After about a 2 hour bus ride, I dismounted near Santa Marta’s center. Relatively newly re-done, the city is a fraction of Barranquilla’s size and has a charming downtown area, with Spanish colonial buildings as well as a location directly on the water. Just blocks from where the bus lets out, I found my absolute favorite place there—a café called Lulo’s, near Santa Marta’s historical cathedral.
Lulo is a fruit that is something like a cross between an orange and a passion fruit. I had an amazing juice smoothie made of watermelon, strawberry, some other fruit, and ginger. Who knew ginger was so incredible in juice?! You should try it! This place is owned by a foreigner whose son is currently also in the Peace Corps! Talk about a small world. I’m obsessing just a little because this is something definitely foreign to Barranquilla—a reasonably priced café with non-typical food, with a focus on healthy and fresh. Entrepreneurs, hear me now: there is a market for this!!
Anyway. I completed the yuppie-hippie experience by journaling away while I waited to reunite with a fellow, Santa Marta-dwelling PCV. For dinner, she informed me, we’d be heading to a restaurant called “Baba Ganoush.” “It has an international food focus,” she told me. “Is that okay?”
Hah. The restaurant is located in Taganga, a small fishing village nestled in the mountains just a short bus ride from Santa Marta. The restaurant is set in the hill, open with a peaked straw roof. We sat to eat before an incredible view of the ocean and while the sun set behind ocean-surrounded mountains we supped on ayhauma (a local orange squash) soup, falafel, and a brownie sundae. And fresh strawberry margaritas. I think I just shivered as I wrote that…so much happy deliciousness!
The next day brought an early morning wakeup and homemade swiss-cheese-veggie-egg scramble, and then we headed back to Taganga. There, a small group of volunteers and one volunteer’s co teachers gathered. We hired a boat for the day, and for a slightly expensive fare, set out for a secluded beach.
Our hour long boat ride took us around craggy jutting mountainsides, where the waves crashed on the rocks and trickled down in spontaneous waterfalls. The boat wasn’t that big—a metal launch, and it seemed the waves were at least our size…there was nothing to do but trust our local guides and the somewhat suspect motor (it took about 20 minutes to start, the first time around…) What the boat DID afford us, however, was an incredible view of the surrounding scenery as well as the ocean waves themselves.
The surrounding water was five times as intense a blue as the clear open sky, and where it crashed against the rocks in effervescent waves it shaded to every variation of teal and aquamarine. I’ve never seen so many colors of blue. I’m suddenly understanding artists’ obsession with the ocean; I’ve always been a forest girl, myself, and although it would take a lot to change that, this beauty definitely won oceans some points in my book.
The beach itself was small, set in a small cove. There were actually three beaches to choose from there. We swam at one a few minute boat ride from the “main one,” which had a restaurant; when we arrived in the morning, the restaurant’s owner pulled out a tray of a variety fresh dead fish to choose which one we’d like to have for lunch. I chose Fred. Actually, I saved my money and ate the lunch I’d brought…but later on, I tasted some meat.
Fish here is always served whole, having been thrown in a pot of oil in its entirety to fry crisp. That said, the Sierra was maybe the best fish I’ve ever had, white and meaty, almost no bones (of course you’re picking the meat off the skeleton, so this is in context, here), and not even as ridiculously fried as they usually come. Maybe since they didn’t have to kill the sat-in-the-hot-market-sun-for-5-hours bacteria that generally accompanies the Barranquilla fish…
We spent the day swimming, relaxing, strolling, and eating, and then it was time to head back on the boat. I took the bus directly from there, and arrived back in my big city of Barranquilla…refreshed to start another week.
The weekend was yet another surreal side to my life as a Peace Corps volunteer on the Colombian coast…over and over again, all I can think is, “Who would have thought…?” There are too many ways to finish that sentence than I could possibly list.
All the photos below are stolen from PCV Heidi Jo, since my camera still remains un-fixed...
