SANTA MARTA... Tourist Heaven or Hell? (Colombia Travel Guide)

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 Colombia. 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 going to find some things like this. And yeah, me and Sienna, we're going to get some street food. Ketchup. Oh, it's wrapped. It's chicken wrapped in rice. Look at that. It 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 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 just a typical street on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Yeah, 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 now. 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 at the hostel, she was like, what are you guys going out for? And we were 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 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. 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 this city, like, 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. American. Is this your restaurant? Yes. All right. Now, the third reason that Santa Marta could be considered a tourist hell, you can kind of see 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 salespeople who will try to get you in their shops, who will try to get your attention, who will sometimes catcall 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 enough different places where it happens a lot that I'm kind of desensitized. I just kind of like have learned to laugh and ignored 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 hell. And as we're looking at the heaven and hell balance right now, I mean, 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. But 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 Trece. 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. With a full day of walking, you could see a lot of the city. And there's the Malecon, which of course is the boardwalk where you get the ocean, 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 menu del dia. It just means menu of the day. It's an affordable way to get 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 $12,000 or $13,000. This one offers two different types of fish for the menu of the day. One of them is a Sierra. That's the one I got. The other one is Mojauro. Am I saying that right? Mojauro? 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 is 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 take a little look. That's like chess. Nice little game. Some 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. But I thought I would take you down to 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 inching its way into the port as I speak. But most of the downtown, most of 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 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 personally prefer Santa Marta. So I would say it's definitely a reason that 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 little beach where you can just relax. That's the thing. It could be heaven or it could be hell depending on which way you look at it. And that's really how I want to present Santa Marta. 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 Minca. And I actually spent a full week in Minca. 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 Minca 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 appeal of Minca 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. 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 hub. It's the starting point from which people will branch off from. And you know there's no denying one thing. Traveling the coast of Colombia 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 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 around 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 Dan from the new... Blah, blah, blah, blah. 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.