El Rodadero is a harbour city located just an hour away from Santa Marta, known for it’s beaches. Since we were based in Santa Marta for four nights, which was not the most interesting place to stay, we decided to do a day trip to El Rodadero to see how the beaches there were like.
We took a bus from 11-11: the streets and avenues here just have numbers, so this was the place where street 11 and avenue 11 crossed, shortened eleven eleven / once con once. The bus rides here do not cost much, and it is interesting to sit by the window and have all the street vendors coming up to your window or even on to the bus every five minutes to sell you snacks and small bags of water, and with the heat here we buy one to drink and wash our faces with almost every time we get the oportunity to do so. For some reason it seems as the locals are not sweating half as much and we hardly see them drinking at all.
Once arriving at the beach we saw the place filled with locals families, vendors selling all kinds of stuff and people offering sevices like massage, photo taking, pedal boat rental etc to the point that it was quite exhausting. Exactly like I imagine Benidorm or other spanish beach cities to be like. It might have been us being there on a weekend, when the people rush from the nearby cities to enjoy a beach weekend, but even on the day tours that we have done so far it has been only Colombian and other Latin Americans who have been doing the trips and no Western Tourists. Considering the fact that it was absolutely no tourism here less than ten years ago, it might also be that these places not yet have picked up for western tourists yet. Anyway, the beach was very overcrowded with noisy Colombians, and we hope that our next nights in Tayrona and Taganga can be a bit more quiet and idyllic than El Rodadero.
