours, boat excursions, restaurants…  I thought we’d suffocate under their weight.  Right after we passed the hawker gauntlet, we met another.  An army of dreadlocked hippies selling the same woven bracelets and necklaces.  The two groups were like a dozen piglets clamoring over half a dozen teats.

In the hyper-touristic sites and cities, the locals in the tourist industry equate white-skinned Europeans and North Americans with money.  Like walking wallets.  And in most of the cases, I think they’re right.  Most of the travelers we meet find no qualm paying overpriced hotels and taxis and guided tours.  We are not like most travelers.  To be able to travel for a year, a year and a half, we try to think and spend more like the regular locals.    

Thus we arrived at a camping ground while pondering which activities we would like to partake in.  At the camping ground, we met Rafael, a Colombian with a drooping Snidely Whiplash moustache and the front half of his skull shaved.  He tried to convince us to visit Tayrona.  “Hay que !,” he said.  You have to go !  Normally, the entrance fee is roughly $35 per person + $8 camping fee per night, which is not a price we spend lightly.  “Honestly,” continues Rafael, “it’s really worth the price.”  “You paid ?” I asked foolishly.  “Well, no, but you should definitely pay.”

Then he told us about one particular entrance to the park.  It was possible to avoid the park guards by walking in a creek around the park office and reach the beach without paying.  So now, we were heavily leaning toward going, by the super secret camino.  But he then added that it takes six hours of hiking to get to the beach.  With nowhere to leave our packs, we would have carry the weight over steep mountains with the heat and humidity of the rainforest air.  Hmmm, maybe not.  And to make matters worse, the guards give you a bracelet when you pay…and often check to see if the tourists are wearing them.  So, perhaps not.  Seemed like a hassle either way.

So, what’s plan B ?  Some locals at Taganga told us about a waterfall and several swimming holes along a creek in the mountains.  Cost : $1.50.  That’s more like it.  So we went there, spent the day there, and saw plenty of locals and not a single tourist.  And we loved it.  The water was perfectly refreshing on a hot day.  And it’s always hot along the coast. 

So we missed two of the biggest sites in the country…big deal.  The money we didn‘t spend means we can travel for another month in Bolivia or Paraguay.  And we have a very good reason to come back and see the rest of Colombia, some day, when we have more money.