Santa Marta and the Caribbean Coast

We flew from Medellin to Santa Marta with Colombia's new low cost airline, Viva Colombia. Santa Marta is northeast of Cartagena on the Caribbean coast. We stayed there for two nights and visited the small town of Minca, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which is known for birdwatching.

The cathedral in Santa Marta

 

We traveled to Minca by collectivo, which is a kind of shared taxi that leaves for its destination when it is full. The collectivo we traveled in was an ancient jeep with the interior all ripped up, a gear shift that was obviously not original to the vehicle, and pretty much shot shocks. The road to Minca is in pretty bad shape, loads of pot holes and broken up pavement, so you wouldn't really want to take a good car up there.

We spent most of the day hiking and birdwatching. We saw some beautiful new birds and some that were familiar to us, and we learned the names of a couple we have been seeing elsewhere. We were fortunate to have a chance to talk briefly to a man who knows the birds and the area. He told us where to find the nests of the Oropendola, a crow-sized black bird with a yellow tail.

In the collectivo bound for Minca

 

Oropendola nests

 

We had lunch at a place with a spectacular view back out to the ocean. The restaurant was rustic with a tree slab table with legs planted into the earth. The food was cooked in a large brick oven with a section where the proprietor could scoop coals under a rack to heat soup, etc, and the other side was the open fire where he grilled meat on a skewer. We had some meat and yucca, which is a starchy root vegetable similar to potato. The soup looked a bit grey and we saw his water supply was from a bucket so we declined salad which may have been washed in that water. Our friend Maria says we have teflon stomachs and that meal proved it as neither of us suffered any ill effect from the meal.

View to the coast in the far distance

The little local "restaurant"

 

Our "chef" in his kitchen

 

At the end of the day we took another collectivo - this time an ancient Datsun or something similar - back to Santa Marta. The driver was delivering two huge gunny sacks of cilantro to the Santa Marta market and the car reeked of the herb, which has never been a favourite of Kathy's.

The next morning we packed one of our carry on bags and one day pack and went by local bus about 1.5 hours to Costeño Beach Surf Camp for 4 days. It is on the north coast of Colombia, just east of Tayrona National Park. It is a beautiful and quite secluded location - you walk in from the road about a 30 minute walk, unless there is a motocycle taxi at the road to give you a lift to the camp. They have a couple of buildings with private rooms, some beach huts with mattresses and mosquito nets, and a hut with sleeping hammocks with mosquito nets. We were in one of the private rooms with an attached bathroom - going for a bit of luxury in our old age!

The hammock hut at Costeño Beach Surf Camp

 

Playing in the surf

 

The building where our room was located, on the second floor

 

We saw many birds and four howler monkeys, one with a baby. We didn't see the caimans that were reported to sometimes come out from a marshy area behind the camp.

Female howler monkey with her baby

 

Red headed woodpecker on a palm tree

 

We walked about 30 minutes down the beach to the west to where a river flows into the Caribbean sea. There were great numbers of cormorants, egrets, herons and vultures there and a few kingfishers and another hawk-like bird we have yet to identify.

Fishers preparing their net in the fishing village near the river

 

The river

 

We spent lots of time lying on the beach and reading, mostly in the shade of the huge coconut palms, visiting with the folks who came here to surf, and going for walks through the coconut palm plantation looking for creatures and birds.

Our last two days were spent in Cartagena where we did some sightseeing in the old walled city, and shopping before catching our flight back to Canada.

On the city wall in Cartegena

 

After a brief stop in Regina to wash clothes and get haircuts we are off again, this time in our van with our hairy, wild-looking poodles. We are heading to Arizona and Texas for the remainder of the winter!

 

Last days in Medellin

El Castillo is a stately home built in 1930 by the Echeverri family. At that time the area around the estate was farm land. Now it is the neighbourhood of El Poblado. The estate has extensive formal gardens, designed in a French style - symmetrical fountains and planting beds. The house looks like a castle and is a marvel of hardwood floors, doors and paneling, coffered ceilings with ornately carved mouldings and full of antiques and paintings, both originals and reproductions. We toured the gardens first and saw scarlet macaws, humming birds, flycatchers, tanagers and a few birds we couldn't identify.

View of the house from the gardens

 

The formal gardens at El Castillo

 

We often rode on the metro system in Medellin, which is modern and very well organized. The system includes a section that goes so steeply up hill that a regular rail car was not possible, so they have Metrocable, which is a cable car line going up into two neighbourhoods. We rode the metro cable to the last station where we transfered to another cable car system which takes you to a park on the top of the mountain on the east side of Medellin. Parque Arvi is a huge area with a varitey of activities, but we were mainly interested in a hike and some birdwatching. Maria and her mother Christina went along on the cable car ride, but did not come hiking with us. We did a 3 hour hike and near the end of the hike we got caught in a series of thunderstorms.

 

The cable car from one of the stations

 

On the trail in Parque Arvi, just before the rain

 

Our final tourist adventure in Medellin was to visit the zoo, which Maria told us has some good bird displays. We did get to see a few birds that are very difficult to see in the wild. The cock-of-the-rock is one of the birds that is a real challenge to see in its natural habitat. This bird puts on a spectacular mating display at about 6:00 am daily during mating season. When we were in Mindo, Ecuador it was mating season and the birding hikes to see this display left at 4:00 amd and hiked through the forest in the dark for a couple of hours looking for the birds. That was a bit more than we were prepared to do, so we were happy to have a look at the bird, even though it was at the zoo. We also saw scarlet Ibis, and three kinds of toucans.

Flamingos at the zoo

Cock-of-the-rock

 

Little Parrots that were very tame

 

We had a wonderful time visiting Carlos and Maria, being included in family activities and being fed all manner of Colombian foods that we might not have tried on our own. We visited markets where people sell their produce from little stalls and supermarkets similar to Superstore or Sobeys, but with totally different products.

Look at the size of those papayas! And they are so delicious!

 

From Medellin we flew to the caribbean coast to spend a few days at the beach before returing to Canada.

 

Santa Fe de Antioquia

Santa Fe de Antioquia was the original capital of the province of Antioquia, before Medellin became the capital in 1826. Santa Fe is located in the Cauca valley between the western cordillera and the central cordillera. It is a beautiful little colonial town of whitewashed buildings.

One of the streets leading to the main square in Santa Fe

 

We traveled to this area with Maria and her graduate student Andrea. We stayed in Sucre, a smaller town across the river from Santa Fe, in the country house of one of Maria's uncles. To reach Sucre you must go over a suspension bridge, built in 1895, which is only able to support cars and mototaxis. The surface of the bridge is planks held down with strapping, so it is a bit freaky to drive across. There used to be pedestrian walkways on either side of the single driving lane, however so many of the boards have rotted or been dislodged that no one can walk over the bridge on the pedestrian paths. Instead they walk on the narrow driving surface which is maintained to have all its planks.

Maria driving over the bridge

 

The casa we stayed in was about 100 years old. Maria's uncle renovated the property and added a swimming pool and beautiful gardens. We really appreciated the swimming pool as the temperature was in the high 30s for the three days we were there.

The pool and he back of the house which has a dining area under the roof overlloking the pool

 

On our first day there we accompanied Maria, Andrea and their field assistant to the area they are studying. It was a scorching hot day, 38 C in the shade where we were and even hotter, 45 C, in Santa Fe. We were pretty wilted by the time we returned to the casa, and Maria and Andrea decided to start at day-break the next day and work until 11 am to avoid the heat of early afternoon.

Looking toward the river from the field area

 

Taking samples from the cliff - Juan, Maria and Andrea

 

Looking toward the western cordillera

 

The exhausted geologists after a day in the field

 

We planned to go sightseeing in Santa Fe on the second day, so after breakfast we took a mototaxi over the suspension bridge and into the center of Santa Fe. We did the "tourist route" around the town, seeing churches - none of them were open, the tourist market in the main square, a few jewelry shops that specialize in silver and gold filigree, a museum and ending at a restaurant for lunch.

Our mototaxi

 

The suspension bridge

 

The bridge is 291 metres long and was built in 1895, one of the first suspension bridges in the Americas

 

In the Plaza Mayor in Santa Fe

 

Delivering milk. This breed of cattle is raised in the valley because they able to withstand the high temperatures that are common here.

 

This museum, in a colonial mansion, is dedicated to the history of the area. It also has a small gallery that was showing some lovely watercolor paintings of landslides.

 

The following day we did a hike from Sucre up to a lovely waterfall. We saw some interesting birds on the hike, including a hummingbird having a bath in the stream. It continued to be extremely hot so we spent the afternoons by the swimming pool in the shade.

The air was cooler near the waterfall, and the shade was helpful too.

 

The church in Sucre

 

Sucre Plaza Mayor

 

On our way back to Medellin we saw many fruit stands on the side of the road and stopped at one to get some bananas. Between Santa Fe and Medellin there is a 2.8 mile tunnel through the mountain that has cut about half an hour off of the trip.

Maria and Andrea buying fruit

 

Medellin, City of Eternal Spring

Medellin's reputation of old - cocaine and murder capital of the world - has changed in the past 20 years and this city of over 3 million has become a travel destination.

We are staying with our friends Maria Velez and Carlos Londoño, who are here on a sabbatical from the University of Regina. They live in the neighbourhood of El Poblado, one of the most modern, upscale and safe areas of the city.

On the day of our arrival we met Maria's family at a weekly family dinner. The following day we met Carlos' father's side of the family at a weekly family lunch. Many families in Colombia gather together for a meal once a week, which helps them maintain very strong family ties. We have been welcomed warmly by our Colombian hosts, and introduced to delicious traditional and typical foods. We have been enjoying the variety of fruits and fruit juices available here, including many fruits that we have never had before because they only grow here.

Carlos, Maria, Carlos' Aunt Carmen, Kathy at the Garden Center

 

Breakfast with Tia Carmen

 

During our first week we did some sightseeing and some shopping. There are huge modern shopping malls in Medellin, but they are filled with clothes for rich, sexy, skinny Colombian women, so we have had little succes in finding anything to fit us. And you should see the shoes! We' d kill ourselves or at least break an ankle if we tried to walk on the very steep hills in such footwear.

A shopping mall full of plants and trees and a living wall. Most malls have two or three courtyards open to the outdoors.

 

Landscaping outside the Santa Fe shopping mall

 

We visited the botanical gardens, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Antioquia, and the Sculpture Park which contains many sculptures by Colombian artist Fernando Botero.

Sculptures outside the Museum of Modern Art

 

Some of the wild life in the Jardin Botanico - a tree climbing iguana

 

One of the huge trees in the Jardin Botanico

 

We were happy we spotted the Sloth that lives in the Jardin. It was quite active - for a sloth.

 

Evanna next to a Botero sculpture in the sculpture park. The Museo de Antioquia is the Art Deco building in the background. It is called a museum but it is really an art gallery.

 

Botero's sculptures and his paintings are of voluminous people and animals, and sometimes fruit and books as well.

 

In the Parque Berrio, near the Museo, we cam across this group of musicians busking. They were very good and played old time music from the north of Colombia.