COLOMBIAAAA!!!!
Part 1 (Sept 11 - Sept 14)
Colombia is seriously great, you guys. We miss it already.
There's a ton of stuff to do there, we barely scratched the surface, but
here's how we did!
We departed from LAX on September 10th on the very reputable, never sketchy Spirit Airlines, with a stopover in Fort
Lauderdale for a quick airport-floor nap, and then we arrived in the
beautiful and illustrious CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA.
Cartagena, aka The First Spanish Colony Of The Americas
(unofficial nickname), boasts crumbling stone walls surrounding its
center (for excitable tourists to climb on), a sunken pirate ship off its coast (leftover from its pirate-fighting days or yore), balconies spilling over
with flowers, and an abundance of policemen in yellow vests who joyride
around town two to a motorcycle.
Its a beautiful place. It is also quite a small place, and one that,
having been recently touted by several Reputable News Sources in the
past two years as the hippest most trendiest place of all places, is
considerably more expensive than anywhere else in Colombia. So a bar of
soap costs approximately one billion pesos (rough estimate).
We checked into our hostel, The Makako Chill Out (idk, I
didn't name it), located within the old walled part of the city. The
social element of the hostel revolves around a sitting room with a
television, where several of the same indeterminately European travelers
sat for two days watching an alternating loop of V for Vendetta and
Grown Ups 2. You know, just CHILLIN OUT (Makako style?). In other words,
two thumbs up.
We took ourselves on a little walking tour of the city,
guided and narrated by ourselves. Below, a list of our discoveries, compiled as a delightful
scavenger hunt that you too may use on your next Cartagenian adventure!
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| Castillo de San Felipe |
Can you find:
-El Castillo de San Felipe, a stone battlement at the edge of town with
secret tunnels and turrets from which there's a really great view of the
entire city (bonus point for each iguana you spot crawling up the side
of the wall)
- The statue in the Plaza de Santo Domingo of a fat lady lounging on her side (she is called "La Gordita¨)
- An emerald 'museum', where an attendant will come out to the street to
assure you that admission is free. Admission is free because it is a
store.
- A boy with a speaker shaped like a remote controlled car who cues up Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggs's 'The Next Episode', walks up to you and dispassionately begins to rap along, and, when it becomes clear you will not tip him for this, abruptly moves on to the tourist standing right next to you and starts up the music all over again.
- A stunning and immaculately dressed Colombian woman who couldn't humanly be able to walk all over this city in her giant heels but somehow does it every day.
- Policemen, not only riding piggyback on motorcycles, but riding along the top of the wall before a golden sunset, like badasses who are very comfortable with their sexuality.
- A boy with a speaker shaped like a remote controlled car who cues up Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggs's 'The Next Episode', walks up to you and dispassionately begins to rap along, and, when it becomes clear you will not tip him for this, abruptly moves on to the tourist standing right next to you and starts up the music all over again.
- A stunning and immaculately dressed Colombian woman who couldn't humanly be able to walk all over this city in her giant heels but somehow does it every day.
- Policemen, not only riding piggyback on motorcycles, but riding along the top of the wall before a golden sunset, like badasses who are very comfortable with their sexuality.
- A personable youth who calls himself the king of the city and sidles up to ask if you're looking for any drugs.
- Collect a point for every time you hear the song 'Bailando' by Enrique Iglesias
- A point for every time the security guard at the supermarket can't figure out what on earth you're trying to ask him, and requires a third party passerby to step in and solve the riddle that is your inscrutable accent.
- A point for every time the security guard at the supermarket can't figure out what on earth you're trying to ask him, and requires a third party passerby to step in and solve the riddle that is your inscrutable accent.
- And find this amazing statue:
After two days of happily wandering about and getting
lost, we got on a bus to the aptly named Playa Blanca (we've since
discovered that you wont get far in this part of the world without
running into a white sand beach called....Playa Blanca).
The bus dropped us at the edge of a road, one that does not
immediately look like it leads to a beach. We and the rest of our
passel of whities on the gringo shuttle wandered down the road and
through some foliage and around a corner and found an immensely crowded
beach -- every native Colombian who's anybody vacations on this beach,
and not just this beach, but this exact section of the beach. Down the
strip a ways to the right or left are long stretches of almost empty
beach, but here, in the 100 yards in front of the entrance, is the cool
spot to be.
Our hostel, The Wizard, at one end of the beach, was
basically a thatched roof hut with hammocks strung beneath it. Jorge the hostel guy gave us a grand tour, in which he gestured to the hammocks, and
then to the bathroom, a curtained box some feet away next to a pond full
of trash. Paradise!
 |
| The Wizard |
But it really is. Playa Blanca is a stunning, warm, smooth
beach that makes you think, in a dreamy, pina-colada-out-of-a-coconut
kind of daze, that maybe we should just stay here for another day or
five or eighteen, i don't know, we could make a decent living selling
papayas, at least enough to pay for this hammock. And then you
wake up from a nap and there's a child shrieking "Mirame!" and kicking
the hell out of your hammock and you reconsider.
At the restaurant next door, an awning with a table
underneath it, the cook brought out a cutting board lined up with fish
and asked us which ones we wanted, which he then cooked up and served
with rice and fried plaintains. This is the standard dish throughout
Colombia and it is pretty consistently excellent. I wouldn't stray too
far from this tried and true menu, and for the love of God don't mess
around with ordering a hamburger, but the fish/rice/plantains combo is
delicious.
A British couple (hi Charlotte and Andreas) stayed at the
Wizard with us. As the four of us were getting ready for bed, Eian, staring
uncertainly into the darkness toward the trash pond, said 'That's a
bull.' A giant white bull had just roamed into our hostel and was eating
the dog's food out of its dish. Charlotte and Andreas began setting
plastic chairs in front of us as a barrier, and we tried to wake up the
dog to get it to defend its food. The dog woke up after several minutes,
and ran barking after the bull, but by then the bull had already eaten
everything and had turned to leave. I think the dog still expected
credit for scaring it off though.
Charlotte woke up the next morning at dawn to find an old
woman standing over her hammock, asking placidly in Spanish if she'd
like to buy any fruit. When Charlotte said no, the woman, feigning
misinterpretation, continued on with a list of the fruit she had in
stock. ¨Tengo papaya, pina, manzana...¨ Andreas, having not slept well
in a hammock, rolled over and said in English 'It's too
early...someone please tell her it's too early...'
It was hysterical. We did buy fruit from her later.
It was hysterical. We did buy fruit from her later.
Eian started his day at 5 am with a swim and earnestly
tried to wake me up to look at sand crabs. I don't remember this
exchange, but I don't think I was receptive. What a lucky man.
At 11, we got back on a bus for the city and prepared for our next adventure, the mud volcano....
MUD VOLCANO
Okay, lets get this out of the way: the mud volcano is a
bizarre thing to do, both in concept and execution. The concept is that
tourists will go and pay to sit in a volcano full of mud. Weird, just,
already. But it's an understandable desire if you consider that, surely,
the entire point of it is that people go to lounge and luxuriate to
their heart's content, soaking up all the magical health properties of
the iron fortified mud, chatting it up, and getting massages and just
plain Makako chilling out.
Well, we made a switch to the Mamallena hostel, its finger
being slightly more on the pulse 9and which included as a house pet an
irritable green parrot named Tori who bit several people in just our
short one night stay0, where we heard that the mud volcano 'tour' was a
must, a one of a kind, authentic Cartagena experience. That it was.
A small bus picked us and a few others up from Mamellena,
and then proceeded to drive around the city in circles for about an
hour, trolling various hotels for more takers until we had filled every
single seat in the vehicle. This happens on every bus ride in Colombia.
It's sort of endearing after awhile.
Once we arrived at the volcano, our tour guide showed us to
a room to change into swimsuits, and then we were herded, along with
several more bus loads of people, to the entrance of the staircase to
the volcano. The staircase to the mud volcano, incidentally, is made of
mud. The climb is a challenge.
 |
| Mud |
At the top we waited in a line and each, one at a time, at
intervals of about 2 to 3 minutes, climbed slowly down the ladder into
the mud pit, which is a circle probably ten feet in diameter. As each
person got closer to the bottom, a masseuse materialized to guide their
feet to the rungs of the ladder that continued beneath the mud, then
guided their floating body across the pit and parked them there like a
boat. From there the masseuse would begin the massage, which turned out
to be two minutes of brushing his hands vaguely over the tourist's body,
usually flinging mud into their face and mouth in the process.
There were two masseurs in the pit on this particular day.
One was a staunch middle aged man who went about this business with a
sort of gruff efficiency, and the other was an eight year old boy. Eian
got the older one, and I got the eight year old boy.
Once the massages were complete, a guide called down from
the top for us to, one at a time, start to climb up the ladder back out
of the pit. As each person ascended the ladder, mud glopped off of
their bodies and splatted pathetically onto the heads of those waiting
below them. Outside of the volcano, we were then directed to a nearby
river to rinse ourselves off. Immediately upon stepping into the river,
older women waded over and began to bathe us, disinterestedly filling
and then dumping buckets of water over our heads, and then taking off
our swim suits and rinsing them in the river. One guy was so unprepared
for the lady to try to take his swim trunks from him that he jumped up
and ran away with his pants down. When she was done cleaning me, my
washer woman flopped the two pieces of my swim suit around my shoulders
and walked away.
And then everybody put their suits back on and, giggly and confused, went back to the bus.
IT WAS BIZARRE.
