Santa Marta

We flew from the cloudy cold Medellin to the roasting hot Santa Marta on the Caribbean Coast. We were finally back wearing our shorts again. We firstly headed to a fishing town called Taganga and stayed in La Provinciana hostel which to my delight had a swimming pool. I went diving the following day with Poseiden dive school. It was a while since I last dived so it took time to get used to what I was supposed to be doing. We went to a reef on the first dive where there was a lot of coral and then on the second dive we saw a load of fish. I really need to learn the different names of the fish as at the moment I just see large fish, small fish and colourful fish. That evening as we watched the sunset on the beach we watched as all of the boats returned from fishing for the day. It was quite scenic!

The following day we headed to Costeno beach which was on the opposite side of Santa Marta. This was nearly like a private beach for the hostels situated along the beach as there was a security man at the entrance only allowing entrance to people who had a reservation. We stayed in a little lodge on the beach and it was amazing opening our lodge door and stepping right out onto the white sand. Unfortunately we were only able to stay one night in this lodge as it was booked up so we moved to a different hostel slightly inland before going to Tayrona National Park ten minutes away. This national park is one of the main places to visit around Santa Marta. After paying at the entrance of the park we walked for an hour an a half through jungle to the first beach. It was quite hot by the time we arrived so we decided to stay at this beach instead of walking further on. The water was nice and cooling and the waves were of a nice height to jump over. It was slightly annoying that there was people trying to sell things to us while we were on the beach but we were just used to Costeno's private beach. It was a nice relaxed day out at the beach though.Read more