Taganga :: Colombia
Now with less kidnappings by Marxist rebels!
Places: Taganga & Ciudad Perdida.
Coolest thing I did: Managed to get clear of my tour group on the second last day and pretty much run down the trails rather than walking them. It's been ages since I did any running at all and I miss the endorphins.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: Right up until 1903 there was no such country as Panama, it had been part of Colombia since independence from the Spanish.
Having now passed through the town of Santa Marta a couple of times I'm glad I decided to base myself in Taganga, it really looked like nothing more than a big town, whereas Taganga has converted itself over the last few years from a sleepy fishing village to a full blown backpacker slum. It's in a lovely little bay but unfortunately, being a working fishing village the beach is covered in boats and the sand is stained by marine diesel and studded with broken house bricks and such. There is a much nicer beach about 20 mins and a "random" police search for drugs away, called Playa Grande where you can swim in water like warm glass. They have built a lot of restaurants on the beach, but it is shaded by a few trees and the menu in most of these places involves someone bringing out a tray of fresh fish for you to pick from. They then bring it back about half an hour later on top of fried bananas and coconut rice. It's pretty hard to beat. The only downside is the sand is also fairly dirty looking at Playa Grande too, so you shouldn't expect postcard Caribbean if you don't want to be a bit disappointed.
Despite about 35% of all buildings in Taganga being dive shops it's not considered a very good place to dive. The main drawcard is it's currently the cheapest place on the planet to get a PADI certification. The Irish people I was drinking with on St Patrick's Day were here doing their Open Water course (which is the beginners course, for you land lubbers) and they were telling me there's fish living in truck tires and stuff like that down there. Didn't exactly make me want to fork over my hard earned.
About another 30% of the buildings are selling treks to this area's other big draw card - Ciudad Perdida. This was traditionally a 6 day trek through the jungle but with improvements to the trail (things like bridges, and wacky stuff like that) it's now possible to do it in 4 days. I chose 5 days, mostly because it costs exactly the same amount to do it for 4,5 or 6 days, and all the companies that do it have set the same price by agreement, so you're only really competing on quality. I also liked the idea of being fed for an extra day.
Ciudad Perdida was the work of the Tairona people, who started building a series of stone platforms for their wooden houses and crops to grow on. I assume because they liked these things to happen on flat bits and the hills of the Sierra Nevada are pretty damn steep. They started about 500 years before Machu Piccu in Peru, and I assume things got way out of hand, as the site now is supposed to have 600 odd platforms, 200 of which have been fully cleared and excavated. The city was supposedly inhabited until the Spanish came, at which point the Tairona abandoned it and moved deeper into the jungle instead of taking on the conquistadors head on. It then stayed a bit lost, except in local myth and legend until grave robbers stumbled on it in the 70s and started pulling artefacts out of the ground to sell. During the next decade the grave robbers fought over the site (including a couple of shootings where the bodies are still out in the jungle somewhere) before one disgruntled grave robber went to Bogota and tipped off the authorities about a decade later. The government then sent archaeologists to excavate the site. No-one really knows how much loot was lost in that decade.
The hike itself, despite having some fairly hard core hill climbs in mud (due to the daily afternoon downpour) isn't as challenging as I'd been led to expect. These days you have campsites with hammocks (and occasionally beds!), mosquito nets and cold showers. They feed you very well, as the food is now brought up using donkeys you don't have to carry any of it yourself and vast improvements have been made to the actual path. In places where the trail used to have you clinging onto the side of the cliff they've concreted a new path and places that used to involve waist deep river crossings now have a bridge. This quite easily could knock a couple of days off. However, doing it over 5 days now involves swimming in rivers, reading and playing cards a fair bit, and also makes sure you're under shelter before the really heavy rain starts at about 4pm on the dot every afternoon and continues into the night. I was lucky to have a young group of top chicos y chicas who all went at pretty much the same pace and provided good banter in the evenings. We saw about 4 or 5 other groups on the trek, and some were so varying in age and fitness there couldn't help but be tension and frustration. There was also groups where you saw or heard someone and thought "yeah, I'd do the time for killing them, just for the peace and quiet".
The descendants of the local natives still live all along the trail, and they seem to in general be fairly happy these days with the tourists as the companies are making sure money goes into everyone's pockets. One night they came down to tell us about the local rituals, including every man being given a gourd like thing made of calcium to allow them to easily have something to chew coca leaves with, and the fact when a bloke turns 18 he spends 5 days married to an older woman (35-40) who is widowed learning how to be a husband before he then goes and gets married to his actual wife (14-18). The older woman is apparently picked by consensus of the village, with the blessing of the shaman, but all of the girls seemed to be a bit freaked out by that idea.
As the foothills of the Sierra Nevada used to be one of Colombia's prime coca growing regions the tour used to include a demonstration of how to turn coca leaves into coca paste - the first of 3 steps into making the powdered cocaine that has spent so many years turning Keith Richards into beef jerky. The government has banned that now, but the guide said he used to actually like doing it, as many of the tourists who see the process includes powdered cement, battery acid and diesel and decide that maybe cocaine is not the drug for them. Back in the 80s and 90s this used to be the way it was done, with smallholders from the Colombian coast all the way down to Bolivia processing their own leaves and selling the paste either directly to the Colombia cartels or to middlemen who dealt with them in bulk. However due to the successes of the mid-90s with the death of Pablo Escobar finishing the Medellin cartel and the extradition of the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers to the US bringing down the Cali cartel, the high end work of using solvents to turn the paste into the cocaine hydrochloride that goes up Aussie backpackers noses fell to the left wing rebel groups. By the year 2000 both the FARC and ELN had come to an agreement with the government that allowed them de-facto control of vast areas of jungle in both Northern and Southern Colombia and they operated drug labs there with impunity. The area the Lost City was in fell into use by both groups, taking it well off the tourist trail, especially after the ELN kidnapped a whole bunch of trekkers in 2003.
In 2005 the area came under the control of the AUC - right-wing paramilitaries who the government claimed not to control but seemed to be fairly comfortable doing it's bidding. The trail was reopened, but you had to hire AUC bodies to come with you, dressed in combat gear and carrying big guns. I don't know if this would exactly make me feel that much safer. That only really ended a couple of years ago, when the army took full control of the area to protect the tourists. When you actually get to the centre piece of the Lost City there's several soldiers there watching over you. They're happy to pose of photos, though I have one where I'm petting their dog, with the whole city spreading out into the jungle valley behind me.
Despite the fact that you end up being constantly damp or wet for 5 days, as the humidity means your clothes don't even dry overnight and you tend to carry a few kilos of sweat in your shirt everywhere you go, it was quite enlivening to actually be doing some proper exercise again. One of the days our group got mixed up with a slower one, which allowed me to get ahead of the guide and basically run for an hour or so down the trails instead of walking it, getting me to the camp a good half hour before the others. The runners out there will know what it's like to sit there in a pool of your own endorphins after a good bout of exercise and understand how much I've been missing that feeling.
So after a massive night out in Taganga to celebrate our return, and as a result a totally wasted day on the beach yesterday the time to make some tough calls about what to do next. The result is later today I'm going to fly back to Bogota and onto Manizales in the coffee growing region south of Medellin and then it'll be back next Wednesday to try and fly to Lima in Peru on Thursday in order to avoid trying to travel over the Easter weekend in any seriously Catholic countries. This means that Ecuador is now completely off the menu for this trip but something had to give. I think I'd like to come back for a diving holiday to see the Galapagos and then maybe also the Pacific coast of Colombia. That was one of the last areas the government regained control of from the FARC and supposed to be world class diving on live aboard boats that has just reopened as a result. That Next Time list is getting fairly long now.