To get to Santa Marta, a fishing town turned surfing town on the other side of Cabo Blanco, I got the earliest bus out of Montezuma at 8am. This took me 45 minutes north to Cobano, a small connecting town. From there, there were three buses to Santa Marta a day and they were timed with arrivals from the ferry at Paquera. Either I was given some wrong information or I had just the connecting bus to Santa Marta as I was sitting there, wondering if the bus would ever arrive, for over two hours. To my relief, it finally did and I was in Santa Marta an hour later. As I got off the bus I turned around to see that Ula also got off the bus. She must have got on just after I had done. It turned out we were both staying at the same hostel. It felt nice to arrive somewhere and already know a familiar face. Santa Marta is essentially made up of one dirt road that runs parallel to the beach about a hundred meters back with a few dozen restaurants, bars and hostels spread along it. We were actually staying in Carmen, an area next to Santa Marta but people often referred to the whole area as Santa Marta.
Once checked-in to the little surfing hostel, I took a walk to and along the beach. When I got to the beach there were a handful of surfers in the water to my right, which was also the way towards the main part of the town, and only wilderness to my left. So I chose left and just kept walking. I didn’t take my camera with me, at this point I was still on high alert about losing or getting my equipment stolen and given that I didn’t know the area yet, I wasn’t prepared to take the risk. I walked for maybe thirty minutes. All the way along the beach crabs sprinted back to their holes, waited just outside with one claw in, until I was too close for their liking and they disappeared. Just past a small stream that ran into the sea was a large group of vultures, no less than fifty of them, scattered along the beach. Someone had thrown out the carcasses of leftover fish. To keep going, there was no option but to walk straight through all of the vultures. I was very cautious, I didn't know how they were going to react. The whole experience was utterly surreal. Six or seven of them were fighting over scraps of the fish while the rest, many of them in a windswept tree, were hunched waiting for their turn. Some hopped away as I walked past, others didn’t move other than to stare at me. It really felt like I shouldn’t be there, like I’d walked into the elephant graveyard beyond the pride lands. I walked for a few more minutes until I could see the end of the bay in sight and took a little detour behind the trees that lined the beach. At one point, the ground seemed to shallow out, I walked along it and realised that all around me were hundreds, if not thousands, of huge holes in the ground, ranging from golf ball to cricket ball size. I thought they had to be made by crabs, probably hermit crabs but there were none to be seen, so I walked home. When I got back I watched the sunset, until I was approached by a local man who was clearly on something stronger than anything served at the bars. I got more and more uncomfortable as his behaviour became stranger and more erratic. After twenty minutes of chatting to him, before the sunset had finished, I went home just to get away from him.
I told Ula about the holes in the ground the next day and we decided we would check them out after the sunset as that would most likely be when they come to life, since they weren’t there in the day. I had a pretty relaxed day on the beach with some of the people from the hostel and then watched the sunset, successfully this time, with Ula and two Americans we met. They declined the offer to check out the crabs, so we walked down there together. We were right, the place had come alive. Everywhere we looked the floor was teeming with hermit crabs. the biggest that I have ever seen, some, including the shells were the size of tennis balls. Trying not to stand on any was a struggle, especially in the dark, but with a few wobbles here and there, we managed it. It’s an image I will never forget. Again, it was frustrating I didn't have my camera but I didn't want to take it out all day with me. On the walk back we came across a huge bonfire made by some locals and we sat by it for nearly an hour before heading to get some ceviche - one ‘Asian style’, which essentially meant a peanut flavoured sauce and one mixed fish. It was the first time I'd tasted ceviche and one of the best dishes I have tasted in a very long time. When we got back to the hostel we played cards with Belgian woman and a Swiss guy for the rest of the night which was a lot of fun. When putting the evenings rubbish into the bin, a Central American bark scorpion scuttled out from underneath it. The Belgian woman, freaking out, ran straight out of the hostel. I personally thought it was quite beautiful. Though Santa Teresa didn't come close to the beauty or charm of Montezuma, experiencing some genuinely enchanting encounters with its wildlife made it all the more worth it.
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