We said our goodbyes with Raj as he headed to the airport and we to the minibus station just down the street and around the corner.
We still had a flight out of Cartagena in five days and had been debating what to do in the interim. There were nice beaches at CCC and Taganga (where we'd been in 2013). There was some particularly beautiful coastline a but further afield at Tayrona National Park a bit further afield. But we eventually decided to head for the hills of Minca, just above the city of Santa Marta in the mountain range of the same name.
The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta are home to Colombia's highest peaks, but Minca sits within them just 20km as the crow flies from the Caribbean sea. It took most of a day to get there from Cartagena. A four-hour trip along the toll road to Santa Marta, an hour or so of walking between bus stations, grocery shopping and finding an ATM, then a final 45 minutes heading up into the hills on a good, but winding asphalt road.
Minca is a pretty little town that reminded me a lot of a slightly smaller, slightly less tourism-developed version of Mindo, just outside Quito, Ecuador. It's got a few little tour companies, some shops selling basic food and drink, lots of cute little restaurants and guesthouses, several brightly coloured murals, a relaxed atmosphere and a very pretty location. It felt like the kind of place you could imagine modern-day hippies coming to hang out for a week or so, with many ending up staying for years.
Most of the prettiest places to stay in the area are in the mountains outside town, though these require a long walk or paying for a moto-taxi back into town every time you want to go to the shop (and many of them don't have kitchens, using their remoteish locations to “encourage” guests to eat at their restaurants). We settled for a happy mediu, staying at Casa Colibri, a charming guesthouse run by a French-Venezuelan couple a hundred or so stairs up and behind the centre of the village.
The kitchen was separate from the main building, up still more stairs under a thatched roof with a nice view out over the town and surrounding hills. It was a lovely place to prepare and eat our meals, while the terrace down below had hammocks and lots of pillows and was good for lazing about, drinking our home-made limeade, sometimes fortified with Medellin rum. In short, the whole situation was idyllic and relaxing.
We did actually get out of our hammocks several times during our stay. On one day we took a couple of hours walk further up into the mountains to the La Victoria coffee plantation and the adjoining Nevada brewery (I wonder how long it took after deciding to name the brewery after the mountains it was set in for someone to point out that calling it “Sierra Nevada” might lead to a letter from an American lawyer?)
The walk was all up a road, but it was a pretty beat up one, with minimal slow traffic and lots of shade provided by the forest, so it was a very nice walk. And the coffee and beer, while maybe not quite up to the standards of what we'd had in Medellin, were both good (three of the four beers [coffee stout being the exception] were way out of style, but we'll made and tasty.)
I liked the walk so much that I took a longer, solo stroll up to Los Pianos, a viewpoint way above town that looked down over Santa Marta to the ocean and (were it clearer than when I visited) up to Cerro Cristobal Colon, Colombia's highest point at over 5000m. Most of this loop was even less busy, with just a few Moto taxis passing me during most of the five hours or so of walking, and most of the rest of the “traffic” consisting of local villagers walking or leading donkeys through the (once again) pleasantly shady forested road.
We also spent a full afternoon at Pozo Azul, a delightful swimming hole 45 minutes walk upriver from Minca. Pozo Azul isn't actually particularly Azul (blue), but it was a pretty spot to hang out. Big jungle trees overhang its several pools and waterfalls flowing with cool (but thankfully not freezing cold) mountain water. We'd been there briefly on a Sunday when it was packed full of Colombian families making a day trip from Santa Marta, but on a Tuesday it was pleasantly busy but much more relaxed, with mixed groups of Colombian and foreign tourists coming and going as we sipped the beers we'd brought (Club Colombia Oktoberfest… showing its four month age a little, but surprisingly good) and went for occasional swims in several of the pools, which grew emptier as you scrambled further and further up the river.
All in all, Minca was a fine way to relax after what had been a surprisingly bustling couple of weeks in Colombia (except perhaps, for the fact that Sarah got absolutely savaged by biting flies on our last day or so. Fortunately they looked worse than they itched).
Our very final days were spent back in Cartagena. We'd considered spending them in Baranquilla or elsewhere, but apparently the relaxation of Minca had left us feeling a bit lazy, so we returned to the familiarity and beauty of the old Caribbean emerald (the old town was packed with shops selling the gems to tourists) for the last couple of days before our departure from South America.
These days were perhaps a bit anticlimactic from a storytelling perspective.
We got to know the neighbourhood around our Airbnb a bit better, venturing out in the evening to enjoy the street food on the neighbourhood's main drag. Sarah had a whole vegetarian pizza made by a man and a woman who dragged their electric pizza oven out onto the corner every evening. I had a couple of nights of super cheap but super tasty steak, salad and potatoes. And we cooked one more meal at home, this time sharing the kitchen with the family whose home we were staying in and a guy from Curaçao who had come to Colombia to meet an internet friend.
We, of course, enjoyed sitting on the terrace again, watching the sunset over the walled city. We, of course, made several return visits to the park to hang out with the iguanas and the sloths. We, of course, had a few more Colombian beers in the sun.
I also returned to get my waistcoat taken in a bit. It fit perfectly in the chest, but for some reason the tailor had overestimated the size of my puku (tummy). They took it and asked me to return in a couple of hours. This turned into several more visits, each an hour or so apart, while they waited for the power to come back on to operate their sewing machines. Eventually as sunset was approaching they gave up waiting and simply had one of the women who worked in the shop finish off the alteration with a manual sewing machine.
And as the suit had been Sarah's idea, she also prodded me into doing a “photo shoot” in old Cartagena on our final full day in town. We wandered around, taking fashion-style snaps throughout the brightly coloured streets and bougainvillia of the old city.
I think these lovely images are a fine place to say farewell to Cartagena, and to South America. So I'll see you again next time on another continent!
No comments:
Post a Comment