One of my initial impressions of Colombia is that it is a
relatively advanced country for a part of the world that is still usually
categorized as “developing” . The cities have a lot of modern buildings and
people living apparently middle class lifestyle standards. The infrastructure
seems reasonably good as well. The current level of prosperity in Colombia is
somewhat surprising since within my memory fifteen to twenty years ago the
country was virtually a failed state of civil war and narco-terrorism. Colombia
has rapidly recovered since the violence of the 1990s with moderate but steady
economic growth and diversification, a huge contrast with next-door Venezuela
that’s spent the same era descending rapidly into anarchy and poverty under
Democratic Socialists Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro.

I took a shuttle van arranged by the hostels in Cartagena
for the 150 miles of so to Santa Marta and in many places got to see another
side of Colombia, the very poor mostly Afro-Colombian rural communities along
the coastal road. With sugarcane plantations the big industry in the region
during colonial times, northern Colombia was a region where a large number of
slaves were brought in to work giving the area a large population of African
ancestry. The gap in income in Colombia seems comparable almost to that of
Brazil.

Along the way the bus circled around Barranquilla, an
industrial port that is Colombia’s fourth most populous city with well over a
million people. Barranquilla is supposed to have the biggest Carnival in South
America outside of Brazil but have virtually nothing to see the rest of the
year . The scenery gradually became drier farther east toward Santa Marta to the
extent that the dry forest of trees mostly leafless near the end of the dry
season gave way in spots to cactus forests.

Santa Marta is the oldest settlement in Colombia and South
America and with a population of nearly half a million is the third largest on
the Caribbean coast. Despite its long history there isn’t very much to see in
Santa Marta, but it’s usually used as a base for treks to La Ciudad Perdida and
to the nearby beaches at Taganga and Tayrona National Park. Its seaside
location makes it popular with Colombians for beach holidays, but most foreign
tourists head for more remote spots to go to the beach.

I recall watching a documentary about the Sierra Nevada de
Santa Marta and the Lost City many years ago and was fascinated that the small
mountain range that’s entirely separate from the Andes contains the highest
peaks in Colombia at around 19,000 feet. The Sierra is considered to be the
highest coastal mountain range in the world with the permanently snow covered
peaks less than thirty miles from the sea and sometimes visible from the coast
and the city of Santa Marta. The documentary was made and aired during the bad
old days of the 1990s, and I recall it making a contrast between the natural
world of the mountains and the indigenous people living peacefully in them and
the hell that was the city of Santa Marta, a city it said had one of the
world’s highest murder rates.

Nowadays, though, Santa Marta is reasonably safe and
peaceful. Despite there not being much to see there I ended up spending four
non-consecutive nights in the city before, between, and after the trips I
booked to the Guajira Peninsula and the Ciudad Perdida Trek before catching an
overnight bus to Medellin. I stayed in a centrally located hostel which was
quite nice and found a very good Greek restaurant named Ouzo on of its
attractive colonial squares where I splurged on some very good non-Colombian
food.