We had an early flight from Montevideo to Cartagena (through Bogota), Colombia so we stayed in an airport-hotel in Uruguay the night before our flight, which eased the whole travel day. Sadly, we took two cabs to the airport and in the hustle and bustle of an early morning transport, we left our trusty-Nalgene water bottle in the cab, RIP, light green Nalgene bottle.
We arrived in steamy Cartagena in the late afternoon - its on the Caribbean Sea and we got that nice (to some people) mix of hot, humid air mixed with sea water smell. Cartagena was founded in 1533; it became a larger city as Spanish fleets stopped at the City en route from western South America (Peru) to Spain. The ships would stop in Cartagena carrying various treasures and offload to larger vessels headed across the Atlantic. It’s size and location for transport sadly also made it a key location for the Spanish Inquisition and the slave trade.
We had a car to the City prepaid; our ground transportation-arival-lady was so helpful and easy to talk to in our limited Spanish. We hopped in the van though and the driver asked to use our google maps on may phone, which would have been fine (well, except we all pay for data on our phones and) except I needed to coordinate with the Airbnb person to meet us. The driver dropped us a few blocks from the apartment, handed my phone back and shrugged, like, this is as close as we can get, then asked for his propina (tip) which I was sort of annoyed about (demanding tips for not great service).. I dug around for American money as we hadn’t gone to the bank yet and we began searching the quaint-but-very-small-for-five-people-with-backpacks sidewalks of Cartagena for our apartment. It was all sort of a rough landing and not a great first impression - we had a hard time meeting our person at the apt, street salespeople were all over us, and of course we were all super sweaty - but! We made it inside the apartment and had a few minutes of AC which helped. We decided to just have dinner at the restaurant across the street (Cartagena old town has a lot of somewhat fancy restaurants!); this one had very good food and live entertainment.
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Our first dinner in Colombia which included a pretty good band.
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We scheduled a bike tour for the morning (to avoid to afternoon sun); sadly, we had to wait +45 minutes as something happened with the tour guide; anew guide showed up and was very apologetic which went a long way for me in getting over the sweaty wait. Biking in Cartagena was definitely challenging because of the many cards and motorcycles, narrow streets, so many pedestrians and major roads to cross. But! We made it the three hours, we just didn’t go so very far. The tour was a nice intro and we got to try a juice (I think corozo) in one of the squares (which we like as then we get to hear how much the tour guides pay for stuff).
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| Staying hydrated on those walls. |
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| My duo, I sorta think I am a bit better at the romantic pictures :) |
Looking back on the photos, the City looks even more scenic than my memory.
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| Caribbean Sea, past the City’s walls and across the giant seaside roadway. |
A main tourist attraction is the Spanish fort, San Felipe de Barajas fort. It was built in the mid-1500s to defend the frequent attacks by pirates (for example, Sir Francis Drake, a hero in England, but the Spanish considered him a pirate as he followed and tried to steal from Spanish ships carrying treasures from South America to Spain; Drake captured Cartagena in the late 1500s and only departed after gaining a hefty ransom from the city).
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| At the San Felipe de Barajas fort. |
We tried to stay cool and hydrated.
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| Alex with our normal sized water bottle |
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| We stopped at a mall near the Fort to look for binoculars; we found none but enjoyed frozen treats.. |
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| No joke, getting my own frozen coffee drink was heavenly in that heat. |
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| Inside the main church. |
After a little less than a week in the toasty city, we were ready to check out some of the islands off the coast of Cartagena; headed for the Isle Grande, part of the Rosario Islands just southwest of Cartagena via a ~2.5 hour speed boat ride. Small side note: I had a heck of a time getting tickets for the boat rides; the departure port is a bit of a madhouse in Cartagena; I wanted to of course purchase online or see a schedule online before we made the +20 minute walk with all of our bags, early in the morning. Without much luck online, I headed over to the port one morning to look for tickets; I was approached by many people asking me to buy tickets on this or that boat (exactly what I wanted to avoid the morning of our departure); I finally decided on tickets to buy for the next day and forked over sort of a lot of money and received this little flimsy slip of paper in exchange. I walked away and through all the salespeople feeling pretty proud of myself.. Halfway home, I dug into my pocket and realized that the flimsy slip of paper much have gotten stuck to my phone when I pulled it out to map my walk home. Oh, despair!!! I turned myself around to walk back through the hot sidewalks and gauntlet of salespeople, scanning the sidewalks the whole way, hoping to find my piece of paper but also prepared to go back to the woman who sold me the tickets. Miracle! I walked +15 minutes back and there was my slip of paper, sitting on the ground on the sidewalk where hundreds of people had been walking to and from the port, wow! This was miracle number three for me (violin in Wales and then pharma spray in Punta del Este).
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| On the nice, calm morning boat ride to Rosario Islands. |
We booked a place on the Island which was hopping when we arrived. There was a big party on the beach going on as we checked in. After guessing a wedding (nope, too many young people) or a company party (so many skimpy bathing suits, in my opinion, for it to be a company), the DJ eventually helped us out by shouting “Let’s party, Harvard Business School!” For some reason, Scott and I thought this was so funny, that the Harvard Business School had their spring break on this island and in Cartagena; we just tried to imagine our GSPP grad school having that sort of beach party and just.. couldn’t.
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| Alex chillin’ on the Isla Grande. |
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| Luke following suit. |
We did two activities on the Island - Our first night, we found a guy to take us to a famous attraction - bioluminescent plankton in a lagoon on the Island. We walked out with him after dark from the hotel to the lagoon which was exciting itself, the 6 of us trying to stay close to one another on the trail and to not trip on roots and plants we couldn’t see. We arrived at the lagoon; there was a small pier and our guide had a paddle board for us to hang onto if needed. There was a garage-ladder that was resting on some nails sticking out of the pier; I went down first to test it and made it into the water fine so in the others came. As soon as we moved our arms to tread water, we could see some flashes in the water. But it was much cooler to put on swim googles, poke your head underwater, and swim through the plankton because the light they give off looked, to me, like you were swimming through the beginning of Star Wars (“…in a galaxy far far away..”). It was a very cool experience.
The next day, we found our guide again (we got a nice two-for-one deal with him) and he took us out to a snorkeling area in his nice little wooden motorboat. He had us wait about 30 minutes after breakfast to hit the boat. We rode maybe 15 or 20 minutes, around some other small islands including one little one with only a big house on it and piers sticking out, which he explained was a $10,000 a night rental or something crazy like that. We dropped anchor near that house and he led us around a few places for snorkeling. The fish and (largely bleached, sadly) coral reef were quite beautiful. Sadly for me, I seem to have a much lower tolerance for active snorkeling than others because maybe 75% of the way through our time, I felt quite ill and lost all of my breakfast to the ocean. Ugh. I felt fine after we got back to land; if I want to keep participating, I think I need to take a lot more backfloat-breaks than others!
After our slow island days, we took the speedboat ride back to Cartagena. Boo, the ride in the afternoon was SOOOOO rough and I was nursing tummy aches before the boat started moving. Ugh, I was counting the minutes for the whole boat ride, bracing myself against each speedboat-lift out of the water and then crash down onto the wave, ugh, just thinking about it turns my stomach. Anyhoo, we made it back and spent two more nights in Cartagena before our flight to Panama.
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