SANTA MARTA

After visiting the delightful walled city of Cartagena de Indias, we rented a car and drove to Santa Marta, about 3 hours east along the coast, to begin our road tour of Northern Colombia. The city is a major seaside destination for Colombians, and has been quite heavily developed with many tall hotels and apartment buildings. It does however still have a small (run down) colonial centre with a few nice restaurants. It’s well worth visiting the excellent museum of local history which has a collection of beautiful ancient pre-Colombian gold artefacts, the most impressive being delicate filigree jewellery and stylised bat shaped talismans.

TAYRONA

We used Santa Marta as a base for exploring the area and we started out with a trip to National Park of Tayrona, less than an hour outside of the city. It’s a popular place with several beaches, trails and campsites/hammocks for overnight stays. We only visited on a day trip which involved entering at the El Zaino entrance, hiking through the forest for an hour (a moderately easy marked trail-the hard part is the extreme heat) and then visiting some of the beaches. It’s worth noting that you can’t swim on most of the beaches because the currents are incredibly dangerous. Although the beaches were clean and picturesque, we found that they didn’t quite live up to the idea of paradise that was promised, but we did enjoy seeing some monkeys, leaf cutter ants and land crabs.

We found our visit to be a huge amount of effort for not a very exciting result, and the entrance fee was quite steep for foreigners, but it was still an enjoyable day.

ARACATACA

Any fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez will know that the famous Columbian author came from the small and suffocatingly hot and dusty town of Aracataca. Aracataca is about one and a half hours drive from Santa Marta through the Bananera zone, that is the vast banana (and now also palm oil) plantations started by the infamous United Fruit Company.

Whilst not being an extraordinary town, Aracataca is interesting to fans of Gabo because it is widely understood to be the template for the town of Macondo that is the setting of his masterpiece of fiction One Hundred Years of Solitude.

You can see the railway that was built during the banana years (and we were lucky enough to witness a never-ending train passing through!), the telegraph office where Gabo’s father worked and which no doubt inspired the character of Florentino Ariza in Love in the Time of Cholera, and an excellent museum in the style of and on the site of Gabo’s childhood home. We found the museum very interesting as it showed just how much Gabo’s early experiences are utilised in his novels. We found ourselves unable to distinguish between the fiction and the reality, as if the magic realism of his novels had spilled out into his own history. How confusing!

We also enjoyed a typical home cooked lunch at a restaurant called El Patio Magico, where we learnt that Gabo is not the only famous product of Aracataca. There was a well-known photographer named Leo Matiz who, as well as covering a variety of subjects, took many pictures of Frida Khalo and Diego Rivera.

Despite having had an interesting day, didn’t quite feel that Aracataca held up to our expectations of Macondo, however we did manage to find a bit of that fictional town’s magical aura in another place called Mompox.

MOMPOX

After seven long hours of driving south from Santa Marta on roads of incredibly varying quality, we reached the remote town of Mompox. Situated on the river Mompox, the town is actually on a fluvial island and has a bit of a reputation for being difficult to get to. So why did we go there?! Mompox is a colonial gem, its glory days long past, but it retains an intact colonial appearance that is just stunning. Mompox got preserved in time because the trade that led to its prosperity dried up when the sand bars in the river changed position. It’s also worth noting that the drive back to Cartagena was also about 6 hours long and the roads were even worse!

You certainly don’t need more than a couple of days in Mompox because it is so small; activities include visiting it’s 7 churches, taking a stroll along the river front or a visit to it’s pretty, albeit run down cemetery. Early evening is the best time for people watching as the locals move their beautiful locally made wood and cane rocking chairs into the street to cool down and have a chat.

We also took a half day river trip in a basic boat which involved a trip to a village, a hairy motorcycle ride and then a sailing on a huge lake full of water birds before returning to the town at sunset. You could almost imagine a steamer from another time chugging slowly around the bend!

We enjoyed Mompox and it seems that there has been some recent investment into preserving the town. Its historic centre is UNESCO protected. We did however encounter some hostility from the locals, something that in 9 months of travelling we have rarely experienced. We aren’t sure of the reason for this, but it seemed to be mainly youngsters. In fact some elderly ladies chastised a group of teenagers on our behalf after they started giving some lip.

We greatly enjoyed our little road trip, despite many long and bumpy hours in the car. As fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez it was captivating to be able to step into that hot, suppressing and somnambulant world where time takes on a different form and there is an air of magic whispering in the streets!