Lucie & Rhys´s Honeymoon Adventure: Week 30 - Ciudad del Perdida, Taganga, Cabo de la Vela (Colombia)

We rolled out of bed and out of the hostel at about 11am and headed to the bus station for a bus to Santa Marta. Although we were told the bus was direct and would take 3-4 hours we ended up stopping in Barranquilla and arriving after 5 hours. From Santa Marta we grabbed a taxi to Taganga, a small fishing village overrun with hippies and gringos a couple of kilometres from Santa Marta. The hostel we checked into, La Masia, was more like a boutique hotel with rooms set around a pool area. It was a shame we were so tired after the last night in Cartagena because two of the guys we’d met in Uruguay were at the hostel and a catch up was on the cards – instead we packed ready for the trek to Ciudad del Perdida and got an early night.

We were picked up from our hostel by Magic Tours in a 4WD for a 2 hour drive to Machete (EL Mamey), a village at the Lost City trail head. There were 3 others in our group, a Chilean couple, Carolina and Juan and an Austrian guy, Max. We were incredibly lucky since they all spoke fluent English and our guide couldn’t say a word so they had to act as out translators over the next 4 days. It’s at times like that that you realise how much we miss out on by only having very limited Spanish skills. We arrived at a restaurant in the village run by our guides family for a quick lunch before heading out to start the trek.

The first day of the trek the tracks are mostly in agricultural land and you weave through pastures and banana plantations stopping at various points for watermelon and oranges. We walked for about 3 hours or so and climbed the steepest and longest hill of the trail stopping for a swim at a natural pool and spending the night in hammocks at the Alfredo campsite. The second day you start to weave through the luxuriant foothills of the Sierra Nevada and you start to feel more and more removed from civilisation despite the city only being 23.3km away from the starting point. We walked for about 3 hours to the lunch point where we swam and chilled before walking a further 4 hours to camp, the last hour in torrential rain. Day 3 we had a short walk along the river before arriving at the bottom of the stairs leading to the city where we spent a couple of hours walking around with the guide before heading back along the trail to the day 2 lunch point to camp. The last day, day 4 was a mammoth walk but we were all in good spirits and made it back in double quick time for a swim at the natural pool before lunch in the village. The walk isn’t so difficult and the distance is quite short but the hills are incredibly steep and slippery, there are river crossings to contend with and the heat and humidity means that even when it’s not raining (and we were incredibly lucky with very little rain) you’re still soaked through from the humidity and sweat, very attractive.

Ciudad del Perdida is the ‘lost city’ of the Tayronas. Although the ruins themselves aren’t generally considered to be as spectacular as those found at Machu Picchu, thanks to its geographic isolation the city has maintained its natural allure and has a certain magic to it. One of the greatest appeals was the small number of people making the hike, only 15 people set off on the day we started compared to 500 people on the Inca Trail and not only that but hiking the trail is the only way to reach the ruins so when you arrive it’s not overrun by busloads of tourists who have rocked up on a day trip. We didn’t even see the other group when we were at the ruins are the only sound was of the howler monkeys and tropical birds. The city was built sometime after 500AD and was discovered in 1975 when tomb raiders started looting and scavenging the site. The first tour group travelled to the ruins in 1982. The site consists of more than a thousand circular terraces that once served as the foundations for Tayrona homes and running through the city and down to the Buritaca river valley is a complex network of paved footpaths and steep stone steps (over 1,350 in total) purportedly added later to obstruct the advance of Spanish horsemen.

Other that walking through the forest and marvelling at the colourful birds, poisonous frogs (Rhys spotted two!) and butterflies one of the highlights is bumping into Kogi Indians on the path. They’re not there to sell you bracelets and to have their photos taken for a fee but live there and are just going about their daily business drifting on and off the main path, in their white tunics and brightly coloured bead necklaces and welly boots. The women are relatively shy and a friendly ‘hola’ usually only received a grunt in reply and the men would run past before you even realised they were coming carrying with them their ‘poporos’, a saliva coated gourd they are given at 18 when they wed that holds the lime to activate the coca they constantly chew.

We were all pretty tired and ready for a shower and clean cloths by the time the jeep arrived back in Taganga. We checked back into La Masia and arranged to meet Juan, Carolina and Max for dinner in one of the restaurants on the beach road before buying a few beers to drink in the bay.

The next day Tim was up early to scuba dive – he’s done hundreds of dives and although Taganga doesn’t offer the most spectacular diving it’s another box ticked and he saw turtles and barracuda and was almost sick from the hangover and boat rocking combinationn. Me and Rhys spent the day in the hostel by the pool. That night Juan, Carolina and Max stopped by at our hostel for a drink and we spent the night playing pool and drinking happy hour mojitos.

The next day we started our adventure to reach the most northern point on the South American continent. After a cab from Taganga to Santa Marta we caught a bus to Riohacha. Although Lonely Planet said it was 4 hours away we were there within 2.5 hours which was a bonus since we’d left the hostel an hour later than intended and had just realised that the trip ahead was a lot longer than we first thought. Once in Riohacha one of the guys from the bus company called a collective to come and pick us up for the hour long drive to Uribia. We waited for 20 minutes for a fourth person to join us in the car before deciding we had to get a move on and paid the extra fee for the driver to take just the three of us. In Uribia our driver dropped us off at the point for the 4WD’s to Cabo de la Vela and we were piled in, Tim in the back with about 12 other people and me and Rhys in the front with a lady with a baby and the driver. Thankfully most of the people had climbed out before Cabo and we had enough room to breathe. The landscape was stunning, it became more and more arid and deserty with the most beautiful colours as the sun started to drop low in the sky. We pulled up in Cabo and checked in to a basic hostel with air con but no running water right on the beach. It felt pretty remote, like we’d actually made it off the gringo trail. The journey was nowhere near as arduous as we’d been lead to believe and was worth the effort.