Tayrona – Overpriced Paradise

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, since I can’t draw for shit and I only have the energy to write about 400, you won’t quite get the postcard-level beauty that Tayrona National Park exhibits from only this meagre article. However, if you do still give a shit by the end then here is a link which should enable you to find out more.

Logistically, Tayrona sounds like a nightmare: go to a weird village resembling an African shanty town that a bunch of Italians have decided to rudely insert a riviera onto the front of, get a bus that would fit better in Wacky Races to a gate in the middle of nowhere and then walk through a jungle for 2 hours in the hope that you’ll stumble across the beach. Luckily, the reality is that these days, Tayrona has developed a certain level of tourist infrastructure, so although I had to do everything listed above, it was far easier and more prescribed than I had thought.

After the 2 hour trek you are greeted with literally the most pristine beach I have ever seen: crystal blue sea making way for perfect golden sand, with a backdrop of scattered palm trees, lush vegetation and rolling green hills. Paradise, I had arrived!
There is pretty much no electricity, definitely no WIFI and it is as close to rural living as you can really get these days; cathartic, in a word.

Now, where to sleep. There is only really one area set up for residential exploits, named Cabo San Juan, and this is where everyone converges. However, probably due to the 2 hour walk that is required to even reach the beach, it is blissfully scattered with backpackers and home to absolutely no holiday makers, no proper buildings and definitely no heavy partying. It has the air of an island that only a special few have discovered, despite it not being an island and having a daily turnover of nearly 100 people.
But this is where the rhyme in the title rears its ugly (albeit poetic) head:

Renting a paltry hammock to sleep in cost 20 thousand pesos (6.50 in pounds) which is slightly in contrast to the going rate of hammocks on beaches on the Carribean coast (e.g. at Playa Blanca near Cartagena) of just 7 thousand pesos (NO I’M NOT CONVERTING IT THIS TIME, DO THE MATHS YOU LAZY BASTARDS).

Then the food: due to the length of hike, bringing your own food is nigh impossible and therefore they offer one place in which you can pay 15 thousand pesos for pasta or 25-30 thousand pesos for a fish dish – compared with 8 thousand pesos for pasta in general and 10-15 thousand for a fish dish. And it wasn’t nearly the best fish I had had in Colombia either.

And finally, the drink: for some reason, the official line is that you cannot bring alcohol into the park, but nobody decided to inform me that checking people coming into a national park the size of Belgium for cans of beer would be time consuming if not impossible, therefore OF COURSE you can bring in alcohol. But I didn’t, and that was duly overpriced as well.

I had originally aimed to spend two nights at Tayrona, but I literally ran out of cash after 36 hours so had to leave late on the second afternoon (my parting quip to one of the staff about whether if I dug a big enough hole into the sand I would find an ATM didn’t go down as well as I thought it deserved to) and with a heavy heart I headed back to the park entrance and back to Taganga – which you can read about here.

Overall, Tayrona is definitely worth the time, money and effort; the hammocks are comfy (although that night I dreamt I had been washed out into the ocean but managed to find an underwater ATM where I was able to withdraw enough cash to pay off a tuna to swim me back to land) and the atmosphere is incredibly chilled out. It is an unrivalled paradise…just a little bit overpriced.