As with Medellin, we were revisiting Cartagena. We'd been with my family during our first visit around New Year's 2013. We had company once again, but this time it was Raj, our Couchsurfing host from Dushanbe, Tajikistan in 2012. Raj works as a doctor and had been attending a conference in Atlanta. He had some free time before returning to his family home in India and, to our absolute delight, chose to spend some of it coming down to visit us in Colombia. We'd kept in occasional touch, but this would be our first reunion in over six years.
We were staying at an Airbnb in a residential neighborhood maybe twenty minutes from the tourist heart of Cartagena in its old city. We walked along a busy road next to a huge empty lot on our way there for the first time, but discovered that it actually sat amongst lots of strikingly painted white homes connected by twisty narrow streets.
The place we were staying was a pleasant two bedroom apartment featuring a huge terrace outside with views of the ocean, the huge Castillo San Felipe and the old city in the distance. We did a bit of shopping and waited for Raj's arrival. We spent our first evening catching up over dinner (we took turns cooking during our six days together) and making (very rough) plans for our next few days together.
The next day we went into the old walled city for a look around. It was just as gorgeous as we remembered, and the pretty, done up section of town had expanded to include the residential neighbourhood of Gethsemani where we'd stayed during our previous visit (after saying goodbye to the family and vacating the fancy resort where we'd been staying). The old city is full of brilliant colours, sixteenth to eighteenth century buildings and, even moreso than during our last visit, foreign tourists. In 2013, the memory of the Colombian civil war was still fresh enough that many chose to stay away, but by 2019 the cruise ships had descended and we spent a good chunk of the day amongst grey-haired throngs following little flags on extendable pointers.
We also checked out the city centre, where the old city meets the new, and enjoyed some tasty fruit juices and cheese pastries before heading back home for an afternoon on the terrace with a tasty, vegetable-heavy dinner and a few beers.
As it turned out, we weren't alone on the terrace. It was shared with two other apartments, but in this case it was a few iguanas. Raj attempted to photograph the one that came closest, but it seemed to climb a tall pot plant in a spiral, always on the far side from Raj, making for an entertaining little game of hide and seek.
The following day we set out to explore some of the huge, untouristed expanse of new Cartagena (simply NEW, not the ultra-modern parade of bright white beach hotels in Boca Grande district). We took an Uber to the main Bazurto market. A lot of reviews online claim that it's dirty, dangerous and not that interesting. This is obviously a function of the city being inundated with cruise ship passengers who have never been to a market in a developing country before. We found it to be a bit grubby, but lively, friendly and lots of fun to explore.
And unlike in the old town, you could just sit down at a juice stand, order your (delicious!) tamarillo and passion fruit juice, chat with the proprietor, hand him some money and be charged exactly what a non-tourist would. Indeed, just generally people around Bazurto seemed delighted to see visitors checking out their part of town and were amazingly solicitous and helpful.
Including when it came to locating a fabric store and selecting some material. For what, you ask? Well, I needed some nice new clothes for my upcoming NZ citizenship ceremony and had decided to have them made in Colombia. I'd found a tailor earlier and he'd told me to select some fabric and come back with it the next day.
We did this at Bazurto, then returned to drop it off at his shop in the old town. It was no more than thirty square metres, but there were clothes and fabric everywhere, and half a dozen women working at sewing machines, while the head tailor, Vincente worked at his own machine in the back. After he’d measured me up, I suggested returning in ten days or so to pick up my suit, but he seemed distressed at this prospect, worried that this would give it too much time to get lost in the small, but very busy shop. We agreed that I'd be back in three days time.
On this day we also made a revelatory discovery. The central park, near the clock-tower gate of the old city was busy with animals including lots of large iguanas and (this was the revelation) a mother sloth and her baby! (This of course, implied that there was at least one other sloth in the park, and as it turned out there were at least two others, a young female and the male, which we never actually spotted). We sat and watched the sloths for ages before finally heading home for the evening.
All three of us had, at some time in the past, taken Salsa lessons. And seeing as we were now in (arguably) the home country of Salsa, we decided we might do well to refresh our memories before hitting the city's dance clubs for an evening. We took a ninety minute group lesson, during which Sarah and Raj made decent progress and I got comfortable with precisely one step (out of six we learned), spending most of the rest of the lesson trying to get pack in time with the music, stumbling over my feet and laughing at myself. “Try again with a couple of beers,” was the instructor's advice.
That afternoon we'd decided to head to the beach. We just hadn't decided which beach. The ones in Cartagena itself are okay, but not the white-sanded, turquoise-watered beaches that you think of when you think “Caribbean Sea”. Such places exist near Cartagena, but they're a bit far from the city and are reputed to be crowded and packed with people selling overpriced goods and services you probably aren't interested in. Eventually we decided to visit one of these, Playa Blanca, anyway.
We got a (very good value) forty minute Uber ride out there and found its reputation to be entirely well founded in all respects. It was JAM packed with people. And there had been parking attendants banging on our car windows trying to pull our driver into their lots. And there wasn't a metre of beachfront that wasn't filled with a restaurant, bar, cafe or guesthouse. There were lots of people offering massages, drinks, oysters, etc. But they weren't particularly pushy. And most importantly, the beach was gorgeous. And the water was clear and warm. We ended up spending a couple of pleasant hours under one of the only (and curiously under-occupied at that) trees on the beach. We found a speedboat ride back to town with a minimum of hassle and negotiation. And as it turned out the bouncing, splashing trip back with 22 other tourists, three crew and four hundred horses on the back of the boat turned out to be possibly the funnest part of the whole day.
The next morning we woke early and went straight to Castillo San Felipe. It seemed super busy the previous evening, so we'd skipped it and come back, finding it all but empty just after opening. It was a pretty cool place, and reminded me surprisingly of the fortifications in Luxembourg city, which, though in an entirely different setting, were completed at roughly the same time and were (like the Castillo, even though Cartagena is a port city and was attacked by both the British and the French by sea) designed to defend the city from attack by land.
We had one more short visit with the sloths and iguanas in the park before deciding to head home (via a barber where Raj had his hair cut) for a restful afternoon. Because, of course, this was Raj's final night in Cartagena and we still had yet to put on our dancing shoes and hit the salsa club.
Most of the best known ones, even for locals, are in the old town. We picked one out at nine o'clock. It was quiet, but looked a likely spot and had inexpensive drinks so I could take the dance instructor's advice and have a few while we waited for things to get going.
The inexpensive Colombian rum isn't quite as good or as inexpensive as the Guyanian stuff, but it was still pretty tasty and a big glass with ice came to something like four dollars, so who am I to complain?
Sarah, Raj and I all had a couple of dances with one another, and everyone managed at least one with a (presumably, given our skills) patient local partner (tip for non-dancers, Merengue is waaay easier than salsa). But by and large we spent most of our time sitting at the bar soaking up the festive energy of the crowd (even on a Wednesday!)
By the time we caught our taxi home we felt like we'd absorbed a good lot of Colombian culture (as well as rum) and could say our farewells the next morning with a fully satisfactory Cartagena experience behind us.
Our time with Raj was wonderfully fun. It was great to catch up with him in person and to share our fond memories of Cartagena with him. And of course it was all thanks to his deciding to spend his holiday with us!
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