too often youtubers like me we tell you a place was the best or the worst we tell you we loved it
or we hated it but the truth is often somewhere in the middle and santa marta is one such place
i both love it and hate it simultaneously and in today's video i'm going to give you
an honest look at this city the good and the bad this is santa marta tourist heaven or hell
hello youtube and welcome to santa marta colombia santa marta is a city further up the colombian
coast my last video was in cartagena we're now about a four-hour bus ride from there
we took a shuttle bus it actually took about four and a half hours with the traffic
it's another very hot afternoon here on the coast of columbia so let's begin with one of the things
i didn't like about santa marta that was the heat now admittedly if you go to somewhere like
the caribbean coast you need to be prepared for the sun you should obviously be expecting that
you know bring sunscreen bring a hat bring lots of water stuff like that but for me santa marta
the heat was so hot it was basically you couldn't do anything in the mid-afternoon
but you should still explore the city because when you do you're gonna find some things like this
and uh yeah me and sienna we're gonna get some street food
ketchup
oh it's it's wrapped it's chicken wrapped in the rice look at that
just melts in your mouth doesn't it oh my god
3 000 pesos for this now affordability is a big reason why a place like santa marta is a tourist
heaven that was a meal that we had for less than one u.s dollar and there's not many places
in the world you can still get away with that if you're a budget conscious traveler colombia
is a great country to visit santa marta might have been the most affordable place i visited
now unlike the old city of cartagena where i filmed at last this feels to me much more like a
uh just a typical typical street on the caribbean coast of columbia you see a lot of locals selling
eating right now it must be lunchtime we got food all around us look at these sausages
people fixing phones people selling street food people
all kinds of stuff here happening now as i continue to walk through the streets i want
to point something else out my backpack where's my backpack yeah my backpack was like this and
i wasn't wearing it like this because it's some cool new canadian fashion statement not
i was wearing it like that because the pickpocketing situation in santa marta is quite
intense you know i don't mean to keep bringing this up i talked about this in my medellin video
but i think it's important for tourists to know what they're getting into
okay to give you an idea when we first checked into our hostel which is in the center of the
tourist zone of santa marta it was about 10 p.m it was actually late at night when we arrived and we
were looking for a convenience store to get like i don't know some water or some chips or something
and then the colombian woman working in the hostel she was like what are you guys going out for
and we're like oh we're just getting some snacks you know at the convenience store two blocks away
and she said you can't walk that way what do you mean you can't it's like it's like two
blocks down the road and she's like no don't walk that way at night like walk the other way
if you want to go somewhere like walk the other way and then over to the square
um she was literally recommending us not to walk two blocks from the hostel and as i spent a few
more days in santa marta i heard from another guy he was a portuguese volunteer at the hostel
he had literally he'd called the police like five times in his three weeks there about thefts he
said like every other day there was someone saying that their phone got stolen or they had some
bad encounter he said it was over and over and over and he was really getting fed up because
he loved the city like he so much so that he wanted to stay there and volunteer but he said
he was really demoralized by all these stories of tourists getting robbed i will say that there is
a security risk to places like santa marta and so i need to pass that along or you know what's
i just got to be honest about that with you guys you are american i am canadian she is american
all right
now the third reason that santa marta could be considered a tourist hell you can kind of see it
with the guy with the sign and maybe you just get the vibe from as i'm walking around the streets
there's a lot of hustlers there's a lot of pushy sales people who will try to get you in their
shops who will try to get your attention who will sometimes cat call at the woman walking around
i've heard from a lot of travelers that it makes them uncomfortable
it's not fun being like constantly called on when you're just trying to walk down the street
i've been in enough different places where it happens a lot that i'm kind of desensitized i
just kind of like have learned to laugh and ignore it a bit but if you're the kind of person who
doesn't react well in those situations this is a city where it happens a lot like i saw it happen a
lot and so when it's a hot day and you're already kind of worried about security and there's people
coming up to you and calling at you and stuff that entire picture can make it feel like a tourist
health and as we're looking at the heaven and hell balance right now i mean it's it's painting a kind
of bleak picture of santa marta now granted we do have that good street food at the beginning and
hopefully you can see from the footage that the streets they do have a certain character to them
with other cities like cartagena nearby
does santa marta have enough to attract tourists let's find out
so we just made it to a place called calera tracee uh it's like a walking street you can
see from this town it is a sizable center more than i'll be able to show you today
but it's not too too much like with a full day of walking you could you could see a lot of a
lot of the city and there's the malecon which of course is the boardwalk where you get the ocean
uh i guess more specifically the caribbean sea we'll take you there a bit later
beautiful streets of santa marta interesting artwork behind me on this place too
i guess it's a music shop oh no it's actually a disco bar albania disco bar interesting
so we just stopped at lunch at this place called playa alta
right on the water so if you've traveled in colombia before you know a lot of restaurants
have lunch specials called meno del dia it just means many of the day it's an affordable way to
get like a main course it usually comes with a soup to start and a drink as well
for like you know max 20 000. like sometimes you get it for like 12 or 13 000. this one offers two
different types of fish for the menu of the day one of them is uh sierra that's the one i got
the other one is mojavro mozara am i saying that right mojave
so this was another great meal for an affordable price and at this point i think i got to add
food to the list of reasons santa marta as heaven you know you're right next to the rainforest so
you know you're going to have things that are fresh and tropical the fish quality amazing i
had some good sushi i had some good smoothies so i definitely add food quality to the list
of positives for the city so we just finished our lunch taking a moment to sit by this little park
in the afternoon sun there's some kind of game happening across the street
i'm going to uh i'm going to take a little look
like chess
nice little game of chess in the park
so sienna just went back to the hostel to take a little nap it is definitely the siesta time of day
uh but i thought it would take you down the water and show you what the waterfront
looks like these wooden buildings are little souvenir stands and stuff like that tiendas
shipping containers in the distance obviously there's quite a large port
that's an enormous ship that's just uh inching its way into the port
as i speak but most of the downtown most the tourists are on the other direction
you can see a little stretch of beach up ahead by those buildings
and finally the waterfront i mean granted the city itself doesn't have the most
impressive beach area i feel like if they wanted to they could probably make it
even nicer than it currently is but when the sun finally sets and the cooler weather comes in
and you see a lot of people just walking around it's it's it's kind of got a romantic feel to it
cartagena doesn't really have anything like that in the old city i mean there is a waterfront but
i i personally prefer santa marta's so i would say that's definitely a reason that um
you could see it as a tourist heaven in fact i mean think about it it's affordable
there's good food there's a lot there's a little beach where you can just relax and you
can that's the thing it could be heaven or could be held depending on which way you look at it and
that's really how i want to present santa marta it's it's an interesting city but you need to
be sure what you're getting into but there's one more cool thing santa marta has going for it and
this is something i'm going to talk about in the last part of the video when i actually take you
out of santa marta and towards a town called minka and i actually spent a full week in minka i spent
more time there than i did in santa marta and it has a lot of the cool things that santa marta has
like the affordability and the good food and all that but it's just a more chilled out pace of life
good morning youtube from the beautiful town of minka in the sierra nevada mountain range
i wanted to do at least one video to show you guys what this area is all about
of course there is the town which i'm walking through right now this is the main street but
i think the real the real appeal of minka for most people is the nature which surrounds it
and there's other places people go to there's a place called palomino
there's a huge national park there's an ancient ruin called the lost city uh ciudad perduda
perduda yeah it's called the lost city i don't know a lot about it but some people i talked to
did the hike and it sounded really intense and pretty cool so the point is there is tourism
infrastructure but mostly santa marta is the tub it's the starting point from which people
branch off from and you know there's no denying one thing um traveling the coast of columbia is
hard especially when it's hot and you're dealing with some of the issues i've talked about in this
video and others it's it's challenging you know a certain type of traveler will love that challenge
another type of traveler will be like you know i should have stayed in the beach resort
in this easy country i should have just flown there all inclusive like i don't want to work
for my travels other people see work as part of the adventure you know
and ultimately it's going to be up to you whether you experience heaven or hell with that expression
we create our own heaven or hell i mean i guess it's really up to us to some degree how we see
a place like santa marta or even a country like colombia and yeah that's it as always i'm dancing
as always i'm dan from the new travel i'll see you next time
i forgot how to talk there at the end okay