Taking a wee holiday on Colombia’s coast? Forget about Cartagena. Unless
you’re seriously loaded you will spend your time surviving on thousand
peso slices of pizza and wincing every time you see a drinks menu,
while loud and awful tourists will seem to be permanently stationed in
front of you on every tiny piece of pavement in the city. Let’s not even
mention the amount of time you will spend persuading hawkers on the
beach that the last thing your pasty scalp needs is a full head of
braids that will brutally highlight your foreignness even more. Give this tourist nightmare a miss and head to Santa Marta where the following delights await you:
– The gloriously tacky statues of enormous semi-naked indigenous people
dotted along the seafront. No visit to Santa Marta is complete
without one souvenir photo of yourself beside the jutting breasts of
the mythical woman, and another of you gawping in awe at the
magnificent Tarzan-esque jaw of the man.
– Pibe hunting in Pescadito. El Pibe (Carlos Valderrama) is a proud
Samario and regularly returns to his native barrio of Pescadito on the
outskirts of town. He is renowned locally for sitting in a tiny
neighborhood shop drinking beers and chatting to the locals, and you
too could shoot the breeze with this Colombian sporting icon if you’re
lucky.
El Pibe’s shop is called Piso Alto, and anyone in the area can
show you where it is (Perhaps inevitably, every Santa Marta taxi driver
has taken the man himself for a spin around town). If you’re unlucky
and El Pibe is otherwise engaged on the day of your visit, Piso Alto is
still an excellent place to pass a balmy night drinking beer and
chatting to the locals, many of whom work for the big banana companies
who operate in the area.
– The Plaza Bolivar’s breathtaking selection of contraband. Various
stalls in the main square of the city offer a wide range of
ridiculously dubious goods, from bottles of whisky plastered with
venezuelan duty stamps to packs of cigarettes branded: “Only for
consumption on board ships”. Needless to say these goods are all
cheaper than their legal Colombian counterparts, leaving you in
the ideal position to pick up a knock-off bottle of run in case you end
up on a bender with El Pibe.