La Guajira Peninsula 19th - 25th October

We have since returned from a place that felt to me exactly like the end of the earth. And in some ways it was. With a few set backs, some determination and some luck we made it to the most tippedy top of Colombia and indeed the entirety of South America (this pleased the geek in both of us as we will now be touching the tippedy top and the bippedy bottom of the sub continent).

 We first travelled to Riohacha and stayed the night in a tiny and insanely cheap little old lady’s hotel right next to the bus station and the next morning we awoke and asked around for a car to Uribia. Uribia is the next main town inland from Riohacha in the lower part of the area we were to be travelling through, La Guajira. When we got to Uribia we were met by a frenetic Wayuu father and son who literally squeezed us onto their collectivo truck. We smiled politely as we pushed ourselves into unfeasibly small gaps in between people on the wooden bench in the back of the truck and began to take stock of our surroundings. As we looked about I started to take in the mannerisms of the Wayuu people around me. We had been told by some Colombians that they were unfriendly and strong willed people, over my time in Upper Guajira I found them strong willed but definitely not unfriendly.

 I immediately noticed the large colourful ankle length smock dresses that the women wore and their singing voices as they spoke, the pitch rising and falling. So we were made space for by a strong faced matriarch and squeezed on with every nook and cranny around us being filled with boxes, huge bags of food, bikes, kids etc etc. Twice there seemed to be about 20cms worth of a gap and the father squeezed on someone else! Their use of space defied reason.

After we eventually set off for Carbo de la Vela, staying remarkably together and travelling at some speed for just how much we had loaded on, I started to notice the colour of the landscape around us. From the incredibly long and straight road I saw how the earth was now an orange colour and that there were sparse desert shrubs interspersed with cactic of two varieties. One was made of joined lines of round pebble shaped sections and covered in spikes and the other was long tall upright thick green stalks with spikes coming out sideways. Here is a baby one...

 The journey from Uribia to Carbo de la Vela in the truck took almost three hours! We were actually very lucky as slowly we started to drop off people at their houses with their small mountains of goods they had gathered in Uribia and it was incredible to see how these Wayuu families lived absolutely in the middle of nowhere. As we drove away each time, waving, it was as if we were going to be the last people they saw until the truck came back again, unbelievable! Each time we arrived the rest of the family would come out of the houses which were surrounded by lines of upright cacti that acted as a fence.

Finally we were dropped in Carbo de la Vela which is basically a long line of empty wooden huts, a few which are restaurants at one time and a couple of tiendas selling drinks and various small items of food with the Caribbean sea on the one side and the desert stretching out into the distance on the other.

 We are in the quietest time of the low season, dead in the middle of the monsoons, so Carbo was a ghost town. We saw only about three other tourists in our two nights. This is what also made it harder for us to get to Punta Gallinas about a two hour journey by jeep and boat around the peninsula. We wanted to get there for Samly’s birthday and planned to spend two nights in Carbo and then travel to Punta Gallinas for three nights.

We stayed at Pujuru in Carbo, a hostel run by a Wayuu family and one of the only ones open! We slept in Chinchurros which are traditional hammocks of the Guajiro people woven of cotton threads or palm fiber like fishing nets, and they are the most comfortable hammocks I have ever experienced (and I am becoming quite a hammock connoisseur over all these years!) A Chinchurro is a also wide hammock with long blanket like sides that hang down and when it comes to sleeping you can wrap them around yourself to create a little cocoon.

Their family home and the hostel was built out of mud and cacti lined walls, complete with cacti lined roofing. Unfortunately for us though the sky decided that it wanted to have two of the biggest storms we have experienced yet in Colombia just as we decide to have a tentative roof above our heads and to sleep in cotton cocoons, and with hilarious consequences. As usual we had gone to bed just after the sun and had about two hours sleep when we were awoken by the biggest thunder clap right above our heads, (so loud that it made the hairs of my skin stand up and my heart skip), and a stream of water began pouring directly onto my head. I tried to wrap myself tightly in the blanket like sides of the Chinchurro but it was not good, I was getting soaked! I jumped up and out of my Chinchurro and with my torch managed to quickly find the only dry spot under our roof, a small metre squared area, and wrapped my sheet around myself. Sam felt sorry for me and joined me and we stood there getting gradually more and more wet, the splashes and rain falling on us as it pelted through the cacti and fell down the edges of the roof. Monsoooon! After about an hour of standing, waiting and with no seeming end to the storm in sight, I decided to try and break into one of the cabanas to try and get to a drier place. I checked the nearest one but it was padlocked so then checked the one next to it and it was gloriously unpadlocked! With only the thought of a dry place in my mind and my wish to avoid using my hand through the small waterfall that was falling in front of the door, I raised my foot and karate kicked the door open! Swathed in my bed sheet and flailing my torch around under pelting rain, thunder and lightning flashes must have looked quite a terrifying sight to the poor soul I startled awake inside the cabana!! Still, we laughed about it in the morning!

During our two days in Carbo we washed in bucket showers, took walks through the surrounding desert in the dangerous and unbelievable midday heat

 (the photos simply do not show just how searingly hot it was), avoiding the strange cartoon like flying langostas...

...we walked over the stinkiest fishy beach and passed fishermen and a kite surfer. The family had a lot of children who were as happy and curious as the other children I had met throughout my time so far in Colombia.

We also saw some juxtaposition of cultures evident in the landscape. We came across a huge mound with a large wooden cross on the top overlooking the sea. On its bank were small mounds of shells.

It is known that the indigenous people collect the shells for a sacred ritual called poporo. They believe that shells exist as a sort of spiritual middleman between the light of the sun and the dark of the sea, and they can tell the history of a area by interpreting the shell’s colour and markings.

 Throughout these two days we had been asking the senora whether we can get a boat to Punta Gallinas. It was looking increasingly unlikely that we would be able to as the storms had clogged all the roads with puddles (we need to get to the port which was a forty-five minute jeep ride away). After our walk around the surrounding desert we talked and decided that we weren’t going to have any luck with getting to the peninsula for Samly’s bday and that t would be better to cut and run down into Santander to make sure we were somewhere good for it. As we returned to Pujuru some Colombians we had met told us that there were two girls also trying to get to Punta Gallinas, two Aussie girls and as we spoke to them they steeled us with renewed hope that we would get there and so we decided to stay one more day, just in case. We made sure that we didn’t get our hopes up and that night there was only a mild rainy pattering and I only got a little bit wet in the night. We awoke to huge puddles remaining on the floor but the bonus was that one of the grils was fluent in Spanish (massive help!) having lived in Cali for two years and she helped us to negotiate a jeep after a few hours of sun and a boat all the way there to Punta Gallinas! It looked like we were going to make it after all!! So our determination had paid off and at about midday we were given the green light and drove in our jeep to Port Bolivar where a small speed boat was waiting for us and a one and a half hour boat journey lay ahead. Unfortunately, the Caribbean sea was not being its usual self after the storms of the previous days and was insanely choppy, completely soaking us every other second as we drove across the waves (I was still picking the dried salt out of my ears five days later!)

Mercifully after a hour and a half we pulled into a channel which held calm water and I wiped my stinging eyes to take in the view now that I could actually see. We were driving though a large channel of calm green blue sea, with lines of lush green mangroves rising intermittently from out of it, flanked on both sides by small but vivid burnt orange cliffs, all under a powder blue sky with wisps of cloud occasionally punctuating its unendingness.

We pulled into a small jetty and were met by Francisco the Director of an ecotourist agency that helps create links between the Wayuu and tourists, and some members of the Wayuu family we were going to stay with. We climbed atop the small cliff to where the family’s house is and found some small open sided huts made of mud and cacti but mercifully with corrugated iron roofs!

We set up our Chinchurros under the roof nearest the edge of the bright orange cliff which was one side of the small peninsula sticking out into and surrounded on both sides by the greeny blue of the sea. Yep! Like something on a different planet!

Lots of cute goats around and at times it sounded as if they all knew my name "cllaiiire!"

It was really difficult at times to register in my brain that what I was actually seeing was real. My eyes seemed to be taking it in but my brain had real difficulty understanding! The colours were so vivid and the landscape so seemingly fictitious! We spent three heavenly days here, over Samly’s birthday, with Maddie and Ellie and the Wayuu family, we felt so remote, literally like we had reached the end of the earth.

The sunsets at the end of each day were indescribably vivid that it was like we had just simply yet magically stepped inside a painting. We were lost in a swirling mass of colour, dotted with the purple black of tiny puffed clouds and the high up wisps of clouds that didn’t seem able to keep still in the melting sky.

On our first full day there (we arrived a hour or so before sunset on the first day) we took some bikes and one of the kids of the family Freddo helped guide us to Taroa Beach. The bike ride would be for one and a half hours across the desert to find huge swathing sand dunes that undulated and fell away into a crystal blue sea. Along our way it was so hot that it felt like I could feel my blood boiling in my bones. Luckily we had mountain bikes because nearly all the paths were rock filled, leading to both our arms and our bums feeling like pneumatic drills!

We had the entire landscape to ourselves. Massive sprawling sand dunes, the orange of the desert landscape littered with scraggily bushes the faint green of cacti and craggy rocks.

Here is the astonishing Taroa Beach…

We passed plenty of flying langosta, large herds of goats, a multitude of cacti and the occasional person on bike or horse which Freddo would stop and chat to for a bit (some of which had a recently slaughtered and folded in the thirds goat on the back of their bike/motorbike). As we were returning, the sun was mercifully slinking in the sky and Freddo was worried about making it back in time to herd the goats away for the night, a huge snake rapidly slithered across my path! I shouted “snake, snake!” and spun around but there was no one there to see it, just me. It was huge and maybe a constrictor like the baby one Freddo showed us.

We watched the sunrise on Samly’s birthday, our first sunrise in South America.

 It was a calm one, made more interesting with cloud. After the massive effort and excitement of the previous day’s bike ride we decided to take it easy this day, keep out of the sun’s glare and hang out in our Chimchurros. Although we did go for a little wander and swim in the nearby bay.

I managed to make Sam my present and secretly a card and a cake, of all things!

We bought the ingredients in Carbo and the girls made it in the coals of the family’s fire whilst I kept Sam busy. It was a delicious limon and panella cake, complete with frosting and thanks to Ellie’s culinary mastery. We ate it all up and spent the rest of the evening drinking delicious ron after another magnificent sunset. A birthday he is never likely to forget!!

The time had come for us to leave. Just as our time here had begun though, there was jeopardy. We awoke to rain (I know, in a desert!), puddles were forming and it was looking unlikely that our boat would go and even if it did, I was dreading the tumultuous waves and continual soaking similar to our journey here. We waited and we waited and we figured out that we had to go as our boat back to Port Bolivar was taking the family’s fish to sell. At about ten AM a break in the clouds came and we were hustled aboard. They must have though me strange dressed in my bikini and sarong awaiting the soaking I received on my way here! 

 The other girls were carrying on round the peninsula to try to reach a national park so we set off in our boats together and separated as we went our different ways. Out of the channel and into the sea, which was as calm as calm can be! Phew!! It was a fantastic journey, with the boat characteristically full to bursting with a variety of goods and people and because this time I could actually see the coastline as we zoomed back around the peninsula to Port Bolivar. Then Hawk eye Sam thought he saw something on the horizon, a black shape! As we were straining to see the others in the boat starting shouting and saying “delfin, delfin!” And sure enough there was a large pod of dolphins heading straight towards us! We saw tails and flippers and even whole dolphins at times jumping right out of the water! It was majestic! They must have been feeding as we saw lots of fish jumping high from the wves to try to escape their clutches. Just magical. What a magical end to a magical trip, full of wonder and the feeling of remoteness.

I wonder what our return to the mountains will bring? But before that a mammoth journey lay ahead for us…

Coolness and green and calm awaits us, just let’s negotiate our last journey along the crazy, sweating frenetic Caribbean coast.