We decided that a few days on the beach would be a nice way to relax, so we went to San Adres. Oddly, this island is 470 miles North of Colombia, yet only 140 miles East of Nicaragua. Looking on the map, you would think this would be a Nicaraguan island, but you would be wrong. Officially, there are three languages spoken on the island — Spanish, English and Creole. In practice though, we met very few people that spoke any English. The Spanish was heavily influenced by Creole, meaning it was largely incomprehensible to us. Our Spanish was mostly understood though, so we could explain what we wanted, even if we rarely understood the words in response.
Colombia is making a very strong effort to eliminate illegal drugs. That was nowhere as obvious as trying to get to the island. After a long line to pay 49,900 pesos entrance tax — about $15USD (could not pay in advance, required pesos, and payment was so inefficient that the flight was delayed), we made it to the normal X-Ray machine. Then a second X-Ray machine. Then two drug sniffing dogs wandered through the line for 15 minutes. Then a pat-down (men on the left, and women on the right). We were then finally let on the plane. When we arrived… yep, you guessed it… another X-Ray machine and another drug sniffing dog. I’m pretty sure no illegal drugs are arriving by commercial flight!
Once we arrived on San Andres, it took nearly an hour for our luggage to arrive on the baggage carousel. At one point, a Colombian woman and her adult daughter asked me which carousel our bags would come out on. I told her what I had heard. She did not speak a word of English, and we spent the next half hour in a halting and laughing conversation entirely in Spanish — SUCCESS!☺
There were a few nice murals in town (upper left above), but nothing like in other Colombian cities. One interesting vendor we saw several times was for “minuto celular” (lower left above). At first I thought they were selling minutes to recharge your phone. Then I saw people buying — the vendor would hand over a phone, the customer would talk for short time, then hand the phone back with the price. Turns out they were selling cell phone time for those without a cell phone. The few transactions I saw were all with obvious tourists, so this appears a decent way to make a call without having to get a Colombian SIM card for your own phone.
We went on a snorkeling trip around the island one day. I had bought an underwater case for my camera before we moved to Ecuador, exactly for trips like this. And, of course, I forgot the case at home in Cuenca. As such, we have almost no photos of that portion of the trip. Heading out was a nice calm motor trip (middle right), but coming back, the motors were set to full speed as the waters got rougher, and I had to hold on for dear life! (lower right… ☺)
We snorkeled over the corals, but it was disheartening to see them in such poor condition. Corals are dying the world over, so this is not unique to here, but we still remember the vibrant, live corals we first saw when diving in the 1970’s in Hawaii, Mexico, Grand Caymen and elsewhere. They are now overgrown with algae, with many parts bleached white and dead.
On our third stop, the boat captain told us to hold on to a rope behind the boat. We were then towed over a region in which there were several statues that had been sunken. There is an “underwater museum” in Cancun, Mexico that San Andres wanted to replicate here. It was interesting, and felt like being towed on a “banana boat” but without the banana (since we were snorkeling).
Food on the island was mostly disappointing, which surprised us. We went to several seafood restaurants (an island? gotta eat fish!), and only the one we went to on the very last day (Peru Wok) was very good. The others weren’t terrible, but simply not up to the standards we had come to expect from Bogota and Medellin. One restaurant did have an interesting use for their wine bottles, using them as sculptures lining their walk. Above is only a tiny fraction of those bottles.