Cascadas Tamanique
If you need a break from surfing the waves in El Tunco, then Tamanique is the perfect place to do something entirely different. Tamanique is small town in the hills near El Tunco. To get here, we took chicken bus #187 from the coastal highway. And lucky for us, our chicken bus had an LCD monitor playing all the greatest hits from the 80s at full blast.
Upon arrival in Tamanique, we were approached by a friendly guy who said he runs the tours for the waterfalls (cascada means waterfall in Spanish). We were a bit skeptical at first but we went along with him. It turned out that he owns the property that the waterfalls lie on. We started with a short hike through some cornfields before coming across the first waterfall. For those who aren’t too keen on jumping from cliffs into water like myself, it’s possible to climb down into the swimming hole underneath the waterfall. Otherwise, there are several ledges to jump from, the highest one is around 5.5m. I jumped from the 2m one 🙂
Directly in front of the first waterfall is waterfall #2. This jump is around 7 or 8m, and it’s a bit of climb to get back out. The water hole is very deep so it’s actually perfectly safe to jump in, so long as you stay away from the rock walls.
We visited two more waterfalls before calling it a day. The third one also featured a really high jump into a much more shall pool of water. And the last one we saw was strictly for taking in the view. Since we had only been hiking downhill all day, it was time now for the hard part, hiking back up in the blazing afternoon sun. We stopped by waterfall #1 for a quick dip then carried on. Our guide had a cold water hose setup not far from the starting point which was so refreshing after sweating it out on the walk back out. He then took us to a local restaurant which I think he owned as well where we had tacos, burritos, and pupusas. And he made sure to get us on the last chicken bus back to El Tunco at 16:30. Unfortunately though, this one didn’t have the 80s hits playing on the big screen…
The chicken bus cost about 25 cents each way and the tour was US$3. Not bad for a full day of waterfall jumping!