The Small Beach of the Mighty Andes

 Prologue

This is the second part of the post Ocaña - The red onion town. If you have not checked it out, I recommend that you check it out first to follow this post.

Throughout this post, I am going to refer to La Playa de Belén as La Playa just like the locals do.

Backstory

A slight backstory to about 2 weeks before this day and time. I decided on the places to visit and charted a route map and was planning on the places to stay. In my whole history of living and travelling in Colombia, there was one instance where I could not find hotels in booking.com for just one place - Tenza, Boyacá. It was a process to find a hotel there, call and book. When I decided that I wanted to travel to La Playa, the hotels that booking.com had were all in Ocaña. I do not want to stay in Ocaña. I wanted to stay in La Playa to enjoy the experience of living and staying in a small town that is the least popular Pueblo Patrimonio (Heritage Town). Hence this is the second such instance of not being able to find a hotel in booking.com. I looked in Maps and they had references of 2 hotels there - I found the phone number and wrote to one of them. It was an economical option than what I had expected. The hotel charged 50,000 pesos a night and included breakfast. Maps had directions to the hotel and I had paid half the amount in advance. What more could I ask for?

Tenza

Present day from Ocaña

I left Ocaña at around 3:45 pm. I was about an hour way from La Playa de Belén. I was excited and nervous at the same time. Excited because I am in Norte de Santander and almost made it till here. Nervous because I wanted to make this final leg of the journey without issues. 

I followed the directions in Waze and drove out of Ocaña admiring the views along the way. Ocaña is not a small town, in fact it is the second largest city in Norte de Santander. It was showing, the city seemed to grow in all possible directions. About 20 minutes out, I was back to the main highway that goes to Cúcuta. While the highway was a 2 lane road, the road was in a very good condition and there were not a lot of trucks hence it was easier to drive here. It was no longer ascending the mountains and hence it was a relief too. 

The entrance to La Playa

At about 40 minutes to the drive, the main road or the only road to La Playa appears to the left. At this point, this road is not paved, however it is not in a bad condition. Crossing the Algodonal river, the limits of the municipality begins from this very point. 

Driving further, the road gradually becomes better and slowly the scenes of La Playa comes into vision. While I was following the directions in Maps, it was pointing to the exact opposite side of the hotel where there was no entry possible. Hence I asked for directions and about 15 minutes later I was already in the hotel. It was about 5:15 pm. I had started from Bogotá the previous morning at around 9 am. Hence it took me about 32 hours to finally reach La Playa!

One of the workers from the hotel offered to give me a ride to the town, it was about 10 minutes away from the hotel. I gladly accepted the ride and my first real discovery of La Playa began.

The town

La Playa is not a big town, in fact in the urban center, less than 700 people. The town has 3 main streets and 4 cross streets, roughly making 12 small blocks or cuadritos. The town is in fact so small, that it can be walked in less than an hour, covering every block. 

This makes La Playa the smallest pueblo patrimonio in Colombia and the only one in Norte de Santander.  La Playa was founded in 1862 and the name La Playa de Belén comes due to the nature of the soil here that is similar to the soil in a river bank or a beach. 

The streets of La Playa still retain the cobble stones from the colonial times. The houses and buildings are painted white with the windows in brown. The walls have potted plants too, the pots are painted in red. This makes the streets and the architecture very beautiful.  The streets are extremely clean and well maintained and a visit here is a travel back in time. 

There are not a lot of restaurants in this town, I had dinner in a small fast food restaurant, a sandwich and some french fries.

I was tired and went back to the hotel after a bit that night. The town is located at an altitude of about 1450 meters above sea level and it makes the climate very pleasant during the night and not too hot during the day. 

I was excited to explore the town on the day while visiting the most famous natural park of this region - Los Estoraques and the pine forest. This will have to wait for the next post.