Bogota Blogger

The main reason we went to the Coast near Santa Marta in Semana Santa was to go to Cabo San Juan in Parque Natural Tayrona.  Cabo means Cape, so I guess the name translates as Cape of Saint John the Guide.  San Juan is a sort of remote beach in the national park that takes a little effort to get to, so is in much better shape and more natural than most of the public beaches.  It’s also located in a national park.

To get to San Juan, we took a “taxi” from the Market (Mercado) in Santa Marta to the entrance of the Parque Tayrona (about 45 minutes).  This is assuming that any vehicle that hires out to drive people places can be called a taxi.  Then we rode in the back of a truck for about 20 minutes to the beginning of the trail to the beaches.  Here you see a photo of both the taxi that dripped us off and the truck waiting to take us to the next point.  At this point we could have hired a burro to carry our things, but we had left some of our luggage at La Casa de Felipe in Taganga, so we each had just our backpacks.  The walk/hike to the beach is just under two hours, and is beautiful, through palm forests, and not too difficult. 

The first beach you come to is called Arrecife, and it’s where most of the people decide to stay.  It’s beautiful and wild, but no swimming is allowed because the surf is too rough.  There are campgrounds and hammocks for rent, and one or more restaurants.

We kept walking, and eventually come to the next beach called La Piscina (the Swimming Pool), so named because there is a reef that makes it look almost like a gigantic pool.  There’s some camping here too, and a small restaurant.  La Piscina is maybe 15 minutes from Arrecife.

We continued, and eventually got to Cabo San Juan, about another 15 minutes walk.  Incredibly beautiful, two crescent-shaped beaches with the cape between.  At Cabo San Juan you can pitch a tent or rent a hammock (or rent space to hang your own hammock).    There are outdoor showers, a few toilets, and a restuarant (of sorts).   We had heard before arriving that it might be full, but as it turns out, that’s an impossibility.  These guys will hang a hammock from your legs while you’re sleeping if it means they can squeeze somebody else in.

We arranged to rent hammocks for a couple nights.  Because it was Semana Santa, the place was booming, and the hammocks had been strung up about two feet apart from each other.  Jose and I were lucky, actually, to be able to get hammocks next to each other.  The hammocks were so close that, if I rocked in the middle of the night, I would bump into the British girl sleeping next to me.

I counted something like 160 tents pitched, and around 50 hammocks.  So, there might have been somewhere around 350 people at Cabo San Juan while we were there, and when my friend Mark had gone in January there were more like 40 people there.  It was a much different experience, I imagine.

For your stuff, you can buy a little (tiny, actually) lock for $10,000 pesos (about $4.25), and then use one of the wooden lockers if any are available.  This is a rip-off, but we felt like we needed to do it, since the place was so crowded that week.

The restaurant had a kind of odd way of operating.  You would look at the menu, and choose your meal (no choice of what that included–each package was all or nothing) and pay at a little card table.  You get a number, your order goes in, and when it’s ready, your number is called.  That might  be an hour or two later–no way of telling.

The food wasn’t very good, and was actually a little on the expensive side for a place far from a big city and of only mediocre quality.  We had been warned that the park was expensive, so we had at least brought out own bags of water and some fruit.   But, my advice to anybody headed to San Juan would be to bring all your own food, and rent the burro to deliver it for you.   You could get by with peanut butter, crackers, fruit, that kind of thing, and save money (even after paying the burro) and also eat a little better by taking care of yourself.  The people in the restaurant also had just a little bit of attitude, as was confirmed by Maria (at Los Baguettes de Maria) when we returned to Taganga.  So, better not to deal with them too much.

The beaches are gorgeous!  And, you can keep walking through some woods and over soem rocks to get to more and more crescent-shaped beaches.  The farther you go, the less crowded.  There’s very little litter, quite a change from what you find on most public beaches in Colombia.  The waves are a little bigger (but not a lot bigger) than what I am used to on the east coast of the US, so it’s a little more fun to play in the water.  But, unlike most Caribbean beaches, the water isn’t bathwater-warm.  I guess that’s because you’re not on an island.  It isn’t cold, though, either, so it’s very refreshing to play around in.

There are also ruins of an old Indian town about a two hour hike up the mountain.   The town is called Pueblito (Little Town)–I’ll write another post about that later.

I would recommend this trip to anybody, with two specific pieces of advice:  one, as I said before, you’re better off taking your own food.  Two:  go almost any time at all except Semana Santa.  Even at Christmas time, when all Colombians have time off, the crowds are not so dense, because Christmas vacation is more spread out.  But  Tayrona is a must-see in Colombia, I would say, and San Juan is a great place to spend a few days totally away from it all.  No internet, no cell phone reception–just hanging out on the beach and maybe reading a book in your hammock.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 8:14 am and is filed under Out of Town Trips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.