The easy part of about Playa Grande is falling for it immediately. The hard part? Getting there.

By Matt Stabile

I STUCK MY HEAD OUT THE OPEN DOOR OF THE BUS and looked down a steep cliff wall that descended into a wide bay. The public buses in Colombia are usually beat-up looking affairs, with rusty fenders, faded stripes painted across their bodies, and, as is customary across many parts of Latin America, manned by both a driver and an assistant who hangs bravely near the door and collects the fares as they are passed up to him after passengers get a chance to settle in.

This particular assistant didn’t seem fazed the slightest as he stood precariously near the open door, clinging to a bar above the windshield and staring lazily out the door of the bus, his foot hanging in the warm breeze, several hundred feet from the ground. We were crossing over the small row of hills that separate Santa Marta from Taganga, a sleepy fishing village on a bay that, incidentally, has become the region’s capital of scuba instruction. I was not heading there to take advantage of the diving but rather as a jumping-off point to head one beach further to Playa Grande, a secluded stretch of sand with an esteemed reputation for beauty. (more…)

Maybe secluded bays and pristine beaches aren’t the first things that pop into people’s head when they think of Colombia, but a trip to Colombia’s Caribbean coast reveals just that. And the best part? No tourists.

By Matt Stabile

AS I LOOKED OUT THE BUS WINDOW AND INTO THE NIGHT SKY, I could see flashes of lightning igniting the dark, colorless clouds lingering high above the Caribbean Sea, portensions of things to come. It was Friday night. Cumbia music was blasting from a radio hanging by a wire above the driver’s head. Behind me a teenage girl was meticulously applying makeup with the aid of a small compact mirror. Two seats in front of me, a group of young Colombian men were drinking from an open bottle and joking around with each other. I peeled my shirt away from my chest, damp from a combination of a slight drizzle and the tropical humidity that had blanketed my body the moment I stepped off the plane, and I couldn’t have been happier. I had traveled here to Colombia’s Caribbean coastline to visit its famously beautiful and remote beaches — beaches whose mythic-like images were planted enticingly in my mind by travelers during cold, rainy nights in Bogotá hostels and Medellín cafes; usually described in hushed tones, like the disclosure of the whereabouts of a lost city that few had seen.

It was only fitting that the rain began to fall the minute that I stepped off the plane. At first it was a light drizzle, but as the hours wore on, the rain progressed into what I would soon learn was an once-in-a-decade “weather phenomena” that, during the course of my stay along the coastline, would cause rivers to overflow, shantytowns to flood, city streets to become deluged and hidden beneath torrents of water flowing from the nearby mountains, and for me to seriously question what vendetta had I with the gods that was causing this storm to strike during the exact period of time that I was staying there.

The good thing about rain, particularly the kind that falls in the warm, humid months of November and December here, is that it’s still far better to be caught in than, say, a snowstorm in the icy, frigid streets back in New York where, had I been at that exact moment, I would certainly not be wandering around in a pair of swimming trunks and sandals, stopping into various shops, and lounging on the beach with a concoction of freshly squeezed coconut and orange juice served in a plastic mug shaped like a coconut shell.

“When do you think it ends?” I asked a bored barista the next morning, shortly after I had ordered my third straight cup of coffee. (more…)