After the formal Skedaddle bike trip I had planned to stay in Cartagena for a couple more days to sight see, as I’d been told beforehand it was a lovely city. Our trip hotel was in the Old Town so I decided to stay there for the extra days. The Old Town is a Spanish colonial town and was a major port for many hundreds of years. It has a classic fortress wall around it, and many colonial style buildings. Cartagena as a city is now much bigger with many high rise buildings and busy airport on the edge of it. But the old town seems to have retained much of its historic buildings.
The roads are narrow, single car width and there is limited vehicular access, through the ubiquitous little yellow taxis of Colombia seemed to get in ok. In the evenings, horse drawn carts appeared to give tourists a lift around town. Cartagena is a very touristy place, it was the first time I heard any other English speaking visitors. Like nearly every town or city we have stayed it, it was noisy, crowded and full of life day and night. And there were hundreds of street sellers trying to flog anything from water, soft drinks, hats, jewellery, sweets, etc.
My plan was to do some visits to museums and historical buildings and then one day to do a boat trip to the islands about 20km off shore. Colombia is very cheap to eat out, and entry into museums was similarly low. In Bogotá I had paid 4,000 pesos to get into the Gold museum, that’s under £1. I’ve attached some of the photos from the Old Town. It’s interesting but you can do it all in two days. There are hundreds of restaurants to work through though, and one of the other riders had stayed on the same extra 3 days, so we met for drinks and dinner each evening.
The boat trip day was an interesting experience. I picked one that visited four or five islands, rather than just go out and sit on one all day. Whilst it was a fun day out, it was very tacky and busy at each of the stops, literally hundreds of people at one, and drinks vendors basically ripping off the captive market. At one, we were shepherded into a hut in the water with a drinks table in the middle, where we then had an hour or so to kill. We’d travelled out on a fast speedboat with about 12 to 14 of us on it. I loved the boat ride part but the rest, I just went with the flow! It was a very international little group with people from Costa Rica, Peru, Argentina, Italy, Colombia, the Dutch island of Aruba (off the Venezuela coast) and me the sole English person. With a mix of Spanish and English we managed to chat. We did a bit of snorkelling, but we’re only provided with goggles, not a snorkel (maybe a Covid restriction??) which was ok, lots of beautiful multicoloured fish to see, but most of the coral was dead, I couldn’t work out if it was bleached or polluted. I’m glad I did the boat trip but if any one reading this comes out here, expect it to be very busy and touristy.
After some very basic food throughout our travels over the last 2 weeks, the best bit of Cartagena was finding some nice quality restaurants and eating tasteful food again. Even the expensive places were under £25 each.
The journey home is long, 3 flights, Cartagena to Bogotá, Bogotá to Madrid, then Madrid to London Heathrow, so I’m going to settle back and watch some films with a good glass of wine.
Stephanie in Colombia 2022 