Santa Marta on Colombia's Caribbean Coast

Finally it has happened! After living in Latin America for more than a decade, I made it to South America for the first time in my life. Granted, it's only for a week, and with the primary objective to see my family, so this brief stay won't give me an extensive touristic experience, let alone any deeper insights into country, which a longer stay would offer. However, since these are my first impressions, they will have a certain impact on possible future travel. So let me share with you here what I saw, heard, and felt during these few days.

The Place and the Reason

My exact destination was Santa Marta in Northern Colombia, situated on the coast of the Caribbean sea, right between the Santa Marta Bay and the mountain range Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. (It sure makes things easy if everything has the same name around here...) Being on the coast in a tropical climate, the region offers itself ideally for tourism, and indeed the reason for coming was partially to take some vacations. However, my home country of Mexico has plenty of similar vacation spots, so there had to be more than that. It was precisely to visit my parents, who have bought an apartment here, partially as a rental, and partially to have a place to stay in whenever they come to visit my sister, who married a Colombian guy.

Overlooking La Gaira

A great idea, all in all, not just for them but also for my Mexican wife and me, who won't have to fly all the way to New Zealand for a family reunion. Once again we had a chance to spend a bit of time together with my parents, my sister, and my Colombian brother-in-law, this time in a relatively fancy apartment on the 16th floor of a hotel / residential complex. I even posted about it a while back, but now I had a chance to see it for myself for the first time. It is truly as luxurious as it sounded like, with several pools, barbecue areas, and other amenities throughout the building. Oh and of course, there is a beach too. And best of all, the only mosquitoes that make it up to this height are the ones that accidentally get caught in the elevator. Very nice!

First Glimpse of South America

This brief trip offered me not only a chance to see my family, but it was also the first time I made it to the South American continent. Of course, these ten days are barely enough to even scratch the surface for that, still it gave me a bit of an impression of the Colombian Caribbean at least. What should I say? It´s HOT... and humid, that's for certain. Prices are lower than what I was used to from Mexico, and people are just as nice and friendly. The food does not even come close in spiciness to what I know from home, yet it was a delightful fiesta for my taste buds. Oh, and talking about fiestas... for some reason, the volume at which Colombians play their music is by a great deal louder than what's normal in Mexico - which I've considered too noisy to begin with.

Downtown Santa Marta

Even though hanging out with my folks was my main priority on this trip, I think it would have been a letdown for everyone (including you guys) if I had not ventured outside the hotel complex, at least for a little bit. So a trip to the center of Santa Marta was more than appropriate. As you can see on the WorldMapPin map, the actual "town" we were staying in was La Gaira, so we had to take a taxi to the historic center. On the way we found out that Santa Marta itself is actually the second oldest Spanish colonial settlement in South America. Impressive! With just over half a million people, it is actually fairly decent in size.

One beautiful aspect that struck me right away on the central pedestrian street, was how the trees were visibly trained to provide maximum shade above the terraces of the bars and cafés, which was highly welcome in the muggy heat. The establishments themselves had a cool appearance too, with impressive murals, and - yes - more music playing at high volumes.

Typical Architecture and a Notable Name

Another thing that caught my attention were the old style buildings with their distinct looking balconies. A bit like Mexico, but actually... different. They have their proper style! The movie Encanto came to mind, as my sister duly noted. Even the derelict houses seemed to keep the same spirit, which I was totally psyched about. In the middle of the historic center the Gold Museum was probably the nicest, most well maintained example of this. And as we later discovered, this very building was where one of the most famous men of South American history stayed in, shortly before his death: none other than Simon Bolivar, the liberator of Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.

Extensive Posting About a Brief Visit

So coming back to my recent difficulty in keeping up my enthusiasm for posting, this short trip offered plenty of opportunities for writing good posts. Actually, there are a good number I have prepared, I just need to sit down and compose them. So please keep coming back to this post over the next days (or weeks?). As you will notice, many of the links are not active yet. They shall be, leading to more detailed stories about the various topics mentioned here. I hope you will enjoy it, as much as I hope I won't take too long to write them.