January 12, 2024
On Tuesday we took a tour to Tayrona Park which is on the Northern coast of Colombia. It was a dud as these things go. As always, I was happy to do the excursion because I want to experience as much of this stuff as possible, but this was a mediocre way to spend a day and that may be generous.
It all began with a bus pickup just outside the marina. Originally scheduled for 6:30-7:00, they called at 5:50 in the morning to say they would pick us up at 6:09. Well that got the heart pumping (while still lying in bed asleep). We got on the bus at around 6:15 and then made our way to Tayrona park with a LOT of other people. There was no ‘English’ tour, so we went with the Spanish tour and it was lucky that we ran into another couple from Calgary, where the boyfriend was actually from Mexico and spoke Spanish and English. We survived, but it was a lot of missed cues throughout the day.
In any case, the primary objective of this tour is to march you for about 120 minutes into a beach on the ocean front that is packed full of people. I say march because there are hundreds of people making the trek, all within 5-7 feet of each other, and you spend all of your time looking at the feet of the person in front of you trying not to step on them. The path itself is really (really) muddy and is used by all the tourists and the horses.
The good news is that we saw a monkey, which I presume was wild and a beach, because we have never seen either of those before. Wait, no we have seen a beach before; just the monkey was kinda new. To be fair, at the end of the walk we also found a LOT of bars happy to reward us with a beverage despite the preceding death march.
I would like to tell you how pretty the beach was but I just arrived from Aruba and it doesn’t compare. As well, I have been to the Bahamas where you can find whole islands to yourself if you have a boat. Worth noting that Tayrona park has a beach at the end of a 90 minute walk (2 hours to the one pictured below) and it will be jam packed with people.
When we arrived at the penultimate beach it became clear the scale of this excursion. Below is a picture of some of the tents setup for tourists staying overnight. You simply can’t fit them all into one picture without a drone shot.
If you can’t tell, walking back out was looking like a crappy way to spend an afternoon so I suggested the horses for a ride out and Jinhee and I paid a quite reasonable sum to let horses do all the work.
There are no pictures of me getting thrown from my horse, but my steed got stuck in the mud and had to kneel to save himself. I went over his shoulders into the mud. That was fun. Anyway, get right back on and off we go. I might have saved myself but I brought a backpack full of stuff to enjoy photos and swimming and reading on the beach and well, all that weight meant I wasn’t staying on the horse once he kneeled.
Jinhee on the other hand did better. It was her first time on a horse and she stayed on. So she has bragging rights for some time to come.
On Wednesday I took the time to revisit the route through the park by bike, riding 100km and seeing the road much slower. It was a wonderful ride and I had a much better opportunity to see all the sights along the way (this was not the mud path into the beach, just the highway through the park).
Today we finally received our paperwork for the boat/Colombia and were able to move on from Santa Marta so now we are en route to Cartagena (anchored in Puerto Valero) and will arrive tomorrow.
Finally, I would like to make a note about the passing of an old friend, Marina Mooney this week. Marina and I were part of a little physics clique at Mt. Allison in the mid 1980’s and she was funny, kind, smart and she is the first of our little group of friends to pass away. I think it is a sign of age creeping up on all of us. I have spoken with her just once or twice in the last 25 years, which is a missed opportunity on my part but her laugh still rings in my ears and her smile is still seared into my memory. My condolences to her husband Jeff Richardson.