"Fish, like the finest colored roosters in the world, blue, yellow, multicolored and all dappled a thousand different ways; and the colors so sharp that there is no man who would not marvel and take a long rest to watch them. When I arrived at this end the smell of flowers and trees of the Earth was so great and sweet that leaving was the hardest thing to do."
Cristobol Colón, Diario del primero viaje
It was the best dive of my life.
That might not be saying much, since I've only been scuba diving about 30 times, but saying that gives more impact to the opening sentence.
I was in a tiny fishing village on the northern coast of Colombia called Taganga. Taganga is about 15 minutes by car northeast of Santa Marta (map), just to the west of the largest national park in the country, Tairona National Park. I arrived there with a friend of mine named Corey, who I met earlier in the year at the school where we were working in Bucaramanga.
After travelling about 10 hours on an overnight bus, we got to Santa Marta at 8 a.m., and were diving by 10, despite no previous plans to do so. In those two hours we managed to find a backpackers hostel (we paid about $3.00/night), make arrangements to be brought to the site and have a little snooze. We were brought to the small out port, and then suited up at the dive shop, a two-minute walk from the beach.
The dive master seemed to know what he was doing, which was reassuring. One other girl, who was travelling with her boyfriend, joined us, along with a middle-aged man who was travelling with his wife and child. We geared up and jumped aboard the 20-foot vessel.
I felt nervously anxious, enjoying the spectacular scenery on the way to the dive site, about a half an hour from the dock. The sun was shining, giving the Caribbean a magical luster, and it was about 85°F, a typical day on the Colombian coast.
We had two dives planned. The first was to be between 25-30 feet, a shallow dive to adjust gear and get a taste of what was down there. A lot was down there!
The infamous Cayman Islands, which arguably have the best diving in the world, are located not too far north of where we were (relatively speaking), but Taganga had a total of just seven tourists that day, all of whom were in the same boat, so to speak. Who could ask for a more serene dive experience?
In Colombia: A Travel Survival Kit, Krzysztof Dydynski writes the following: "There is good snorkelling and scuba diving off the Archipélago de San Andrés and Providencia, and around the Islas del Rosario." Dydynski is author of Lonely Planet's Colombian edition, but he can't be a scuba diver. Not with such a skimpy understatement about diving in Colombia. It is amazing.
Scuba diving means leaving the world behind for a short time. It means entering a paradoxical place where man does not naturally belong.
Unable to speak or move about with the same agility as on land, we are dependant on our need for air and limited by time. But we are also freed; not only from gravity but also from all the confusion man has created with everyday life. We enter another world, and observe hundreds of other life forms frolicking in all their splendour. All is left behind as we explore the mystifying underwater world, that we still know so little about.
Apparently the Caribbean Sea was once part of the Pacific Ocean, and was separated when the Central American Isthmus rose about 38 million years ago. This also formed the Antilles and the Beata Fault, which is why the island of Cuba is separated from the other Caribbean Islands.
Only four million years ago, the Caribbean was completely divided from the Pacific, which explains some similarities in the life forms in the two bodies of water. Mangroves, estuaries, coral reefs, rocky coastlines, submarine pastures and beaches all combine to form the mosaic environment that exists with a large number of species of fauna and flora.
Besides that, some species of algae, molluscs, crustaceans and fish are endemic to the region, and some are even named after it, such as the Pachybathron tairona and the Periploma sanctaemarthae. (This info came from, Jorge Hern´ndez Camacho's Colombia Patria de Très Mares.)
Algae, fish and other forms of sea life own this underwater world. A scuba diver, while actually able to enter, is not part of it, and often goes unnoticed by its members. This enables the scuba diver to observe the natural setting in which these bizarre and intriguing life forms exist.
Questions?
If you want more information about this area you can email the author or check out our South America Insiders page.
