Cartagena: Last Stop

Wow. It’s hard to believe we’re really here. I’m hoping The Amazing Race’s Phil Keoghan is there to greet us at the airport with a list of how many miles and countries we’ve covered circumnavigating this continent.

Seriously, how can this possibly be over? This is our life! This is what we do, for better or worse. We jump on a bus, we get to a new city, we learn our way around, we plan some hikes, look for museums, book an excursion or two. We wake up at 5:00 or 7:00 or 9:00 depending on the schedule. We scrape together meals from whatever’s available at the nearest grocery that’s compatible with our hostel kitchen – or go out for the cheapest local cuisine we can find. Or hot dogs.

Our week in Cartagena has been a week of “lasts,” not unlike the month before we left Atlanta. We passed through our last municipal bus terminal. We checked into our last reservation on Booking.com. We built a mental map of our local area for the last time. We’ve been using some of our travel gear (and clothing) for the last time, throwing things away as we go. As I’m typing this, Lea has announced that she’s taking her last “vacation nap.” Yesterday it struck me that I was withdrawing money from a South American ATM for the last time.

As much as I’ve been looking forward to returning to the land of sausage biscuits, potable water, and central air – I’m sad for the trip to be ending. I could use another week in Cartagena.

Knowing that this city would be our port of departure, we’ve done things a little differently than elsewhere. For once, we’ve splurged on our accommodations. Instead of booking an inexpensive hostel in a slightly sketchy part of town, we rented a big, two-bedroom apartment in ritzy Bocagrande, a narrow peninsula of high-rises and beach resorts that juts out west of the Old City into the Caribbean. Our apartment is on the 19^th floor of the Edificio Poseidon del Caribe, with a balcony overlooking the ocean. Here’s the view:

Instead of cramming ourselves into a space the size of a walk-in closet with no storage, at last we have room to spread out. In addition to craving comfort and some actual vacation before returning to the States, we rented a larger place because we were expecting company. Our first night in Cartagena was actually our last night alone. For months our friend Melissa has been planning to join us, and at almost the last minute our friend KT opted to ditch Florida and fly down too. Our two-bedroom apartment has now become the party suite!

It’s good that they came to join us, because if they hadn’t we wouldn’t have left the building. We’re both worn out from all this travel, but having guests with energy and excitement and enthusiasm about being in South America has given us the renewed motivation we needed to get out and explore our surroundings for a little while longer.

Last Excursions

Lea and I are sticking to our “no more guided tours” pledge. However, one change we’ve made in Cartagena is to give up on the local bus network and use taxis. On our way to the airport to pick up Melissa and KT, we happened onto a friendly driver from Medellín whose Spanish Lea can understand. We’ve had bad luck with cabbies in the past and generally don’t trust them farther than we can tow their vehicles, but Daniel was willing to wait for us at the airport until our friends arrived and seemed like a genuinely cool cat, so we hired him to be our driver for the week, at least for all of our longer trips. This has worked out wonderfully.

The first excursion was a street art tour of Cartagena’s Old Town. This one I had to miss due to one last attempt by South America to demolish my gastrointestinal tract. My roomies had a great time, however, and returned with some really neat photographs. Street art is something Lea and I have seen plenty of, but to enjoy it with friends who are seeing it with fresh eyes brings a certain level of “wow” back to the experience. Even though I didn’t go, I loved seeing all the photos they took.

The next day we rented a boat. This was by far the best way to enjoy the beaches and islands along the coast. We could have taken a packaged tour and been herded like aquatic sheep from one tourist trap to the next, wasting who knows how much time fending off beach vendors and sweltering at overpriced restaurants.

Instead we had at our disposal at 32 foot motorboat with a Skipper, a Gilligan, a cooler for snacks and beverages, and an itinerary that we could alter at whim. The plan was to swim offshore in the Rosario Islands, visit a popular party beach, then go to the more secluded Playa Azul. We decided we weren’t interested in the partying and that we’d brought sufficient snacks, water, and alcohol without having to stop and buy more, so we got our friendly drivers to take us from one beautiful swimming hole to the next.

Though not on the itinerary, they also showed us Pablo Escobar’s 300-room island vacation home and one of his drug planes that was shot down and sunk just offshore from his villa.

We ended up returning earlier than planned due to weather, but it was still a full day and much more relaxing than any packaged island tour would have been.

It was also Lea’s birthday, which all of us forgot until after our trip. Luckily we were able to locate an outstanding tapas restaurant called La Tapería, and after two pitchers of sangria all was right with the world.

The next day we went back to the Old City to enjoy a few more of its sights. First on the list was Parque Centenario, which is inhabited by a variety of monkeys, birds, fiery red squirrels, and supposedly sloths. It took a long time to find a sloth and she was so well hidden as to not be very photogenic (see last week’s post for better sloth pics) but the park’s other inhabitants were more than happy to pose for us.

We followed this up with pizza in the Plaza San Domingo and a visit to the Palace of the Inquisition. Only the fist floor of that museum is dedicated to the Inquisition itself, while the rest is given to the history of Cartagena in general. Amidst the dioramas of indigenous persecution and displays of “Enlightenment” era torture devices was, without any fanfare, a display case of banned, heretical books – including a copy of Nicolas Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres.

My brain exploded. “They’ve got a Copernicus!” I told everyone who could hear. I don’t think anyone else was quite as excited, but to those even slightly into astronomy, this is a sacred text. It’s like stumbling on a Gutenberg Bible, Shakespeare’s First Folio, or issue #1 of Action Comics in the corner of an unassuming history museum where most people’s eyes would glaze right by without understanding how transformational an object they were looking at.

Anyway, I’ll calm down. But holy crap – I think I was just as excited to see a copy of this book as I was to see the Magellanic Clouds for the first time way back in Chile.

The following day we continued our “DIY excursion” program by hiring Daniel to drive us to the Mar Rosado (Pink Sea) – a brightly colored brine pool that’s much more accessible than those near Salar de Uyuni (only without the flamingos) and the Totumo Mud Volcano. For a fee you can walk up to the summit of the volcano and, if you’re into making questionable life choices, you can lower yourself into the mud. KT and Melissa did so. Lea and I were happy to watch.

Our evening ended with Daniel taking us to one of his favorite restaurants. We’d asked him for a place that served cazuela de frijoles and bandera paisa like they do in southern Colombia. He provided the perfect spot and even joined us for our meal. I’m telling you – if you find yourself in Cartagena, forget all the tourist agencies and look this guy up. You won’t find a better cabbie in all of South America. In my mind, he’s redeemed his profession and I’m not nearly so reluctant to get into a taxi as I’ve been for many a year.

Today, as I write this, is our last full day in South America. (By the time you read this we’ll already be home, or at least on the way.) We’ve had laundry done for the last time, and Lea and I made our last trip to buy stamps and mail postcards. We’ve gone to the beach for the last time (which we also did on the first full day KT and Melissa were with us) and drank a little too much for the last time on this continent.

A brief word on the beaches in Bocagrande – the sand is perfect, the water is clear, warm, and beautiful, and the vendors outnumber the tourists two-to-one. As long as you’re sitting down, you’ll be telling a salesman “no, gracias” about every thirty seconds. They sell sunglasses, hats, temporary tattoos, sets of dominoes (?) and anything else you might imagine. If anyone had come by selling high-pressure water guns I would have bought one just to use it as a pop-up blocker on all the other vendedores. It’s much less stressful, we discovered, to go on a weekday late in the afternoon than on the weekend. Both times, we did give money to vendors selling cocktails, fruit salad, and homemade coconut candy. After all, those are essentials.

And so.

Here we are.

We’ve done what we set out to do. We quit our jobs, we broke our American brainwashing, and we’ve traveled eight countries in nine months, two weeks, and three days. We swam with giant sea turtles. We hiked in cloud forests. We saw whales. We explored ancient ruins. We dipped our toes in the world’s largest swimming pool. We ventured as far south as it’s possible to go without swimming to Antarctica. We stood in the icy breeze coming off one of the world’s last advancing glaciers. We’ve seen street art where the paint was still fresh and rock art left by inhabitants before the invention of the written word. We soaked in the spray from one of the world’s greatest waterfalls. We made our way through a country where neither of us could speak the language. We’ve ridden dirt roads over mountains and seen more wildlife than anywhere else except the Serengeti.

We’ve ridden day buses, night buses, and goat buses. We’ve traveled by plane, train, gondola, riverboat, and 4×4. We’ve visited rainforests, salt flats, mountains, valleys, deserts, beaches, and jungles (both natural and urban). We’ve done more mental currency calculations in one year than in our entire lives before. We’ve dined well and eaten cheap. We’ve slept without heat or air conditioning, taken cold showers, gone without a roof over our heads for more nights than I can count (buses don’t qualify), and learned in the process what we truly need to be happy in life and what privileges we’ve enjoyed in the past should not be taken for granted.

There have been times when I couldn’t wait to come home. And now I just want one week more.

Signing off from South America…

…but The Escape Hatch will ever be open.

Jared Millet, Cartagena de Indias, 16 May 2019.

P.S. Our route through Colombia: