The Beaches of Tayrona National Park
Saturday we’re off again, this time to camp for a night on the beaches of Tayrona National Park. As we hop on the bus, Kim pops her head out the window and waves. She, Diego and Ewout – friends from the trek – are headed to the same place. This comes as a relief – I’m getting a bit sick of teaching new people our card game (kidding!). Along the way, we also see the Swedish couple from our trek at a roadside cafe just outside the park, bump into the British girls we played a drinking game with back at the hostel in Cartagena and run into our Four Loko gals from Taganga on the beach. It seems the backpacking world is a small one, at least on the Colombian Coast.
The two hour hike to Cabo San Juan is a piece of cake after the trek we’ve just been on. Actually, I think it might just be a piece of cake, period. Children run along the path carrying their family’s cooler alongside their grandmothers in flip flops, one of which without Courtney’s translation I never would have known was laughing at how sweaty I am. Unfortunately, by the time we get to the campsite all of the hammocks are reserved for the night so we have to pay more to spend a very hot and stuffy night in tents. Luckily, the ocean quickly drowned away our sorrows before they could even form. The coast is lined with one beach after the other. We make our way a couple beaches down to a deserted patch of sand and ride the waves for hours. As a park ranger kicks us off the beach because it will soon be dark, Nate points out “if we had kids, they would be exhausted by now. We would have just outplayed them.”
As night falls, we drink agua frescas mixed with the rum Courtney somehow smuggled in past two military check points without even trying and celebrate the beautiful discovery that the beach bar takes credit cards by ordering multiple rounds of Aguila. When the beach bar closes at nine, we take our last round down to the beach and lay in the sand and listen to the waves, interrupted only once by a panicked search and rescue for a drunk man who has apparently either jumped or fallen into the ocean from the rocks above. More and more men with flashlights are running toward the rocks, and just as it seems things are not looking good, we see a panting figure staggering out of the waves toward shore.
The next morning, after breakfast and one final swim, we say goodbye to our friends and to the Caribbean Sea.
