Day 71: Transfer Fun

Day 71
Today I'm in: Taganga, Colombia

I am never going to get caught up posting entries here.  Fortunately, Day 71 wasn't one of the most memorable days of the trip, although it wasn't without the uncertainty, excitement and general lack of clarity that come with attempting to move around in a foreign country.

On a map, going from Cartagena to Taganga doesn't appear to be too complicated.  It's a distance of only about 100 miles or so, and there's a highway connecting the two places.  I had originally planned to take a long-distance bus (after all, the one I took in Chile had been very comfortable), but when I asked the staff at our hotel in Cartagena, they said they could arrange a van transfer for me.  It would take around three hours and cost only about $40 USD.  Not bad at all.

The shuttle came right on time and was about the size of a SuperShuttle in the US.  It was about half full (including a mother with a fussy baby) and we spent the next half-hour driving through lunatic Cartagena traffic picking up the rest of the complement of passengers  It was very tight seating on the bus, but at least some of the passengers were getting off in Barranquilla, a large city about halfway along the route.  The first half of the drive - which took us past the Volcan de Totumo that we'd visited a few days before - was through a lush landscape of hills and pastures, usually with the Caribbean visible just a half-mile or so in the distance.  The driver drove like a maniac, overtaking in both the passing lane and on the hard shoulder and swerving wildly when oncoming traffic came on too suddenly.

We got to Barranquilla a little after 2:30pm.  Barranquilla is Colombia's fourth largest city (after Bogota, Medellin and Cali) and is one of its busiest ports.  It's a sprawling, fairly charmless city, although it looked to be a bustling and reasonably prosperous place, and it's the hometown of both Shakira and Sofia Vergara, two of the country's better-known and better-looking exports.  We rolled around town for almost an hour dropping off passengers and finally, around 3:30, the driver pulled up to the shuttle company's office and announced that I needed to wait there for a connecting shuttle.  OK.  I sat in the lobby of the office for half an hour and then another shuttle pulled up, and we began the slow refilling process again, driving from house to house in Barranquilla picking people up.

It was 4:30 before we hit the road for Santa Marta, the next destination about another hour up the coast.  The drive between Barranquilla and Santa Marta wasn't quite as picturesque - a flat, scrubby, cactus-studded landscape, with the Caribbean just off to the left breaking onto empty gray beaches.  We rolled through a few towns where it was apparent that poverty is still a fairly large problem in Colombia.  The conditions there rivaled some of the worst townships I saw in South Africa - run-down homes made from scrap wood and corrugated steel, dogs in the streets, and dust and garbage everywhere.  It was sort of disappointing after how nice Cartagena had been.  There appeared to be some sort of festival going on in many of the towns - we passed multiple processions of people carrying religious statues, lively-looking street parties with blasting speakers, and kids in colorful school uniforms performing on makeshift stages.  I have no idea what the occasion was but I'm hoping to get some clues while I'm here.

Finally, a little after 5:30, we rolled into Santa Marta, another port city that's much smaller than Barranquilla, and began dropping off passengers.  I was transferred yet again into another van for the short 15-minute journey over the mountain to Taganga, where I finally reached my hotel just before 6pm.  Not quite the three hours promised by the hotelier in Cartagena, but it definitely could have been worse.  Night fell pretty shortly after my arrival, so I didn't see much of Taganga until today - I'll cover that in the next entry.