bicrom abroad

taganga has all the ingredients to be a picture perfect place, a small fishing village set in a deep, sweeping carribean bay guarded by dusty hills with boats bobbing in the harbour and fishermen chewing on cigarettes hauling their catch onto the sand under the watchful eyes of excitable children and hungry dogs. unfortunately, such attractive charm is very hard to keep secret: taganga is well and truly on the gringo trail. i am not so naive, or indeed arrogant, to believe that a place is inevitably ruined by popularity. angkor wat is no less spectacular for the hordes of tourists which visit it each day; sites tend to be busy for a reason, most usually because they are worth visiting. taganga however, with its hard to define sleepy allure, is busy for all the wrong reasons and with all the wrong people. it has become a mecca for the most tedious, look at me i'm finding myself, kind of traveller. yes you with the dreadlocks despite being white, middle class and of to some redbrick university next year. and you with the bongos, surely the most hideous "instrument" to be discovered by these cretins insofar as it requires little or no talent to make some noise and play at being musical (although if you're on a six month trip and carrying a guitar around you're also not welcome; i don't care that you can strum the chords to a couple of santana songs, nobody wants to hear it). i particularly enjoy the costume adopted by these unimaginative fools as they strive to be a bit ethnic and, like, totally like one of the locals, primarily because be it in asia or south america, the choice of clothing is identical and in fact completely independent of the locals, most of whom are wearing jeans and tshirts whilst smirking at the schmuck in the baggy trousers and licking their lips at the prospect of flogging them some totally genuine beads (just like the locals never wear).

i'm aware that the rant above sounds like the whinings of an old man but, in my defence, it is a beef that i have had since my first forays at backpacking in india, a particular magnet for this kind of thing. give me the british kids giggling to themselves whilst sloping back to their hostel with a couple of bottles of rum any day, at least they are being true to themselves rather than trying to live out some hideous cliche in the hope that it is authentic.

our plan for the first couple of days on the coast was to head off to tayrona national park for a few nights right by the sea. we did not, however, want to be stuck in close confines with the kind of people we had been despairing of in taganga, thus ruling out the most accessible, and therefore popular, campsites in tayrona. the whole park, in fact, was making us worry a little insofar as far from being a tranquil, unspoiled idyll it now appeared to be full of people. solace, it appeared, may have been available in a secluded campsite which required a three hour hike to reach and was cut off from the rest of the park. having emailed the place to make sure they had some space however, as to schlep all the way there only to be turned away would be a nightmare, we received an email back telling us that the people running the site had moved out of tayrona and to a place called palomino.

on receiving this email i immediately reached for my trusty lonely planet only to find that palomino did not warrant a mention. surprised but presuming this meant it was not worth a visit i googled it more out of curiousity than expectation. what i found was a place out beyond tayrona in la guajira, set on the same amazing rugged coastline but with a handful of shacks on the beach with the sea to one side and the snowcapped peaks of the sierra nevada to the other. all in all it sounded pretty amazing, much more so than tayrona.

vicki and i ummed and aahed for a bit, partly about whether we shouldn't just go to tayrona anyway as everyone does and partly about whether it was wise to go somewhere about which there was relatively little information available. eventually our sense of adventure and curiousity got the better of us and we boarded a morning buseta down to palomino. after a particularly well timed stop and search by police which allowed vicki to go for the wee for which she was busting, our buseta stopped at the entrance to tayrona; and promptly emptied out. we resolutely, if a little nervously, stayed put as the conductor and couple of locals looked on with some surprise. so we remained as we headed further west, passing through numerous police checkpoints and, bizarrely, a checkpoint manned entirely by salsaing children demanding sweets, until we finally arrived in palomino.

palomino isn't really a town; more a collection of about five shops staffed by bored looking old women. we collared a couple of mototaxis to take us to the beach and, five bumpy minutes later, arrived. the setting was everything we could have hoped for, miles of unspoiled sand worn down by the crashing sea, sparsely populated by fishermen and a couple of holidaying colombians. no shops, no cafes, no swarms of backpackers, no nothing. we found ourselves a little cabana with a couple of hammocks out front and settled in. from the battalions of pelicans skimming the waves and the palmtrees in formations of varying precision, to the (overfriendly) cats, dogs, chickens and iguanas pottering around our cabana, to the monster king prawns that had been happily prawning along in the sea about an hour before landing on our plates to, most of all, the delicious seclusion palomino, for all its rusticity, was everything which we had hoped for. expect it to appear in the next round of guide books and be unrecognisably changed thereafter.

despite february supposedly being the least rainy month in colombia, with rain virtually unheard of on the coast, online weather reports keep promising impending gloom. after a long morning lazing on the beach under clear blue skies we were heading in for the day in the afternoon when the clouds rolled in. we took a snap decision to split our journey to cartagena in two by stopping off in santa marta for the night and, following a slightly hairy mototaxi ride which concluded somehow with both vicki and i, and our two backpacks, squeezing onto the pillion of one wobbly motorbike, we hopped onto a bus which we presumed was terminating at santa marta. it transpired, however, that it could get us all the way to cartagena. taking it to be a sign we strapped in and, battling hunger pangs and with a little bus to bus shunting in barranquilla, we arrived in cartagena late on sunday night having freed up a day which would otherwise have been wasted travelling.

we checked into an amazing little boutique hotel which is newly opened and is consequently offering some great online deals (thank you internet). our plan for the next few days is to lazily take in the sights whilst keeping our fingers crossed that we don't get unlucky with the weather.