Cartagena
COLOMBIA
The Land of Pirates & Mud
By LYNDI
Sunday, August 24, 2008
After 5 days aboard the Stahlratte in the Caribbean Sea, Aaron and I were ready to set foot upon solid ground. And we probably couldn’t have picked a more beautiful ground to set our feet upon.
Cartagena was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the early 1980s and since then has restored and preserved it’s beautiful colonial setting on the edge of the Caribbean. Starting in the 1500s, Cartagena was used as a storage area for all the gold and other treasures that the Spanish and British conquistadors found all over the continent for shipping back to the Motherland. Well, any good pirate doesn’t let booty like that just sit around waiting to be shipped, and ever since Cartagena was settled by the Spanish, the pirates have been ransacking and looting it. This led to building strong fortifications around the entire city which are still intact today and lend Cartagena a classic and authentic feel.
After finding a nice hotel in the Getsemani part of town, Aaron and I took off to walk around the old town and enjoy the sites. Since we disembarked the Stahlratte with about 10 new friends, we had all agreed to meet up that night at a local pub. On our way to the pub, we ran across most of the crowd at a small park drinking spiked fruit smoothies, and it wasn’t a hard choice to join them. Well, we never made it to the pub, but we did enjoy the local salsa music pouring from a nearby home and the lively atmosphere of all the locals in the plaza with us.
We spent the entire next day just walking around the city visiting museums and walking through markets. Cartagena is the best kind of city because you can entertain yourself all day just by walking around and not spending a dime. We also discovered the greatness that is arepas, one of the many Colombian delicacies. Only every other street vendor sells these corn patties filled with some magically delicious ingredient – and with the overbearing heat, we could only force ourselves to down these arepas or the fresh fruit smoothies sold all over.
The next day we decided to take a day trip to the nearby Volcano Totumo with our fellow Stahlratte crew Sinead, Arran, Paul, and Justin. The instructions were pretty straight-forward: take a bus to Galerazamba, then take a moto-taxi about 3km to the volcano. Total travel time: about one hour. So after 3 hours of buses, taxis, and hiking, we were wondering what went wrong. It could have had something to do with the fact that we took a bus to Santa Catalina instead (the bus driver did promise it was going to end up close to Galerazamba), or it could have been the fact that we thought the moto drivers were pulling our chain when they told us it would be a half hour ride (ha! It should only be 3km according to our Lonely Planet!), or it could have been the fact that we started walking down the wrong highway. At any rate, as we were walking down some random highway going God-knows-where, we came across a police roadblock. Either out of the goodness or their hearts or sheer boredom at having to work at a roadblock all day, these 3 cops made it their personal mission to get us to the volcano.
Really, all we had to do was find a taxi. But apparently there’s not a lot of taxi drivers patrolling Nowheresville. The cops finally found a taxi driver that would give us a fair rate to the volcano, with a few slight issues:
Six adult passengers in one taxi? No problem!
The road there is entirely unpaved and has unlimited potholes? No problem!
The car has no shocks? No problem!
There’s already two full grown male passengers in the taxi? No problem!
accepted.
And so we were off – 9 full grown adults in one mid-sized sedan on an unpaved, uneven road for a full 30 minutes. By the end of our trip, Sinead had a severe neck cramp, Aaron had lost feeling in both of his legs, and one of the Colombian men had to ride in the trunk. I can’t make this stuff up.
But, lo and behold, we finally arrived at the volcano, paid our $2.50 entrance fee, and jumped in the muddy pit. Totumo is really more of an oversized ant hill than a volcano, but apparently over the years, some volcanic muddy matter has repeatedly bubbled up, spilled over, and created a really unique tourist attraction. I can’t even begin to explain the feeling – it sort of felt like floating in milk. Or maybe paint pots. Or maybe liquified tofu?? At any rate, the 6 of us grown adults had the time of our lives floating, rolling, throwing, and playing in the mud that it didn’t take us long to forget about our hellish ride to get there. After about an hour, we climbed out and were led down to a little lake by the local ladies and scrubbed clean (this included them ripping off our swimsuits and digging into our ears).
The ride back was much less eventful – we transferred buses once and then were practically dropped off at our front door. After a good scrubbing to get the mud out of body crevices I didn’t know existed, we met up once again for dinner in a local plaza and a few cervezas at our favorite bar Donde Fidel’s.
For our final day in Cartagena, Aaron and I walked through the colonial streets, visited an art museum and a fort, did some shopping, and said our good-byes to the Stahlratte crew. Cartagena served as a perfect segue from the Caribbean to South America – where the tropics end and the South American hospitality begins.
