Back to the Steamy Tropics I - Tayrona National Park

 From the cool, 2000+ meter air of El Dorado and the Sierra Nevada, we dropped down to the Caribbean coast and Tayrona National Park.  Tayrona is a seaside gem of sand beach coves and coastal forest land. Another birding paradise.

We stayed just outside the park in a posh-ish resort, a welcome change from the relative rusticness of El Dorado.  A bar, a pool, an electronic bracelet to record any and all purchases, no need for money … being pampered has its place!

Tayrona’s beautiful coastline and the beach where we swam. Some nasty currents and  undertows make for dangerous swimming, but we found a section protected from the waves by some big rocks.

We did two half-day guided tours while at Tayrona and were delighted that they were each led by guides we had while in Minca and El Dorado … always a joy to see a familiar face and hear a familiar voice while a stranger in a strange land. Jaruen (pronounced like “Har-win”) was, in the 1980s, the first Audubon-trained birding guide in Colombia.  He heard and saw things totally opaque to our untrained senses.  Joi (pronounced “Joy”) is a 20-something, eager young man and colleague of Jaruen who had an uncanny ability to see shadowed bird and animal shapes among the dense forest’s dark leaves and branches.

With Jaruen, we did a pleasant tubing float down the Rio Don Diego, one of the six rivers that originate in the Sierra Nevada were we just were.  The wide river afforded us great views of egrets, pelicans, kingfishers, and more.

Roseate spoonbill on Rio Don Diego

Magnificent frigate soaring over the mouth of the Don Diego

Jaruen is much more than a birding guide; rather, a very learned man about his country and its natural and cultural heritages.  He took us to a small museum dedicated to one of the four descendent peoples of the “original” Tayronas (current theory says the indigenous peoples of South American migrated from the north via Central America - the Kogi people. They have maintained much of their language and customs against forces that push toward assimilation, much as we see in North America, Oceania, and elsewhere.  Remnants of the Tayronas, themselves, are evident in complex stone terraces that reach back to the 7th century of the common era.

The small museum dedicated to Kogi culture

A nearly 1400 year old stone terrace created by the original Tayrona people

With Joi, we had a nice morning walk along Tayrona’s pathways where we spotted woodpeckers (“carpenteros”), jacamars, flycatchers, and wrens. And also this:

Joi spotted this “blog” high up in the trees, a mother sloth (whose face you can see in the lower right-hand quadrant of the photo) and her baby who, we think, lies upside down near the center of the photo.

On to the big city of Cartagena…