Pacific Coast: Bahia Solano, El Valle, (Nuqui)

If you read Lonely Planet, you will see Nuqui listed as the place to go between July & October as it's whale season ... but if you are not Colombian and you are not visiting Colombia during that period, should you still go?

The short answer is: YES!
If you don't live in a place that has a coast to the Pacific, than visiting the Pacific Coast in Colombia will be a very special and different experience. Let's see why :)

Getting There

Now it depends on the time you have and on the love you have for being a long time on a boat vs flying. It's not that I don't like boats, but I am afraid of being at sea. This is not to say that I don't take boats, I do, but with a Heart Rate high enough for my watch to consider that I am working out (oooops) ... way to burn calories.

Basically, we discarded the option of getting there by boat (about 18-24h) and decided to fly. 
Given the remoteness of the area you will board into an ATR (if not familiar with aircrafts, it's a small airplane with propeller). 

There are few companies (e.g., Satena & EasyFly) that fly into the area as they need to have in their fleet such an aircraft and most of them use bigger ones.  

Our initial plan was to fly & stay in Nuqui, but about 1 week before our flight (this was the day we landed in Bogota) Satena announced us that the airport in Nuqui closed for renovations and neither they nor any other company was flying there. This of course posed a bit of stress as we still wanted to reach the area but he had mad no previous research on what other option we had.
Thanks to the jet leg we woke up pretty early the day after we landed in Bogota and researched alternatives and found that EasyFly was flying to Bahia Solano, a village a bit more up north from Nuqui so we "replaced" our destination with Bahia Solano .

We arrived at EOH Airport (which is the airport within Medellin) and took our 1h flight to Bahia Solano. We landed on a tiny airport where the arrivals hall is a tent :D and where you have to pay an entry fee. We picked our luggage and got on a tuk tuk to our hotel. 

Where is Choco

The province of Choco is on the west side of Colombia with access to both the Pacific and the Atlantic Coast. The full Boarder with Panama is within the Choco province. 
Choco is often overlooked by both national and international travelers for serval reasons between which: 
- it is hard to reach (airplane or boat only)
- it's expensive (as you need to move around by boat, it will be a more expensive trip compared to other trips you can do in Colombia) 
- it's a very poor area with only basic infrastructure 
- it can be dangerous if you go out of the main points of touristic activities 

What to do in Choco

Day 1 - Arrival day

After dropping our luggage at the hotel, they arranged for us a boat to pick us up and bring us to Playa Mecana to relax in the afternoon. 

But before we went to eat. Our boat driver brought us to his house to offer a local lunch with tuna, patacones & rice. 

From there we spent the afternoon on the beach and made friends with a lot of cute crabs.

Your activities in this area will be defined by the tides which are very pronounced here. Similar to what you find for e.g., at the North Sea in Belgium & Cantabiran Sea in Spain. For this our boat driver picked us up around 17:00 and brought us back to Bahia Solano. 

We took a walk through the village and finished our evening with a beer and some fried yuca 

Day 2 - El Valle

We booked our tuk tuk to drive us to El Valle which is about 1h away from Bahia Solano (if you have ore time to research, not like us, or if you read the post, it's more convenient to stay in el Valle). 

When arriving in El Valle we have been handed over to a motorcycle driver who brought us to MamaOrbe which is a turtle sanctuary on the amazing 9k long Playa Cuevita

At Mama Orbe we had breakfast 

Followed by resting for some time on the black sand beach

And then we could release some baby turtles which were born the same morning. This was a beautiful but also sad experience. 

Mama Orbe explained us the work that is being done in the sanctuary, the amount of plastic the washes on the shores and explained us how the turtles know how to return back to this beach to lay their eggs 18 - 20 years after having been released. 

To support the place 50000 COP is requested per person (which is not really voluntary) 

At 13:00 our motorcycle driver came to pick us up and brought us to Playa el Almejal to spend the afternoon.  

This is a smaller beach but friendlier to beach lovers when it comes to the big tide difference. But don't relax too much as you can't be sure how fast the water grows. 

Here we could also see a lot of plastic on the beach, and keep in mind that this does not come from the people in the village but most likely from people all over the world :(

At 17:00 our tuk tuk driver came to pick us up and bring us back to Bahia Solano. 

Day 3 - Utria National Park 

This was our last full day in Choco so we decided to go back with the tuk tuk to El Valle and take a boat trip in Utria National Park. 

The boat was 300.000 COP (for 2) and the "captain" was with us the full day also acting as a guide in the Park. 

The park itself, was for me not especially impressive but hopefully the entrance fee can help keep the park natural and clean. 

After the visit we went to Playa Blanca which is the only white sand beach on Pacific (at least in the area). 

It was very relaxing as there were super few people and we could enjoy the place almost only for us. 

Around 15:30 where there was almost no more beach left, we took the boat and went back to El Valle and we spent some time on the beach with a beer before our tuk tuk driver arrived. 

Day 4 - Departure 

Unexpectedly we had to go to this tiny airport 2h i advance as their process is fully manual and they told us that we can risk being left behind ... not that we would have not liked staying longer in this area, but we had more to explore.