23/02/2015 My time in Brazil is slowly coming to an end after almost two months and exploring Santuário do Caraça as well as colonial towns such as Ouro Preto was another great experience. I barely had internet in the last days, but now I can finally get a quick update out. Santa Marta has been an amazing base for a lot of different things in the northern coast of Colombia; one short side trip in a Jeep took us up the mountains to a small village called Minca.

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I had to bear through another long bus ride with Colombian music videos featuring local music and ridiculous half naked girls to arrive in Santa Marta at 7pm. The drop bear hostel was just 3km away from the Bus station, so I decided to walk over there in a creepy atmosphere, a thin layer of mist covering the ground in the dark. The hostel turned out to be pretty amazing, featuring a huge swing, really nice game room and very comfortable, clean and big dorms. Since it was pretty hot in Santa Marta, I jumped into the swimming pool to cool off before heading off with my new four buddies from Australia to explore the mountain village of Minca in the next morning.

We made a deal with a Jeep driver to get us up there and picked up another guy on the way: Tristan from England. Seemed like a cool guy and just jumped off another bus when we were about to leave town to head into the mountains. Once there, we started the 45 minute walk to the local waterfall. I paid 3000 to get in and 2000 for a beer (instead of 3000, pero no tengo mas!! – haha) and we enjoyed the nice water for a while before heading back down.

The town itself is not so spectacular, what makes it really enjoyable though is the surrounding landscape. And because of that reason, I decided to quickly run to a viewpoint while the rest waited for the Jeep to bring us back again. After running into the wrong direction first, I finally found it but was not too impressed by the view. Still a nice workout running around in that altitude hehe 🙂 When I made it back to the center of the village, everyone was already waiting in the Jeep for me to squeeze in on the last tiny spot in the back.

We made it back to Santa Marta at nightfall and dropped off at the supermarket to store up for the trip that everyone was looking forward to already: Tayrona National Park. This next update will certainly be a much bigger one – I could even do some really nice Bouldering there! 🙂