(Parque Nacional de Tayrona, Colombia)…It was only a few years ago that this beautiful park on the northern coast of Colombia, close to Santa Marta, was utterly off limits. Even in the mid-part of the last decade, the park and jungle’s leafy valleys were the haunt for guerrilla movements, notably FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia). The original residents, the Kogi, retreated high into their dominions in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Maria. They have come down to the beaches again, if only to keep an eye on the fledgling tourism developments, which thankfully here consist only of a park rangers' headquarters (see photo) with a basic restaurant and a shack selling water by the only beach not pummeled by Atlantic Ocean breakers.
This is the land of Nobel Prize for Literature winner Gabriel García Márquez, and the lengthy drive between the commercial capital hereabouts, Barranquilla, and the park are riddled with references and sign to and of him. The last time I visited Colombia (2000), it was considered too dangerous to visit Aracataca, his birthplace; this time around, I simply did not have time, but a hot soak after my Tayrona adventures brought me very close. Next time! The huge marsh of La Cienaga, which means "The Marsh" in Spanish, is his country, too, as is the desert promontory of La Guajira, home of the Wayúu Indians and the small city of Riohacha. I would fly out of Colombia from that place on a small plane headed to the near but totally different tourism experience of Aruba.
The walk through the Parque Nacional de Tayrona was easy and pleasant on the way to the beach. Small rivulets were crossed, and I caught glimpses of such wonderful birds as the Collared aracari, Lance-tailed manakin, rufous-and-white wrens and a type of hummingbird called a White-tailed starfrontlet. The sound of crashing in the jungle undergrowth could have been anything, most likely small rodents, such is the way sound is carried here. After a handful of miles, the path drops down to the type of beach film producers would crave for to represent the beginnings of the planet. Huge rocks reminded me of the opening lines of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude -- rocks that he wrote bordered the "bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs, [where] the world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
Waves crashed high, and a lone horseman with a dangling machete rode through a tidal pool to complete the scene. Eventually, the park headquarters building is reached, and it was here for lunch that the clear skies and large sun disappeared behind brooding cloud. As the rain came down, a Kogi child emerged from the jungle and sat down opposite us. I thought in clichés, of primordial swamps and our distant ancestors. A donkey shaded itself beneath a large red beach umbrella, and a white horse stuck its head out from huge palm fronds.
The rain did not cease and grew harder. We needed to head back, and it was with a little nervousness. Lightning hit the beach ahead of us, and I longed to get back into the forest. I picked my step up and started climbing to get around the series of rock boulders that came down to the sea in regularly spaced out formations. Eventually my group got back under cover, only for me to pause under a reed canopy and feel the hairy attention of an adult tarantula on my shoulder. I flicked it off, which I do not think I would have done if I had paused for another second to consider what it was. The small streams we had crossed on the way up were now raging torrents that crossed the path and had grown to eight or ten times their original size. More water sliced across the trail in the opposite direction. On the second torrent, all hope was lost to keep shoes and socks dry. T-shirts stuck to the skin. I was having a great time.
Shivering back at the bus we dried the best we could. One of our group of four had the keys to a rudimentary natural hot springs of a friend of his (he had never been) that was somewhere near to the hamlet of Orihueca, just the other side of the Aracataca rail line. It was dark, and we fumbled along in the car trying to find the entrance. At one stage the army appeared from nowhere – just like the white horse – and asked what we were doing. Explanations believed, they pointed to a dirt lane, and after opening some old gates, we turned on the headlamps and jumped into the warmth of the springs. Above us bats the size of dinner plates flew around, and an unseen train rattled along on its way to my Timbuktu of Aracataca, no more than 10 kilometres distant. I lent back in the silent pool and considered that what the train contained was not fruit but the dead bodies of the banana workers massacred in the famous scene in García Márquez's fictional town of Macondo.