Cartagena de Indies

For those of you keeping track, you might have wondered about the radio silence lately.  We left Cartagena 4 days ago and are only now back in the wi-fi zone in a beach town called Taganga...but I’m getting ahead of myself, first let’s talk about our time in Cartagena.

 

Pronounced Cartahena (i.e. “hen” as in a female chicken), Cartagena is the quintessential Latin-American colonial city.  Founded in 1533 by the Spanish invaders, it was their principal port on the Caribbean coast and their gateway to the north of South America.  Gold and other treasure pillaged and looted from the indigenous inhabitants was stored here for shipping back to the motherland.  Because of that it attracted pirates and other non-desirables looking to reloot the loot from the original looters. Hmmm, interesting twist.  In response, the Spanish made Cartagena an impregnable fortress complete with a massive stone wall around the city and thus preserving the original city inside the wall, otherwise referred to as El Centro.  Lucky for us tourists, but too bad for those indigenous inhabitants.

 

True to form, Cartagena, and particularly El Centro, is all about just walking around, eating the street food, and taking in the central squares, lavish cathedrals, cobbled alleyways, balconies overlooking the streets, and other classic colonial features of the period.  Every street is a post-card-worthy scene from the 16^th century.   It’s one of those places you just don’t get tired of.  Every outing finds something else, another little cafe, another spot to have a cerveza and look out over the ocean, another cobbled street, another romantic corner to sit, split a bottle of wine, and watch the world go by. 

Highlights for us were sitting on a cannon atop the wall (see photo in previous post) one beautiful evening looking out over the Caribbean bathed in a wind of warm salty air, planning the rest of our lives.  It only got better when a young Columbian entrepreneur with a cooler came by with a “Senior, cerveza?”.  Hard beat that!  Then there was the “wedding night”.  It would seem that rich Columbians like to get married in Cartagena, on Saturday night, and in the most elaborate way possible.  We hit it right on and must have seen 4 wedding parties carting around in horse-drawn carriages complete with drivers donned in full suits and hat, coming and going along the cobbled streets, stopping outside the most beautiful cathedrals all done up for the recoming of Christ (or so it seemed).  Cartagena at night is indeed pretty hard to beat.  If the word romance isn’t in your vocabulary, it will be after spending a few evenings here.

Alas, all good things come to an end (or do they?).  The beaches of the Caribbean beckon.  Although it would have been quite easy to just slip into a Cartagena coma for a while, we came here to cycle across the continent, so we figured we better get our feet wet and see if our rigs even roll down the road.  The plan leaving Cartagena was to cycle up the coast towards the beaches of Santa Marta and Taganga.  We weren’t entirely sure of the distance or the route (we don’t have a high-resolution map showing all towns and distances), but we knew the direction and that’s really what’s important.  “Hola Senior, donde es Taganga ?”  Must have said that about 100 times.  Four days of cycling on the Caribbean coast, what could go wrong?  More on that mission next.

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