Tayrona National Park, Colombia

Tayrona National Park, Colombia slideshow

Tayorona National Park is an hour east of Santa Marta, which is four hours from Cartagena. Although on the Caribbean coast, travelers go there mainly to go to the beaches at Tayrona National Park. The other reason, would be to arrange trips to Ciudad Perdida, Lost City, one of the largest pre-Columbian towns discovered in the America, built between the 11th and 14th centuries on the northern slopes of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

I spend a day in Santa Marta and considered going to Ciudad Perdida seriously. It is a six days trek in the jungle among mud, mosquitoes, crossing six or seven rivers that would come up to my chest, but the beauty of the area and the fun swimming in rivers is worth all the suffering, I was told. But six days is all I had for the area, and besides, I did not so much looked forward to mud and mosquito bites. Instead, I decided to relax in Tayrona and surrounding beaches.

After the van dropped us off at the entrance of the park, we walked through a mixture of jungle and ocean views. An unspeakably beautiful scene. Legend has it that the Tayrona Indians (related to the cannibalistic Carib Indians) created the bay to allow for easy access to the ocean and fishing. Thus, upon rounding the tip of Arrecifes, the gorgeous rock formations sticking out of the sea and large sand beaches composed a picture of vast beauty that often kept me standing still for several minutes admiring all that beauty. But the sun was beating hard on my hat, so I kept walking another 45 minutes to Cabo San Lucas where I rented a tent.

My plan was to stay for four or five days, but after day two, the rain and lighting were becoming more frequent, so it was time to move away to another beach. When the rain stopped in the morning, Erika, an American woman from San Francisco and I gathered our things and went to nearby Taganga.