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| local man |
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| street empandas |
After
5 days in Cartagena, we decided its time to move onto a different place. We took a “4 hour”, bus ride, ended up being
6 hours (not so bad) from Cartagena to
Santa Marta, which is along Colombia's Caribbean coast.. Nice air conditioned
shuttle bus (can't ask for more). We got
dropped off at the place we chose to stay beforehand but quickly realized there
was nothing around, that it wasn't exactly in the center of Santa Marta. We ended up taking a taxi to a place closer
to the center of Santa Marta with more shops, restaurants, street carts,
nightlife etc. We decided to stay here
for 2 nights, its more of a lay over
spot to go to the Parque Nacional
Natural Tayrona (National Park of Tayrona)
As
soon as we arrived we headed out grabbed some empandas from a street cart,
where he plopped down some white plastic chairs and we ate in the street with
the other locals. We went out around
11:30pm to explore the nightlife and ended up at La Puerta(a popular bar for
locals and travelers) and found a plaza along the way with lots of people
outside drinking, eating, and going to the nearby clubs.
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hiking to el cabo san juan
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The
next day we walked around the city, not much to see here in Santa Marta, we
walked along the beach and enjoyed some of the local dishes of arepas,
empandas, jfruit uices, etc. We also
headed to the grocery store to prepare for our stay in the Parque Nacional
Natural Tayrona, because there isn't many options there for food. We bought canned tuna, snacks, fruit, snorkeling gear, bug spray and
a flashlight. We headed back to our
place to pack up a smaller pack for our 2 day stay in the park, because we were
going to leave our larger packs since we had to hike to the beach and then we'd
come back to Santa Marta for our packs after our trip.
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camping grounds
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Monday
morning we woke up bright and early at 6:30am took a local bus about an hour to
the entrance of the park paid the entrance fee of $18 each and started our hike
to the beach of El Cabo San Juan, which was the best beach in the park we had
read. We had heard that the hike to El Cabo would be about an hour and a half,
we figured it would be a nice easy walk.
Boy were we wrong. It took us
about 2 hours to get there and it was a very very hard hike. We were climbing huge hills, rocks, going
down steep steps, sliding down dirt hills, moving out of the way of horses
passing by, all in 90 degree heat carrying our belongings and food. It definitely was not the easy walk we were
expecting.
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| journal writing |
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| Adrienne |
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| Tayrona Park
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When
we arrived we rented our “beds” (hammocks) on the beach under a hut, and headed
for the beach. We hung out here for 3
days 2 nights it was very relaxing and peaceful and the hammocks weren't too
bad to sleep in. We walked to different
beaches and hung out and caught up on sleep since lights were out by 10pm. We woke up early every morning so we got some
good full days on the beach.
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