After a long and way too warm busride from Maicao to Santa Marta I got on a moto taxi and 20 minutes later I was in Taganga. It is said to be a super laid back fisherman village full of gringos, but I find it less pleasant and much less laidback than Montañita in Ecuador.

Taganga in sunset

Not superimpressed with the place I decided to do it easy here. Found a cheap hostal where I could sleep on the roof in a hammock, and a diving school where I could get my advanced scuba diver license. Decided to go with Calipso dive school because they arrange combined tours and diving courses to the national park of Tayrona. This was on sunday, and the safari, as they call it, was on thursday.So to use 3 days the next morning I took a bus to the east side of the park. From the entrance it´s a 2-3 hour hike to Cabo san juan where I was going to spend the first night in my hammock. We were a group of 7 people walking over and when we got there we discovered that Cabo is a big camping ground. Nice beaches and all, but just too many tourists and not at all what I thought I was going to find. So spent one night there and pretty much everyone I talked to agreed that this wasn´t the colombian beach hideaway that you imagine it to be. Next morning I took a swim in the very very warm ocean(31degrees) and just fooled around on the beach for a while. Some american guys that I had met in Taganga showed up and we agreed to get out of there and try the beach of Playa Brava instead. To get there we had to walk an hour up the mountain to some old Tayrona ruins called Pueblito.

The ruins of Pueblito, remade

The trail was on top of and around and underneath huge boulders that is unique to this area, and it was humid and hot so the sweat almost drowned us. Despite the effort, the trail was amazing and we saw bats, monkeys and of course loads of birds. Finally reaching Pueblito it turned out to be a lost city mini version and the stuff we saw there resembles the pictures we have seen from the lost city. An hour back down the same mountain, but to a different side and a different beach and we arrived the beach of Playa Brava.

Playa brava

Immediately we loved the place. Very relaxing, only 8 tourists on the whole beach. And it was huge. Played around in the big waves and just enjoyed the moment for hours: We had found are hideaway. In the evening we caught big blue land crabs and cooked them on a bonfire on the beach while the moon made it all very magic. This is a life worth living for! The next morning I was awaked by the rising sun. It´s a great way to wake up, very natural. No alarm, no nothing, I can just lay in my hammock until the sun has made me want to go take a swim in the ocean 10 meters away. Walked up to a waterfall with the others, spotting two snakes and loads of huge spiders on the way. In the creek we also found remnants of some gigantic rivershrimp that must have been 30 cm long. Would have loved to catch some and cook them with the blue crabs in the evening. At around noon we started walking back over the mountains to the highway and 3 hours later through thick forest, up and down, swetting insane amounts and having some fun encouters with monkeys we arrived at the highway and caught the first microbus back to Taganga. The next morning I woke up to a dive club in action. Everything was being made ready for the safari, and an hour later we were sitting in the boat, some 10 tourists and the instructors, on our way to the middle of the national park. We got to our destined beach and the first dive was minutes away, without time to lose. First dive was a current dive, and it was really good to get into the water and to the world there. Our home while diving for 3 days Saw a huge green moray on this dive, on of the ones I have always wanted to see in person. Ugly beast. But it wasn´t the last we saw. During the safari we saw maybe ten of them and the biggest was like 3 meters long. Creatures of the devil indeed, but super fascinating. Also saw tons of lion fish. They belong to the indian ocean and do a lot of damage to the local species here in the carribean so our instructors weren´t very happy with them. Between dives we had lectures on the beach and just chilled out, reading and chatting, swimming and snorkeling around. The second day we did a long dive of almost an hour an a half, cleaning a coral nursery right of the beach. We were accompanied by some marine biologists taking samples and watching the corals. My fifth dive was a night dive. We descended to about 20 meter with lanterns, and the world that met us was very different from that of the day. The illuminous alges was incredible when we turned off our lights and we played around for a while in the darkness, making the water around us all sparkly and divine. Fishes was laying around on rocks actually sleeping, and when we woke them up with our lights they would swim right into the nearest rock, blinded by the light. Poor fishies. Also saw huge majestic lobsters. I loved it. The last day we did a dive into a cave and saw some schools of fish there and making a bubble of air to the cave ceiling so that we could go up and take our regulators out and our masks of and have a quite nice conversation at 26 meters of depth. After coming back to Taganga it was saturday night and an obviously good time to party, but we were all so tired that after 3 beers we fell asleep right there in the divecenter. It has been 3 intense days, with moments of total relaxation in between the intensity. The Calipso dive safari was truly something different, sleeping in hammocks on the beach and always being in a state of scuba diving. Now it´s sunday night and I am going to do a wreck dive here in Taganga before leaving westwards to Cartagena and Medellin. Having 3 months and 10 days before going to new york I´m now often feeling a sensation of stress, a feeling of not having sufficient time to do everything and travel the way I like. The feeling is also filled with joy and I´m really looking forward to all that will happen the next 4 months before finally returning to norway 17th of january. On top of everything the feeling also contains a joy of going home. You can call it a bittersweetsourwonderful feeling and I really enjoy it. To be continued...