Our greedy Frenchman turned 35 last May. An important milestone in one’s life. Now’s the time to stop pretending you’re still 25 and accept the natural ageing process of life: you’re a thirtysomething!
Stefan wanted to organise a fun and unique celebration in Cartagena for his French beau, which would make this milestone truly memorable.
Cartagena is Colombia’s most visited city, famous for its UNESCO listed old town. Back in the 1500s, it was a major trading port and the main gateway into South America for the Spanish, who used it as the base to ship their gold back home. As such, it became a tempting target for pirates in the Caribbean. Sir Francis Drake was one particular British pirate who led a huge siege in 1586 against the Spaniards. The Spanish responded by building the fort to guard the town which you can still see today.
A few miles from the coast are a group of beautiful islands – the Rosario islands – where just a few centuries ago, you could imagine Captain Jack Sparrow-type pirates fighting those dashing handsome Spaniards right on these shores. There’s even an island called Pirate Island.
Today, the Rosario islands are popular for beach partying and for relaxing in one of the many secluded white sandy beaches. The islands are located within 1-2 hours from Cartagena and can be visited on a day trip by boat. As we absolutely love cruising the seas and relaxing on secluded white sandy beaches as much as we love fantasising about Pirates of the Caribbean, this made for the perfect present for our birthday boy.
By Stefan Arestis – Full Story at the Nomadic Boys
Street Art in Cali, Colombia[/caption]
The place I was most excited to visit in Colombia after Las Lajas sanctuary was Cali, Colombia’s third largest city and the salsa capital of the world. Last year, when I traveled through Colombia for nine weeks, I always saw myself stopping in Cali for a week or two to take salsa lessons – it’s almost a compulsory ritual for solo female travelers in Colombia it seems. You go to Cali and learn how to salsa. But then I flew to Mexico on a whim and never made it to Cali.
My excitement about visiting Cali faded quickly, however, when I read the following section in Wikitravel’s Stay Safe section:
I held the little bamboo cup with both hands and quickly gulped down the thick, dark liquid – Ayahuasca. The bitter taste in my mouth was repellent, and I tried to wash it down with some water as soon as I sat back down on the wooden floor of the ceremonial hut in the Colombian Amazon.
“You should be feeling the effect of the ayahuasca in about twenty minutes,” the shaman named William told us in Spanish. “If you don’t feel anything then, I’ll give you some more.”
He then pointed to my left, where on one side of the hut, the wooden wall was only chest high, above that it was open until the ceiling, like a window, but without glass.
“You’re very likely to throw up when the ‘medicine’ begins to work. If you feel it coming, throw up out the window.”
He then turned his headlamp off, the only source of light in the hut, and the four of us were suddenly sitting in the pitch black dark, cross-legged, waiting for Ayahuasca, the ‘medicine’, as William called it, to work.
I’ll admit it: Bogotá was the place I was the least excited to visit in Colombia. I even almost skipped it because I had read so many horror stories of muggings and I hadn’t found any articles in which people were raving about the city. It seemed like most people were rushing through Bogotá, hitting up the most important museums and moved on to the next place.
There were only two reasons that made me want to go to Bogotá: I had heard that it was the city with the best street art scene in all of Colombia and it happens to be home to El Theatron, the largest gay club in all of South America. I had to check it out, even though that meant leaving my hotel after dark, a thought I found somewhat daunting before I even arrived in Colombia’s capital.
Once I got to Bogotá, however, my fear vanished almost immediately. The day of my arrival I was already meeting friends in Plaza del Chovorro De Quevedo in La Candelaria, Bogotá’s oldest neighborhood, which I had heard wasn’t very safe at night. Apparently this plaza is where the city was founded in 1538, and the surrounding neighborhood with its still intact and well-preserved Spanish-colonial buildings quickly became my favorite neighborhood in town. It was a drastic difference from the shiny office towers in the Chapinero neighborhood, where I was initially staying. In La Candelaria, I found myself surrounded by small, one-story, colorful Spanish-colonial houses, there were still some cobble-stone streets, and there were several colonial churches. I could barely put my camera down on my strolls through the neighborhood!
Confession: I almost didn’t get on my plane to Colombia because in the days leading up to my departure, I got scared. I spent the last few hours before my flight departure in agony, going back and forth about canceling my flight. I had just read this article:
Solo Female Going to Colombia? Just Don’t.
I came across it the very day before my flight, and reading the headline alone made me wonder if I should read the article or not. It wasn’t just that article: a few days earlier during a travel meetup, a friend of mine offhandedly mentioned to me that her friend recently got back from Colombia where she and her friend had being robbed at gunpoint and lost everything.
I was scared, if not terrified.
Was I crazy for traveling to Colombia as a solo female traveler, just as many family members and friends suggested I was when I told them I had purchased a plane ticket to Cartagena? Even though the country has gotten considerably safer in recent years, there is still a government warning for travelers to Colombia in place.
I admit that until the very minute we hopped on the bus to Palomino, we weren’t sure if we had made the right decision to go there, and if we would actually enjoy the small beach town. We had read in travel guides and blogs that the current was too strong to allow for swimming in the ocean, and our hostel of choice, the Dreamer Hostel, was fully booked because we had waited too long to make a reservation.
However, when I saw photos of snow-capped mountains just behind a palm-fringed, white-sand beach, it looked too magical to skip.
So we ended up booking a bungalow right by the beach – pricey, compared to the Dreamer, but we came here for the beach after all, so we wanted to be as close to the beach as possible. And that was the only good thing about the place: that it was a beachfront property.
Minca wasn’t in my original travel plans for Colombia, but as we were leaving Cartagena for Santa Marta, one of my Instagram followers remarked that I had to visit Minca. I had never even heard of Minca but a quick Google search revealed that it was a small mountain village close to Santa Marta. The pictures looked lovely, travelers were talking about waterfall hikes, good vegetarian food, local coffee farms, and a giant hammock with mountain views – that’s all we needed to hear to convince us to make the detour. Plus: Cooler temperatures would be welcome after Santa Marta, which seemed to be even hotter and more humid than Cartagena.
The ride to Minca was quick – within an hour of driving up a winding mountain road we found ourselves in the village, and within another hour, we had explored it entirely – yes, that’s how small it is.
The chillier weather that had been mentioned was an illusion: it was still 86 degrees! We did the only sensible thing: we grabbed our swimsuits and started the hike to the first of two waterfalls I wanted to visit, both of which were within walking distance of the village (but in different directions).
I loved Cartagena, but phew, that city was hot! To escape the heat, we decided to head further east along the coast. We had heard glorious tales about breathtaking Caribbean beaches – exactly what we needed to cool off.
One place that came up over and over again in travel guides and on blogs was Tayrona National Park, one of Colombia’s most popular national parks. The park stretches along the Caribbean coast and into the foothills of the mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, covering 12,000 hectares of land and 3,000 hectares of sea.
Tayrona has several beaches, but is also famous for its wildlife and jungle hikes, including a full-day hike to El Pueblito, the ruins of a small historic village similar to the nearby ‘Lost City’ (which is the five day trek through the jungle that I set off on a few days later).