Santa Marta and diving from Taganga

So we arrived at midday in Santa Marta, a nice convenient time, and just hopped on a local bus into the town centre (the driver of which was a tad cheeky and tried to overcharge, but we saw two girls hop onto the bus and pay half what we were told, so Sarah impressively told him we'd only pay the same - he kinda agreed just laughing it off, kinda!).

Anyway, after the usual checking of a few places we settled into the wonderfully cheap Hostel Meda, with our own bathroom and powerful fan. That fan was certainly necessary as the temperature here was a perfect 30C, and so once we dumped the bags and had a shower it was time to check out the town.

It's actually quite a grubby town I reckon, but has a fairly decent beach and a good bit of life to it (on a Saturday anyway).

After the long bus journey from Bogota, we both slept late that night, and so the next day was a fairly lazy affair. I wanted to use the internet for a good bit to try and plan some our Central American options, but the place closed at 2pm. So instead I decided to get the bus to the nearby fishing village of Taganga to check out scuba diving.

Taganga was also a bit grubby in my opinion, and the beach here was dirty (with lots of broken glass even!), narrow and very noisy with bars along it pumping our extraordinarily loud 'music' (although the beach is quite long and the setting with the surrounding hills is nice). There are loads of scuba operators here, but the nicest place also happened to be the cheapest (a Belgian guy and his Colombian wife, who operate from their house, with their 2-year old son wandering around the place in his nappy as I'm filling in PADI waiver forms and the like).

So the following morning we arrive back in Taganga at 8am and head off for my two dives. It was just me and the divemaster for the dives (Sarah snorkelling), and the weather was spot-on, so the visibility was fairly OK at about 12m-14m. Lots of nice coral and colouredy fishys, big morays, tiny spider crabs, lobsters, etc., but the best part was having such a calm, lovely smooth drift current - all my previous dives on this trip in Africa, Brazil, the Galapagos I had swells or nasty currents, so this was a real pleasure I must say. Although I did lose my divemaster half-way into the first dive when I swam off to check out a huge puffer fish. When I turned back I couldn't see the divemaster at all as he'd turned around a rock face and I'd been carried along by the current, and so after looking around for a bit I had to surface, be rescued by another boat and eventually re-united with the divemaster again before going back down again with him!

The little village of Taganga is nicer than Santa Marta, but the beach still has loads of rubbish and lots of broken glass and is very pebbley, all very grubby really. But the beach of Playa Grande, only about 20 minutes walk over a small headland is a lot cleaner and therefore a lot better, so we had lunch there. It was a public hoilday too, so lots of people with kiddies, but actually I liked the lively atmosphere.

Tomorrow is hiking in the nearby Tayrona National Park, so looking forward to that, as the heat should make it a nice challenging day out...