STORY BY BOB SCHULMAN
You’re in a colorfully seedy cafe on a little Caribbean island. Homies are sitting around beat-up tables gulping down a kind of fish stew… at other tables, visiting divers are guzzling rum-and-cokes while swapping tales of the day’s underwater adventures… at the bar, tourists are arguing (loudly) about the merits of a local beer called Costena vs. imported Red Dog from the States… and all in the din of booty-swinging cumbia tunes blasting out of the P.A.
Welcome to the improbably named Café Gourmet.
The island is San Andrés, a dot on the map about 150 miles off the Nicaraguan coast. (Oddly, this island and two other neighboring specks belong to Colombia, which is hundreds of miles further away than Venezuela.)
Among big draws to the island are the Darwinian delights of a 20-mile-long reef system in remarkably good shape. Dotted by three dozen dive sites, the reef is loaded with spectacular caves, cliffs – one drops down a straight 300 feet – and sunken ships, all basking in a palette of parrot fish, snappers, groupers, pipehorses and spotfin gobies, to name just a few of the 500 kinds of local reefies.
Aprés-dive, chances are you’ll find the chow at the Café Gourmet is pretty good, particularly the broiled snapper and other snacks you might have seen darting around the caves and cliffs earlier today. A Colombian favorite on the menu is rondon, a tasty stew of fish, snails, yam, yucca, pork bits, plantain and dumplings (and seemingly anything else handy in the kitchen), cooked in peppered coconut milk.
The pièce de résistance of this restaurant-bar in beautiful downtown San Andres shows up around 10 p.m. It’s the Creole Group, a local five-man band, one strumming a guitar, another plucking away on a banjo, one thumping out bass notes on a string tied to a washbucket, one shaking maracas and the fifth scratching a donkey’s jawbone with a stick.
Together, this mish-mash of musicians has everyone in the cafe either up and dancing or toe-tapping (or shaking other body parts) to Colombian cumbias and old-time calypsos, reggae from Jamaica, Cuban salsas, Trinidadian socas (a combination of soul and calypso), melodious merengues from the Dominican Republic, zippy brukdowns from Belize, call-and-response funjis from Tortola and sexy zouks from Martinique.
If you liked what you heard, the band will be happy to sell you CDs of their songs. A disc will set you back around 20,000 Colombian pesos. But don’t let that number turn you off – it’s only about 10 bucks in U.S. currency.
STAYING THERE: San Andrés offers some 25 tourist-class hotels. Among the top-rated properties is the Royal Decameron Aquarium, which has a good number of its 232 rooms arranged in circular clusters above the ocean. Guests can eat at hotels or at a dozen or so restaurant-bars (many with the ambiance of the Café Gourmet) scattered around the the seahorse-shaped island.
GETTING THERE: San Andres has an international airport, but there are no scheduled nonstop flights from the United States at present. Instead, passengers flying from U.S. gateways like New York JFK, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Miami typically get to San Andres by way of connections at Colombian terminals such as Bogota, Barranquilla and Medellin or at Panama City, Panama.
MORE INFO: Proexport Colombia, the nation’s tourism organization, has travel information about San Andres.
MORE COLOMBIA TRAVEL TIPS:
• Islas del Rosario: Colombia’s Caribbean Island Paradise (PHOTOS)
• The Top 5 Reasons to Visit Cartagena
• “My Bogotá” — Travel Tips from Cristina “Macky” Osorio of United Airlines
Bob is a Denver-based freelance travel writer and co-owner of a monthly travel magazine for baby boomers called WatchBoom.com. His stories, mostly focusing on Latin American destinations, have appeared in some two dozen major publications. In an earlier life, as Bob puts it, he was one of the founders of Frontier Airlines and served as the carrier’s vice president for PR until he retired a decade or so ago. A self-described “airline bum,” he earlier held PR posts with a number of other carriers serving the U.S., Mexico and the Caribbean.