First Impressions of Riohacha

Protip: If you're arriving by plane and want to have an amazing first impression of Riohacha, make sure to book a window seat on the right side of the plane, as the flight path for all landing aircraft takes you on a breathtaking 10 minutes or so panoramic flight of the Caribbean coast to the west of the city… [And FYI, this is not Riohacha, it's Camarones and a couple of flamingo sanctuary lagunas that are some 30km west of town]

Almost every place we travel immediately exceeds our expectations, and we usually already get pangs of future nostalgia on day one. So, after falling in love with Bogotá at first sight, and still liking it just as much if not more after a totally unplanned seven week stay, we had no reason to assume our experience in Riohacha would be any different, despite knowing next to nothing about the place. And you'll almost never hear us admit this, but boy were we wrong.

Our first impression of Riohacha was that it's even more of a remote, dodgy, lawless shithole than we'd heard that it was. And immediately wondered how we'd cope with a full week here, let alone extending the stay as we'd intended to do…..

Heat & Humidity

After seven weeks in Bogotá (where the temperature was less than 10° every morning and never got higher than 21°) it was a relief to be embraced by 33° and 60% humidity upon stepping out of the plane and walking across the tarmac. It's also nice to be able to step out of a plane, walk across the tarmac and out of the airport in under 90 seconds.

Only 90 seconds from the first step of the airstairs to knowingly getting overcharge by an airport taxi driver! One of those two things is excellent.

Unfortunately, Uber is Currently Unavailable in Your Area

We've made it no secret that we hate the Silicon Valley vultures - whose modus operandi is taking a great, society uplifting idea from some nerds, sleazing up to investors to get enough funding to burn through billions monopolising a nascent market and creating a long-lasting network effect, then tightening the proverbial screws to squeeze so much labour and wealth out of the market that it would make Marx himself choke on his sauerkraut - and the unregulated taxi service known as Uber is really one of the worst of the bunch, and should be illegal or at least heavily regulated.

BUT, when it's in our area, especially when arriving at airports, we're going to use it. When you're at the mercy of unmetered airport taxi drivers who won't tell you the price before you get in you're going to overpay. No doubt about that. After convincing them that we did indeed want to go to El Centro de Riohacha and not the much more popular tourist/hippie town of Palomino some 2 hours away, we ended up paying the same for a 10-minute, 4km drive to our Airbnb as we did for a 30-minute, 20km Uber to the airport in Bogotá. Was this amount equal to €5? No, it was actually only €4.35 at that day's exchange rate, but it's a matter of principle.

Getting to See Some of the Worst Bits of Town First

If you had a window seat on the right side of the plane, the on the descent you already got a birds eye view (literally) of what looked like desolate shanty towns and dusty dirt roads. And while the short drive from the airport was paved (more or less, some of the potholes here could stop a tank), the views out the window weren't exactly reassuring, with much higher levels of poverty than we'd expected - especially coming from the glistening capital of Bogotá. Although it also reinforced the strange fact (not that it needed reinforcing since it's clearly already a fact) that the south of virtually every city and country is poorer than the north).

'Gringo!'

Got called gringo, or what sounded like a more insulting derivative of gringo more times in 30 minutes here than seven weeks in Bogotá (although since the number of times it happened in Bogotá was zero it wasn't going to be hard to beat). Update: The ‘gringos’ were never heard again after those first few hours, which is clearly strange, but also appreciated.

We had no idea what this chap was singing about and didn't especially like the music, but hey, when it's a free concert, you've got a €0.60 beer in your hand and it's still like 30°C at dusk, life is good

There's a Lively Concert in the Main Square Every Night

We arrived on a Monday and came across some kind of concert happening in the main square on our initial beer(s) in hand walk about town, so naturally assumed that this must be a frequent occurrence. This was unfortunately not a correct assumption, so it's a good thing we lingered for a while on this occasion. On a side note: We almost sat in wet paint. Seriously, who paints almost every available surface to sit in a town's main square on the same day that a public concert is happening? The municipal authorities of Riohacha apparently.

'Amigo'

Also got called 'amigo' by nearly every person we interacted with, which was the 5-6 people we bought beers from, the little stall where we got the best empanada, arepa and some other deep fried goodness for dinner, and the hombre staying in the same Airbnb where there's no water. Update: The ‘amigos’ have continued unabated, which is also appreciated.

The Refreshing Sea Breeze

That heat and humidity mentioned above goes from adjectives like ‘embracing' and ‘relieving' to ‘unbearable' and ‘oppressive' quite quickly, and really makes you appreciate the refreshing sea breeze when you're standing on your balcony, even if your balcony doesn't exactly have the best view you've ever laid your eyes on.

No water

There's no water. Apparently that's a pretty common thing, as Guajira is a desert, and one of the few things we knew about the place after getting warned by someone in Bogotá. However, it's still not the most pleasant feeling when your Airbnb goes dry just a couple hours after your arrival and first sweaty walk about town.

No internet

Water is clearly the worst thing to run out of, so it's lucky that the owner of the flat has a go-to handyman who sorted out the broken pump quite quickly. However, we hadn't even dried off from our much needed first shower before finding out that the internet was also down, although in the silverlining department this seemed a perfect cromulent excuse to spend another hour walking around town drinking beers. So at least there was that…..

If you're an adult with close to zero responsibilities, who's technically on holiday, you don't really need an excuse to drink a beer, especially at night, but it never hurts to have one.

And there's a saying about first impressions. First impressions last a… oh wait, that's actually not the best one to bring up. What we meant to say was don't judge a book by its cover. Yes, that's right. All it took was one full day and some beach time to once again ask our Airbnb host if we could cut out the Silicon Valley vultures, and tack an extra month onto our stay with a cash payment.

Coming soon(ish): Top 20 Reasons You Should Consider a Long-Term Stay in Riohacha