LONELY ISLAND

Glancing at the Booking.com listing for pseudo Eco-hotel Isla Del Sol on beautiful and recommended Los Rosarios islands, you’d be forgiven to think it was a slice of heaven. But get your itchy Book Now button finger off the trigger, I assure you it is not.

Now, I would forgive you for thinking me an over-indulged, entitled little bitch looking at these pictures because it all looks rather paradisiac from this side of the saturation filter… I understand and you may very well be right, but please let me explain. We arrived from Cartagena on a boat built for fifty, on which they were already pitching various add-ons, pre-priced for our convenience, local aquariums, boat rides and snorkeling voyages, up-sells not being a great introduction to heaven…

The paradise they sell you on this listing, or even their website, does not begin to match reality. I feel wretched criticizing an island resort, trust me, I know how lucky we are to even be able to spend a few days near water while sipping Sauvignon Blanc, but the expectations bred by the marketing of this Eco-lodge by the ocean are not close to be met. In this case, eco stands for “economy” not “ecology.” There is no beach, garbage everywhere, even in the ocean, no services or products worth the price asked for them and in the end, the entire place seems like un-managed shacks with a sign on the door hoping for fools to believe the experience will be an authentic one because of the “Eco” denomination. Don’t get me wrong, that is fine if you’re a backpacker in search of an exotic hostel, but not a family promised a bit of sophistication nearby turquoise water, neither exists here. Not a few feet behind the few shabbily built and maintained buildings is the backstage area, which is basically a landfill un-hidden from the customers, littered with empty beer bottles and animal feces, it is not what you are sold in the brochure. Again, the expectations bred are the problem, not the place itself, which after a few days, tends to grow on you, mainly thanks to the adorable staff who will bend over backwards to satisfy any need, to the best of their ability to, on an island that just got fresh water 6 years ago. I do not have pictures of all this because while there, all I wanted was to capture the beauty around, and there was some…

The truth of the matter is that the resort was built for day-trippers, the people we later realized were the ones filling our boat, and who leave at three in the afternoon, leaving us and two other couples to look at each other in confusion and fear.

THAT SAID… Hiring a boat to leave this error in judgment is easy enough and you soon are indeed bathing in incredible, clear waters, stopping over sand banks and having some Sauvignon Blanc, again, and being led through the local village where you are astonished to witness incredible and unseen poverty (even having been to cuba!) made even more surprising when you finally reaching the nearby and magnificent mangrove, looking like an alien land, and understand how much the natives absolutely LOVE their island and have done, and are doing, everything to protect it from, well, us…

Back at the hotel, we got friendly with the wonderful couples we found ourselves sharing this land with after hours, not wife-swap friendly, but friendly. That and Gina read…

…and read…

Thankfully.

Now, I have heard of MUCH BETTER hotels on Los Rosarios, hotels that were not presented to us on Booking.com perhaps because we were too late to book, which is fair. I will be more careful in the future to actually read all the reviews before pushing that button though because I no longer want to see this in paradise…