Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, PLUS a Cartagena Fashion Show

We said our goodbyes with Raj as he headed to the airport and we to the minibus station just down the street and around the corner.

We still had a flight out of Cartagena in five days and had been debating what to do in the interim.  There were nice beaches at CCC and Taganga (where we'd been in 2013). There was some particularly beautiful coastline a but further afield at Tayrona National Park a bit further afield.  But we eventually decided to head for the hills of Minca, just above the city of Santa Marta in the mountain range of the same name.

The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta are home to Colombia's highest peaks, but Minca sits within them just 20km as the crow flies from the Caribbean sea. It took most of a day to get there from Cartagena. A four-hour trip along the toll road to Santa Marta, an hour or so of walking between bus stations, grocery shopping and finding an ATM, then a final 45 minutes heading up into the hills on a good, but winding asphalt road.

Minca is a pretty little town that reminded me a lot of a slightly smaller, slightly less tourism-developed version of Mindo, just outside Quito, Ecuador.  It's got a few little tour companies, some shops selling basic food and drink, lots of cute little restaurants and guesthouses, several brightly coloured murals, a relaxed atmosphere and a very pretty location.  It felt like the kind of place you could imagine modern-day hippies coming to hang out for a week or so, with many ending up staying for years.

Most of the prettiest places to stay in the area are in the mountains outside town, though these require a long walk or paying for a moto-taxi back into town every time you want to go to the shop (and many of them don't have kitchens, using their remoteish locations to “encourage” guests to eat at their restaurants).  We settled for a happy mediu, staying at Casa Colibri, a charming guesthouse run by a French-Venezuelan couple a hundred or so stairs up and behind the centre of the village.

The kitchen was separate from the main building, up still more stairs under a thatched roof with a nice view out over the town and surrounding hills.  It was a lovely place to prepare and eat our meals, while the terrace down below had hammocks and lots of pillows and was good for lazing about, drinking our home-made limeade, sometimes fortified with Medellin rum.  In short, the whole situation was idyllic and relaxing.

We did actually get out of our hammocks several times during our stay.  On one day we took a couple of hours walk further up into the mountains to the La Victoria coffee plantation and the adjoining Nevada brewery (I wonder how long it took after deciding to name the brewery after the mountains it was set in for someone to point out that calling it “Sierra Nevada” might lead to a letter from an American lawyer?)

The walk was all up a road, but it was a pretty beat up one, with minimal slow traffic and lots of shade provided by the forest, so it was a very nice walk.  And the coffee and beer, while maybe not quite up to the standards of what we'd had in Medellin, were both good (three of the four beers [coffee stout being the exception] were way out of style, but we'll made and tasty.)

I liked the walk so much that I took a longer, solo stroll up to Los Pianos, a viewpoint way above town that looked down over Santa Marta to the ocean and (were it clearer than when I visited) up to Cerro Cristobal Colon, Colombia's highest point at over 5000m.  Most of this loop was even less busy, with just a few Moto taxis passing me during most of the five hours or so of walking, and most of the rest of the “traffic” consisting of local villagers walking or leading donkeys through the (once again) pleasantly shady forested road.

We also spent a full afternoon at Pozo Azul, a delightful swimming hole 45 minutes walk upriver from Minca.  Pozo Azul isn't actually particularly Azul (blue), but it was a pretty spot to hang out. Big jungle trees overhang its several pools and waterfalls flowing with cool (but thankfully not freezing cold) mountain water.  We'd been there briefly on a Sunday when it was packed full of Colombian families making a day trip from Santa Marta, but on a Tuesday it was pleasantly busy but much more relaxed, with mixed groups of Colombian and foreign tourists coming and going as we sipped the beers we'd brought (Club Colombia Oktoberfest… showing its four month age a little, but surprisingly good) and went for occasional swims in several of the pools, which grew emptier as you scrambled further and further up the river.

All in all, Minca was a fine way to relax after what had been a surprisingly bustling couple of weeks in Colombia (except perhaps, for the fact that Sarah got absolutely savaged by biting flies on our last day or so.  Fortunately they looked worse than they itched).

Our very final days were spent back in Cartagena.  We'd considered spending them in Baranquilla or elsewhere, but apparently the relaxation of Minca had left us feeling a bit lazy, so we returned to the familiarity and beauty of the old Caribbean emerald (the old town was packed with shops selling the gems to tourists) for the last couple of days before our departure from South America.

These days were perhaps a bit anticlimactic from a storytelling perspective.

We got to know the neighbourhood around our Airbnb a bit better, venturing out in the evening to enjoy the street food on the neighbourhood's main drag.  Sarah had a whole vegetarian pizza made by a man and a woman who dragged their electric pizza oven out onto the corner every evening. I had a couple of nights of super cheap but super tasty steak, salad and potatoes.  And we cooked one more meal at home, this time sharing the kitchen with the family whose home we were staying in and a guy from Curaçao who had come to Colombia to meet an internet friend.

We, of course, enjoyed sitting on the terrace again, watching the sunset over the walled city.  We, of course, made several return visits to the park to hang out with the iguanas and the sloths.  We, of course, had a few more Colombian beers in the sun.

I also returned to get my waistcoat taken in a bit.  It fit perfectly in the chest, but for some reason the tailor had overestimated the size of my puku (tummy).  They took it and asked me to return in a couple of hours. This turned into several more visits, each an hour or so apart, while they waited for the power to come back on to operate their sewing machines.  Eventually as sunset was approaching they gave up waiting and simply had one of the women who worked in the shop finish off the alteration with a manual sewing machine.

And as the suit had been Sarah's idea, she also prodded me into doing a “photo shoot” in old Cartagena on our final full day in town. We wandered around, taking fashion-style snaps throughout the brightly coloured streets and bougainvillia of the old city.

I think these lovely images are a fine place to say farewell to Cartagena, and to South America.  So I'll see you again next time on another continent!

Old Friends in the Old Town

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!