Sunday, 23 September 2012

To the coast

It´s been a while since the last update, and now I am in an internet cafe made for people with no knees.

After a long bus trip with new friend Sara from Switzerland we finally got to Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast, we stayed a night The Dreamer hostel where the only beds left were in an 8 bed dorm. The dreamer is full of typical backpackers lazing about next to the pool in hammocks, it´s OK but not my cup of tea these days so we headed over to nearby Taganga to check out scuba diving places and accommodation for the next few days, we found both at Tayrona Dive Center where the very friendly but forgetful reception lady Sofia made us feel welcome. Sara wanted to do her open water diving course and I wanted to continue with rescue diver course, for taking a course we got the accommodation 33% cheaper. Santa Marta´s a dump, the best thing about it is the Bueno Vista shopping mal as it has a proper coffee at Juan Valdez, which is also 5 mins walk from The Dreamer.

Taganga in contrast is a nice little fishing village just over the hill from Santa Marta, everything is walking distance and there are lots of nice restaurants on the beach with the days catch on the menu. Our room at Tayrona Dive Center was very nice, big and clean plus en-suite  My friend Emma from Bogota was coming down also at the weekend to do some diving and on our first days diving we met Ruben from Belgium also doing his Open Water and staying at the dive center, so it was shaping up to be an enjoyable week with lots of new friends. The dive center has no training pool, so Sara´s first ever diving experience was in the open water with minimal instruction, I also has not been diving for quite a while and had asked for a refresher course, but it was more a case of looking how the equipment went together and then straight into the water. Ok, this is diving Colombian style. Emma had booked a different dive center - Posieden, as we had originally looked into that one but when myself and Sara checked it out in person the girl on the counter didn´t seem to know much about diving. Later though it would appear they were a bit more professional than Tayrona and they did have a training pool but the accommodation was a bit basic.
Still there was a lovely restaurant right upstairs from our accommodation that was rather like an Asterix hut and very nicely made for something in Colombia.
Emma did a night dive and some fun dives and after 3 days Sara and Ruben had their open water certifications and I had my Rescue Diver certification. The Rescue course is not fun as such as its mostly about techniques for helping other divers in trouble in the surface or during a dive, so lots of drills and not much actual diving and one whole day in the classroom doing an EFR, which is a first aid course.
It was sad to see Emma go back to Bogota and Ruben go as well, but also so nice to have Sara to travel with for a while.

After Taganga we went to Tayrona NP, which is a nice beach area, and the place on the front of the guide book for Colombia my Mum got out from the library. It´s a nice unspoiled place, the beaches are nice but the currents are strong and some beaches are dangerous for swimming due to steep drop offs and waves. The accommodation inside the park is either cheap hammocks or camping, or expensive Cabanas for hundreds of dollars a night. The thing is after 5.30pm its dark and there are a million mosquitoes  plus its very hot and everyone wants a shower at the same time. So we didn´t stay in the park but visited for a day and stayed just outside in a very nice Cabana called Yuluka hostel with a pool and restaurant for a fraction of the equivilant inside the park, the owner was very helpful and drove us to the park entrance after we had eaten lunch. Plus that evening there was a massive thunder storm so I think our Cabana with AC and en-suite was much better than a hammock and 10 other people.



The next day we took the bus to Cartegena, a pretty walled city, where we wanted to do some more diving. Diving is much more expensive in Cartegena, a third to half as much as you´d pay in Taganga. The place the guide books all talk about is Isla Rosario, but apparently you can´t dive there anymore because it´s been spoilt, but its actually part of a chain of islands just of the coast, we were taken to one called Isla Baru which was fantastic. The first dive was a wreck dive with 2 wrecks, the first wreck you descended into the bowels of the ship and up into an air pocket, where you took your regulator out and breathed air 15 m below the surface, you then continued to the next wreck, where we went into the wreck and then through a dark narrow corridor before coming out of the other end of the wreck.

Unfortunately some time that afternoon I ate something that didn´t agree with me and had food poisoning which lasted all the night and the next day, of course we had to travel the next day and I couldn´t eat anything, I eventually managed to eat some dry crackers before we caught our flight to Cali where Sara had convinced me to go Kite Surfing on Calima lake. I was pathetically weak like one is after a bout of food poisoning  but was very thankful to have a friend with me to carry my bag and generally look after me. At the Airport Sara went to get some cash out and found both her cards didn´t work, verdammta toeff!!! We arrived in Cali and had to stay one night in a shitty hostel and than had to argue over the price and the room was one bed less than the booking, but I did manage to book a flight out of Colombia to Lima. Sara leaves on the 27th, I will be so sad without my Swiss travel buddy, still at least I have a new friend in Europe I can go skiing with.

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