Santa Marta, Colombia

I only stayed in Santa Marta because I had a long day of traveling from Villa de Leyva and didn’t think I could make it to Minca up in the Sierra Nevada mountains before dark. Now that I know how to get to Minca, I would advise going straight there because I found Santa Marta to be kind of gritty and unpleasant. Minca is really nice.

My travel from Villa de Leyva involved multiple modes of transportation. It started with a short taxi ride to the bus terminal, then a three-and-a-half-hour bus ride to Bogotá, another taxi to the airport, a 90-minute flight to Santa Marta’s airport and finally a taxi to my guest house. It took me about 10 hours door-to-door.

I stayed at Casa Alma, a small family-run guesthouse in a relatively quiet neighborhood about a mile from the city’s historic center. The two sisters who run the place are really nice. I had dinner and breakfast there and both were very good. It’s a decent place to stay.

After dinner I walked into the old part of town which was thronged with people walking the narrow streets. The streets are lined with bars and restaurants, each with a person standing outside urging you to drink or eat there. These people are in addition to the many other hawkers walking the streets, asking the international I-want-to-sell-you-something question, “Where you from?”

The place gave me the sense of it being a multigenerational, multinational Spring Break destination lacking in any real culture or quality.

I was in the main square, Parque de Los Novios, taking in the tawdry scene, standing right next to a parked police motorcycle, when two young girls, about 15 years old came up to me. They were dressed in tight jeans and tops, pretty heavily made up. One of them smiled and greeted me with, “Hey, baby.” I found that greeting amusing, as I’m theoretically old enough to be their grandfather. But there was nothing amusing about being face to face with child prostitution.

I’m very liberal when it comes to what consenting adults choose to do, but I draw a moral red line not to be crossed when it comes to children. All I could do was smile with sad eyes at the two girls and politely let them know I was not interested. They walked away to find a guy who was.

That brief encounter further sullied my opinion of Santa Marta.

As I walked back to my guesthouse along a busy, noisy thoroughfare on a dirty, uneven sidewalk, I was grateful to be heading up into the mountains in the morning.