Living la Vida en El Cabo in Tyrona National Park

El Cabo San Juan has definately become one of my top ten favorite places in the world, and it is totally without having any kind of "wow" factor. There are not much to see, not much to do, but that is also what makes it so great. The places with the nicest beaches, best night life and most day activities can easily become tiring, and for most tourists El Cabo will probably be too simple. There is also a two hour, semi tough walk through the jungle that might help keep the families and other demanding tourists away.

El Cabo has got everything we needed, but not a single thing more. Simple things like not having to choose what to do (since there was not much to do) or which restaurant (because there was only one) was great in between travels where we have to do a thousand decisions every day. The place is a bit similar to Bottle Beach in Thailand, where there is just some bungalows, one kiosk, one restaurant and one beach. Tyrona is a little bigger, but still even more simple with just hammocks and bungalows. Hammocks being really cold at night, and the tents being really warm. Temperature wise we were most comfortable in the nights sleeping in a tent, but we must say that waking up in a hammock at sunrise with a view over the beach and the ocean was a great feeling that should not be missed. Most people there were pretty hippie-ish as well and some chose to spend the mornings meditating at the beach and others went skinny dipping in the neighbour nudist beach.

One highlight of our stay in Tyrona was a trek to Pueblito, a small village on the top of one of the mountains where you can find archeological remains of a lost city from around 500B.C. It was a really sweaty hike, where we just found the trail by ourselves, starting from the beach in El Cabo San Juan. It was not Pueblito itself that was the best part, but the four hour trek round trip where we had to jump up some big boulders, crouch through some rocks forming tunnels and navigate through the jungle that we liked the most.

During our last dinner we noticed that people started standing up and pointing towards the place where our tent was standing and as we looked towards it we saw that the forest was on fire! It had started with people burning garbage, which quickly had turned into a proper forest fire right behind our tents! We were quick to leave our meal and run to get our things packed, but soon afterwards we were told by the two policemen at the camp that everything was under control and that we should get back to restaurant. Luckily it was, and we watched the fire die out completely in the distance before we went to bed.

The next morning we took the easy way out of the national park and joined one of the speed boats heading for Taganga. An hour after we arrived completely soaked from having bucketloads of water thrown at us by enormous waves. When returning to the mainland we noticed that we had received texts from people back home who were worried that we were in the ongoing tsunami on the west coast of Colombia, but even though the waves had scared us to death and it was april fools day, we decided not to make a joke out of it and instead to just be happy to be at safe and dry shore.