Palomino

Day 1 – Change of Plan - Palomino

After a night of being kept awake with loud snoring (not Glenn for a change), loud conversation from our neighbours, overpriced food, a hot sticky tent, mosquito’s and packed beaches, we decided it was time to say goodbye to Tayrona. A shame, as we later discovered that had we not cocked up with yesterday’s lunch que, we would have had time to hike further to find some pretty remote beaches.

Anyhow, we woke up to camp noises around 6:30am but had to wait for the café to open at 8am for our caffeine boost before our trek back.

 

 

Probably because it was later in the morning, the trek back seemed a bit tougher, with more ups than downs making us hot and sticky. As we walked, we passed hordes of people heading into the camps so we were happy to be leaving.

Today’s plan was to head to Palomino, which the travel agent in Taganga had recommended. Palomino is a small backpacker beach town where you can tube down the river and more importantly, had beds with walls to keep the mozzies out and the noise down!

We had heard there were buses outside the national park that could take you and after catching the minivan back to the park entrance, we were greeted by a very friendly Colombian who directed us to the waiting bus and we were quickly on our way for the 45 min journey.

We arrived in a small dusty town around lunchtime and headed to a nearby café to get our orientation and our ‘welcome to Palomino’ beer. We liked the place, quite backpackery, with some indigenous people still in residence and the beer was cheap!

 

As we had arrived a day earlier than expected, we didn’t have accommodation for the night. We only had our light day packs on us so decided to head down towards the beach to see what we could find. The beach was quite a distance from the main road so we made it about half way, with occasional stops at hostels to enquire about prices, before we decided we needed to eat.

 

We found a nice hostel with an open restaurant which was made of thatch. Unfortunately, the food wasn’t so great, Glenn ended up with a tiny curried crepe type thing (that had just looked at the curry packet!) and I had fish which was undercooked (I hadn’t ordered sushi!).

 

We then headed to the main beach and discovered that like most of Colombia’s Caribbean Coast, the waves, whilst swimmable, were pretty rough. We wandered along the beach, stopped by at a couple of places to enquire about rooms before deciding to head back to get a room where we ate. Whilst the food was crap, it was about the best price/accommodation we had seen.

 

We were shown to our room which whilst it was really nice, it was adjacent to another hostel banging out techno music. Pointing this out I was told that it would stop around 11pm. The roof was also made from thatch so had a massive gap in the eve’s which let in mozzie’s. So much for the upgrade from our tent. Oh well , we were both knackered so slide under our mozzie net for a much needed doze, toe tapping to the techno sounds

 

After waking and showering, we headed to a couple of bars by the beach, it was pretty quiet and we were still a bit groggy from our nap so headed back to our hostel for a beer before turning in for the night. ….No idea what time the techno stopped but it was way past 11!.

Day 2 - Bike Ride Hell, Tubing and meeting old (new) friends

We decided to risk b/f at our hostel as we couldn’t be arsed to walk further. It was okay, with the usual eggs (one is always broken) and over sweet bread but the coffee was good (as you would expect in Colombia).

We had heard that our friend, David, was in town (who we had met back in Myanmar) so our plan was to do tubing in the morning, and meet up with him for lunch.

I’d done some research and heard it was better to book with one of the companies by the beach so you didn’t have to schlep your tube back up to the main high street.

As luck would have it, there was one directly opposite our hostel which agreed on the price we were willing to pay.

Before I knew it, I was on the back of a bike, handed a rubber ring and clutching my newly purchased bottle of ice cold (and therefore very slippery) water and hurtling along the dusty and bumpy road.

At this point, I had no idea whether Glenn was behind me or not, I couldn’t turn around because of the rubber ring I was holding and was concentrating all my efforts on holding on to everything.

We reached the end of the dusty road and hit proper tarmac, relief!. Not for long, my driver took a turning and we were heading along and up and down very VERY  steep and bumpy and dusty roads which dirt bikes would have trouble with. At this point something had to give, and luckily it was my bottle of water.

We stopped to retrieve it which was where I saw Glenn behind me, we exchanged a ‘what the hell are we doing, Im crapping myself’ looks before we continued the rest of the journey.
 

The rest of the journey turned out to be worse!  It got steeper and bumpier so I decided to close my eyes until I felt the bike stop and we were deposited at the start of our hike to the river.

 

After the bikes had gone, we sat down to let our heartrates calm down a bit before making the climb. The climb took about an hour, of hot and sweaty walking with Glenn in the lead and me effing and jeffing behind him, carrying my rubber ring.

We then finally made it down to the river, secured our dry bag headed in for a nice dip before jumping on our rings and being taken by the current towards the sea.

 

It was beautiful, lots of stunning jungle scenery, king fishers and fishermen to keep us amused, however the current did manage to take us into the banks a few times where we had to wrestle ourselves out of the trees. A lot of people take beers with them to sip along the route or to stop off at one of the nearby banks but as we were meeting David (and it was a little too early for beer, even for us!) we just let the current take us along.

 

After about 2hrs, we came close to where the river met the sea, the water became quite shallow in parts which meant trying to drag yourself along by your hands and feet, or stand up and shuffle over to a deeper bit, neither of which looked very glamorous!

 

Back on dry land, we had quite a hike across the beach to where we were to drop off our rings, we then picked up our bags from the hostel and headed to a bar where we had agreed to meet our friend.

We met and spent the afternoon and early evening with David, catching up on each others adventures. Unfortunately David and Katherine had gone their separate ways whilst travelling, and Katherine was now back in blighty, so we had a drink for her too.

 

David was catching a night bus to Santa Marta so we said our final goodbyes with promises to meet up in London, before we headed to our hostel to check in.

 

It was around 8pm and the route took us down a very dark and dusty road but we were rewarded with a warm welcome from the hostel owner and a very VERY nice room. We did our usual opening and closing drawers, checking the power and temperature of water, bouncing on the bed to see how comfy it was and locking up our valuables before heading out again.

 

We made it to a bar at the end of the road, where we had a couple more beers, a chat with some lads we had met back in Tayrona, before heading back along the dark road to our lovely, quiet, mosquito free room.