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Despite planning on spending only 3 or 4 days in Taganga we ended up staying for more than a week. We found this quaint little town to be quite entertaining and both Dylan and I could have easily spent more time here. After a few days I ditched my silver chain and we picked sarongs in an attempt to blend in a little more with local hippie population. There were a few reasons we ended up staying longer than we had anticipated, one being the comfort of our hostel Casa de Felipe. It was a beautiful and clean little hostel on the outskirts of town surrounded by lush vegetation and littered with comfortable hammocks. There was also an amazing restaurant run by a Belgian chef that served a filet mignon which would rival the finest cut of meat in Alberta but cost only 17000 pesos or 8 dollars.

However the main reason we ended spending so much time in Taganga was most definitely the plethora of interesting characters we met. One of our sidekicks was a quiet German fellow named Beno who failed to correct us even though we called him Meno for close to a week. There was Lucas, a 36 year old Australian guy who only seemed to have two passions in life – smoking copious amounts of weed and devouring 2-3 of the local banana splits per day.  There was a very nice travelling duo which consisted of Argentinean named Luciana and an American named Erica. There was a deaf mute who would sit around our table while we were eating at the beach and as soon as we stood up he would proceed to have a seat and finish our meals. We met an American guy who was living in Bogotá with a group of socialists and his friend who came down to visit from Florida and one day while lazing around in a hammock declared he hated international travel and that this was going to be his last trip outside the states. We met Susan, a 29 year old American girl who had been backpacking around the world for 10 years straight. There was a retired couple from Alaska who were the pair of golden oldies which each and ever hostel seems to host. A trio of Swedes, one who ended up giving me a rather impressive haircut at 2 in the morning despite having consumed a significant amount of our good ol favorite Colombian rum ‘Viejo de Caldas’. The list goes on but needless to say there was a constant flow of very unique people which made Taganga a very interesting place.

Dylan and I both agreed that we could have easily spent more time in Taganga and we would both love to return someday. However after checking our bank account statements and realizing we were coming up on a month in Colombia we decided that if we were to even make it close to our final destination in Buenos Aires it was time to hit the road. The Caribbean coast of Colombia is about as far from Argentina as you can get in South America so we packed our backpacks and opted to travel nonstop to Quito, Ecuador and make some progress south…

Connor