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…)