Week 15 Santa Marta, San Gil

Week 15

Wednesday. 4pm we finally arrived at Santa Marta, back from our lost city trek - getting clean was a priority!  We checked ourselves in at Drop Bear Hostel and were shown to our room. We were both a little surprised to see that to get to our room we had to first walk through a 10 bed dorm room, filled with 18 year old Colombians (all in a major party mood with a blaring sound system). I quickly realised that I would need ear plugs to sleep as it almost felt like we were in the dorm with them - the music was that loud!! Great!

Luckily, our neighbours left about 8pm allowing us to watch a movie before falling asleep. I still used ear plugs!

Thursday. Drop Bear was a massive hostel and we latter found out that it used to be a drug cartel's villa!  Following a well needed 10 hour sleep we headed out to buy our bus tickets to San Gil. Annoyingly we had to get a taxi to the bus terminal as it was located on the outskirts of the city. Ticket purchase was really easy, and to my surprise there was a direct bus to San Gil for 129,000 COP!

We took another taxi back to the beach area and wondered around searching for a place to eat. The food on the trek was really good and plentiful but I didn't want to see rice or pasta for at least a week. Luckily we stumbled across a small street which had quite a few little bars and restaurants and decided to go to Lulo. What a great choice! The food was yummy and for 40,000 COP we left feeling very satisfied!

Not the nicest beach in the world!

Freshly made limeade! Delicious!

Market

Amazing!!

We arranged to meet the trek gang in the evening at the bar in Drop Bear for a well earned post trek drinky. We all took advantage of the  happy hour which led to extreme dancing, prancing around in helmets and laughing until our cheeks ached. We really did meet a great group of people and promises were made to meet some of the group when back in the UK or if we travelled to Australia.

Friday. Our last day in Santa Marta. As our night bus was not leaving until 9:30pm we made the most of our day by hanging out at one of the beaches in the Tayrona National park with our trek gang.

Today was the first day that we experienced the moto taxi. I was a little dubious about getting on the back of a motorbike, sandwiched between Roland and the driver, with no helmet, scooting through the dirt roads.  However we did make it in one piece to the beach which was called Concha and is mainly used by locals.

Blending in with the locals

This was a very pleasant beach. However it was a lot busier than I was expecting. We soon settled in with our own beach 'tent' (for shade), mixing in amongst all the Colombians - we stuck out like a sore thumb! We spent a lot of our time here trying to work out who had bum implants - a popular procedure in Colombia. Full pert bottoms everywhere!!

We enjoyed a very chilled out few hours here before heading back to Santa Marta in a cool looking 4 x 4.

Saturday. 11am and after a 15 hour night bus we arrived in San Gil which is know for the adventure activities that you can do around the town. 

Good morning - on the night bus! 

However we decided that ´adventure on our first day' would be a bit too extreme as we were both tired from lack of sleep.  We only managed a small walk around the town square and grabbed a bite to eat. I tried some more street food today, deep fried cheesy balls, Bunuelos. They were good! Its going to be hard to stay healthy here! 

We spent the rest of the day relaxing at Sam's VIP Hostel.

Sunday. We had a very busy day today and made the most of feeling human again after a good night sleep! We climbed up to the view point to see San Gil from above and then explored the town as much as possible, stumbling across a very hectic market area and the botanical gardens.

Where the hostel was

Top of the viewpoint

Hmmmmmm

In the afternoon we met up with our Aussie mates (from the Lost City trek) and went to explore the nearby town, Barichara (taxi was 37,000 COPS from San Gil) and walked 9km to Guane, a small beautiful colonial village.

This was the convenience store`s mascot?!?!

To get back to Barichara, we were offered a ride in a local's Jeep (20,000 COPS) and then we caught a taxi back to San Gil.

Monday. Another adventure day! Yay! This time we hit the class 3, 4 and 5 rapids on the river Suarez with Colombia Rafting Expeditions - 125,000 COPS each. After the safety instruction, I was almost tempted to turn back and let the boys manage this one. So pleased I didn't!  It was so much fun and I enjoyed every minute.  We both even managed to stay in the raft this time - an improvement from before!

We ate at Gringo Mikes in the evening and had the most wonderful burger! 

The spicy gringo burger was very good!!