Santa Marta & Minca

To give everyone a break from hosting us in Medellin we headed off for a two week trip to the Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Juli has travelled in this area before, but only for short periods, and after a couple of weeks of learning Spanish grammar I was keen to practice/escape. Suffice to say we were both excited to board our flight on 9^th February from Medellin to our first stop, Santa Marta.

Arriving at our Airbnb just south of Santa Marta itself, our first impression was the wind! We just happened to visit during the windiest time of the year in Santa Marta and it had recently blown out one of the big glass panels in the reception area of the building in which we were staying, which had been replaced with slightly dodgy metal mesh. This was a sign of things to come. We made our way past the ‘sales office’ where the computers were covered in plastic sheeting and up onto the 9^th floor to find our apartment. Our corridor had a sort of apocalyptic feel given it ended with a short hop onto the roof of a very much unfinished adjoining block, and there weren’t any hand-rails or walls in the staircase. The apartment itself was nice and had an excellent view of the beach, but we would discover over the coming days the block was very unfinished and was pretty much abandoned – there was even still a massive crane in the pool which had been left to swing around in the wind! The photos give you an idea… At night the wind howling through empty floors was slightly disconcerting, but we didn’t let this prevent us from enjoying ourselves.

We spent three days relaxing on the beach, eating seafood for lunch and watching the sunsets, before deciding to bail out a day early to squeeze in a trip to Minca, a 45 minute drive up into the hills above Santa Marta. 3 stars – we will try not to be catfished by Airbnb again!

We only passed through Santa Marta itself as there isn’t a huge amount there for tourists and lacks a bit of the charm and wealth of nearby Cartagena, most people stay at nearby beaches as we did. The city centre is mayhem with really densely packed shop fronts, street vendors and lines of stationary traffic. We changed buses and hustled through the chaos with our huge backpacks and were happy when we’d made it out of the intense heat onto the bus.

Minca is a small hill-top town in the Sierra Nevada mountain range and has become a chilled out place for backpackers to stay and explore the surrounding jungle. We stopped two nights in this amazing hostel which was a nice change from Santa Marta… Our accommodation was a little hut made from bamboo sitting up on stilts and it had an fantastic balcony with views back down to the coast. Aside from relaxing in hammocks, drinking coffee on the balcony and chatting with our American neighbours, we undertook our first two hikes of the trip to two nearby waterfalls, first to Pozo Azul and then the next day to the more well-known Marinka waterfall. Both were impressive and you are able to swim in both, which we did as the water was not too cold, but we preferred Pozo Azul as it’s a series of smaller waterfalls with fewer people and lots of brightly coloured birds to spot in the trees. In Minca itself we ate twice at the number one restaurant on TripAdvisor which was a really good Italian. The second time this proved to be a particularly good decision as there was a power cut in the town and this was one of the few restaurants with its own generator – making for a more romantic Valentine’s day! Slowly others wandered into this lighthouse and we chatted to a couple from the UK whilst sipping one of Colombia’s only pale ales brewed by the Cerveceria Nevada located just outside of Minca – just edging out Juli as the best thing about the evening… just kidding 😉 The next day we headed back down to Santa Marta so we could catch the bus further up the coast to Playa Costena, the subject of our next blog!

Next blog: Playa Costeno and Cartagena