Cartegena: Bringing Europe abroad

Days 20/21/22/23

El Viajero, Cartegena

Colourful streets of Cartegena

And so our journey continued towards Cartegena, a beautiful touristic city boasting both high rise buildings and an ancient walled town, on the west part of the Carribbean coast. Our hostel, El Viajero was situated at the heart of the walled part of town, otherwise known as Old town. After hearing a few tips that we should stay away from the main party hostel area, Getsemani (the Soho area of Cartegena, situated just outside the walls) our hostel had the best of both worlds, being a ten minute walk from the Media Luna street in getsemeni (and the similarly named Media Luna hostel, with its 160 beds, being at the heart of many people´s stories of Cartegena), but also a 5 minute walk from the walls which looked out over the sea.

The sea through the fortified walls of Old Town

 The charm of Old town Cartegena is hard to ignore. We genuinely felt like we were in a European holiday town, with marble/ light stone pedestrian streets and flower-ridden, rainbow of buildings tangling to and fro. All this is sewn together by churches, plazas, white linen wearing blokes and summer-dressed wives. In keeping with the holiday vibe, our time in Cartegena revolved heavily around reading, relaxing, eating and wandering. On our first night, a Saturday, we attempted the Media Luna area, settling in a buzzing, if slightly dodgy, square in Getsemani with locals trying to tout beers. After the long bus ride from Costeno however, we took turns to be knackered and finally gave up after the heavily gringoed Saturday-night streets got too much. The next morning, feeling hot and sweaty (Cartegena was muggier than our beach resorts), we took refuge in Exito, the supermarket and found a `shabby-chic` ice cream parlour which offered the most amazing head-size icecreams for 2 pounds (oreo & coconut of course, really branching out on my flavours). Our evening was spent looking out over the sea view from the fortified walls and watching the sunset. All in all fairly relaxing!

Sunset on the walls

With the intention of saving you some boredom, our second day in Cartegena followed pretty much the same pattern (ice cream and Exito included) but with more admin, things take a loooong time to organise when in holiday mode (tough life), until the evening when we munched down, firstly a street kebab (YUM!) and subsequently, a delicious menu del dia (my personal saviour, a very cheap food option, consisting of a set menu starting with soup, followed by a plate of meat, rice, unhealthy salad and chips/plantain) and continued our new found love for straight rum over dinner! Following this, we headed over to Media Luna street, which was dead, but managed to find a bunch of people who fancied a boogie, and so continued our salsa learning experience. Unfortunately for me (and perhaps Bean), although we now know the Salsa foot-work after a few impromptu lessons, our malcoordination continues. We will persist, watch out UK!

Street food (tourist shot)

Our plan the next day was to catch a boat over to Playa Blanca, a gorgeous beach on an island 40 minutes away, and stay the night in hammocks. Waking up to the familiar Pit-pat of rain quickly scuppered this and we made a rapid decision to skip out on a wet Playa Blanca and head down, away from our beloved coast, to Medellin, the second biggest city in Colombia. To save on accommodation, we chose to take the overnight bus (13hrs), rather than the equally priced flight (1hr). Character-building stuff. Medellin appeared on our horizons (or not, as it`s situated in a valley, so that would be impossible) at 11am and we taxied over to Tiger Paw, our next hostel.

I am slightly aware that our time in Cartegena seems quite quiet, but we did get a real feel for the beautiful city and had a (fairly) well needed (not at all really) recharge after a really hard time cruising from beach to beach up and down the north coast. We were, safe to say, very sad to leave the coast, but the unknown of Medellin (pronounced MedeJin (Colombian accent)) has been a great surprise and in the next blog I`ll fill you in on our being flooded out of a room and (finally) learning about Colombian history.