On arrival into Santa Marta we headed straight for the bus terminal to buy our tickets to Venezuela for Sunday 4 January with Expresos Amerlujo, the only company that goes to Maracaibo from Santa Marta. From Maracaibo we will pick up a connection for Merida, our next major destination. At the bus terminal we were told that there were no tickets left for Sunday or indeed Monday, oh the joys of not being able to make advance reservations and having to buy your tickets from the station. However, we were told that there were a few seats left on the bus the following day, Saturday otherwise we would have to wait until later in the week. As we have a lot to cover in Venezuela we opted to take two tickets for the following day and would have to miss doing the Tayrona national park outside Santa Marta. Many other travellers had told us about Tayrona, it was a shame, but when backpacking one of the golden rules is "you can't do everything all of the time".

In the afternoon we headed to Taganga, a quaint, small fishing port. Its beachfront is lined with tavernas selling fishfood and cold beer, a great start in my book for any place. It has numerous dive shops and I was a bit gutted that we had to leave the following day as the prices were very reasonable and I still haven't strapped on a tank since we set off on this trip. By chance we bumped into David and Martin, two Irish brothers who we travelled with on our Southern Cross tour, we knew they were in the area but hadn't been able to finalise meeting up. It was great to see them and catch up. Together we shared a few cold ones and a late lunch. They told us of there nigtmare journey from Equador to Colombia where they were stuck for over 9 hours at the Equador border because the computers were down and everything had to be done by hand. Once they got into Colombia formalities were straightforward and took just 10 minutes. We gave them some tips on Cartagena, their next destination. After a couple of hours we said goodbye and headed back to Santa Marta for the evening, though at 5pm getting a taxi or bus from Taganga back into the town was a bit of a bun fight, after 20 minutes we had thrown enough to get onto a small bus.

We stayed at Hostal La Galeria in Santa Marta, the only place we found online that had spaces. It is run by Juan, an eccentric, intelligent man who speaks several languages. He was extremely helpful (for example, David and Martin stayed there for a couple of nights too and Juan made about ten calls to get them a room in Taganga after their own search had failed) and a source of excellent local information, he made us feel very welcome. The hostel itself doesn't quite have the character of its owner, concrete block rooms with no air conditioning, just mobile or ceiling fans (depending on the room), but it is clean and in an outstanding location just 50 yards from the beach. We spent some of the evening talking to Juan who has some great plans for the place, it only opened in May 2008, and I think in a year or so the place will be full of the comforts backpackers have come to expect. If we ever make it back this way in the future be good to see Juan again.

As for Santa Marta itself it is a nice enough town, but there is nothing that stand-out about it. There are a fair few nice bars (Calle 16 and 17 in particular) and restaurants, and this time of the year it is packed with holidaymakers, so the atmosphere was buoyant. The following day we wondered around for a couple of hours before heading to the bus station, where we weren't suprised to learn that our bus was running late.