Activity Summary
Thursday 3rd August - Day 303 (continued)
Travel to Cartagena
Dinner at El Bololó | Bowls del Caribe
Walk around Getsemani in the early evening
Friday 4th August - Day 304
Free walking tour of the old town
Monumento Torre del Reloj
Plaza de la Aduana
Plaza San Pedro Claver
Santuario de San Pedro Claver
Strangely nice Starbucks coffee & paved Miss Colombia
Generic nice streets
Monumento a Gertrudis
Church of Santo Domingo
Emerald shop
Walk around the city walls
Dinner at Vive Restaurante Bar Colombiano
Saturday 5th August - Day 305
Castle San Felipe de Barajas
Coffee & research at Juan Valdez
Dinner at Vive Restaurante Bar Colombiano
Sunday 6th August - Day 306
Museo de Cartagena de Indias
Lunch at El Bololó | Bowls del Caribe
Coffee & research at Juan Valdez
Dinner at Vive Restaurante Bar Colombiano
Monday 7th August - Day 307
Absolute nothing day
Tuesday 8th August - Day 308
Taxi to airport
Flight to Medellin
Summary
Cartagena
We really liked the old city. It was clean, picturesque and safe to walk around.
Getsemani was a little hit and miss. Initially we really enjoyed the place, with interesting street art and colourful streets in the centre of town. It felt safe enough from Thursday to Saturday as there were loads of tourists out and about but then it was oddly quiet Sunday to Tuesday. Not quite so savoury at that point but still fine.
We spent a lot of time here and with the array of restaurants we found that were affordable, coffee shops with WIFI and a comfortable hotel meant we got a lot of admin done.
Transport
Cartagena
Berlinastur shuttle from Santa Marta to Cartagena.
Taxi from Berlinastur to hotel.
Accommodation
Cartagena - Hotel Casa Cielo Cartagena
Number of nights - 5
Price per night per person - £15
By the time we were looking, a lot of the private room accomodation was the same sort of price. This place was pretty great to be honest. It had aircon (an absolute must in Cartagena), free water & coffee, free ice lollies which were delicious, lukewarm water for showers and a comfortable room with TV. The rooftop area was pretty nice to relax on as well.
We could never work out whether we could use the small kitchen but on finding our cheap dinner spot this became obsolete really.
Turned out to be a great hotel for what we needed it for. Obviously it wasn’t remotely sociable.
Diary
[Continued]
It was an easy journey to the halfway point at Barranquilla where we should have been having a short 20 minute stopover but ended up turning into an hour. It did mean our timed urinations were completely misjudged. The highlight of the stop was an introduction to a deep fried potato ball filled with egg & meat. Gave Nicola a nice helping of fried stodge that was needed.
Sadly the last leg involved Nicola getting booted by an old lady from his comfortable single seat with leg room due to allocated seating. This did make the second half of the journey much less pleasant but it was only a few hours.
At the Berlinastur Cartagena terminal we met a Flemish guy who was staying down the road from our hostel and jumped in a cab together. Having another guy in the can certainly alleviated any stress of being robbed. He was a smoker so Nicola did shun his company initially until he was done.
The cab stopped at the guys hostel, said our goodbyes after 20 minutes driving in slow traffic and walked up the road to our hotel.
We relaxed a little in the hotel first before having a quick wander in the Getsemani area, mainly for the bank which happened to be in the least attractive part of the town. Not a great intro.
We had been forewarned that Cartagena was quite a lot more expensive than other places in Colombia so we did do a lot of research before heading out. We had dinner at El Bololó | Bowls del Caribe which cost P30k (£6) for a refreshing bowl of veggies and jerk chicken. Not massively filling but was damn tasty.
To our delight the Getsemani area was pretty nice in the early evening so we had a short walk around the bustling streets before heading back to the hotel. While still safer, going out drinking and socialising just isn’t something we are currently interested in as we weren’t in a hostel.
Our morning was spent on a free walking tour around Cartagena old town courtesy of the blue umbrella guys.
Our tour guide, while clearly a nice man, was not the best for a busy city walking tour. He was pretty old and he was very difficult to understand and hear so the both of us kind of lost interest in what he was saying a lot. It didn’t stop us from tipping far more than we would have liked to but the group was only 5 of us and Luke felt bad. Probably the worst walking tour we have had, sadly, but we did enjoy Cartagena at least.
The sights we covered were:
Monumento Torre del Reloj
Plaza de la Aduana
Plaza San Pedro Claver
Santuario de San Pedro Claver
Strangely nice Starbucks coffee & every Miss Colombia nominee had her face imprinted on the pavement
Generic nice streets - the old town was a beautiful place with nice colonial buildings and generally well kept streets
Monumento a Gertrudis - famous lady has a big bunda
Church of Santo Domingo
Emerald shop - this was a rather awkward end to the tour as we were followed around the store by an employee which is the complete opposite of how we like to shop. None of the jewellery looked any good and it was all super expensive.
The group we had were nice, all on holidays, but we barely had a chance to speak over an extended period of time before being cut off by our guide. It was also SUPER warm, pushing mid 30’s and humid as hell. Each of us had an umbrella courtesy of our guide, one of which it appeared he just stole from a vendor in the shade, but it did help. Safe to say we weren’t acclimatised to this level of heat.
For lunch we tried traditional arepas, a stuffed corn pita bread, from a well reviewed local hole in the wall that seemed overly expensive (P12k) for what they were. Nice but nothing special. Nicola ended up consolidating her hunger with a trusty papas ball for P4k, arguing it actually filled her up more.
The afternoons tended to be a lot cooler with a lot of cloud cover usually rolling in so when we stepped out in the mid afternoon and walked around Getsemani & the old city walls it was a lot more comfortable.
Our hotel had a nice rooftop chill area with hammocks, overlooking the fort, and also provided free coconut cream ice lollies so we made the most out of the ‘free’ stuff.
On further research Nicola (she put in quite a shift to find affordable eateries in a generally expensive city) found a local food place called Vive Restaurante Bar Colombiano so we figured we’d try it out. The food was great and cost P12k for the ‘menu del dia’ - effectively a soup starter, meat dish with rice, patacones & salad plus a drink. For £2.40 this was plenty of food and the fried chicken / chicken in salsa had us leaving very happy with ourselves.
Our morning activity was the Castle San Felipe de Barajas. Entry cost £6 each so not a great deal of money but we would have felt hard done by if we hadn’t been ushered into one of the rooms that had a 25 minute presentation explaining everything we would have wanted to know about the history of the castle.
The 360 views from the top were pretty good. Cartagena’s old walls were the best view from the top while the rest of the surrounding naturally looked like a not particularly pretty city and naturally no tourist ever really ventured that way.
It was very warm at 10am so after an hour or two we were done and back in our hotel room. Rather than go out for food we went back to the hotel to have sandwiches in the nice airconed room to recover from the heat.
We knew we had far too much time in Cartagena but were always consigned to taking it slowly and planned to do a lot of research given we had some big ticket items to get resolved ASAP (Galapagos, Amazon trip, Ecuador hikes & Machu Pichu) and Cartagena was definitely the right place for us to do this based on our previous Colombian locations. Our afternoon was spent around the corner with a coffee / chocolate sugary monster drink at Juan Valdez which was comfortable enough and had decent WIFI.
Keeping it cheap again we went back for dinner at Vive Restaurante Bar Colombiano, this time (and every night thereafter) didn’t have our much desired chicken del dia dishes and the service just got worse and worse. But for £2.40 and decent food we weren’t going to stop coming back, simply sethe in silence.
It had felt like we had eeked out everything we could have done in Cartagena already as we didn’t want to spend $75 on a catamaran trip to the Rosario islands, Isla Baru looked a bit shit as we can’t just sit still on a beach (certainly not so early in our part 2 travels) and Totumo looked awful and we really didn’t want to be smelling of sulphur for weeks again.
Our morning activity was to go to the Museo de Cartagena de Indias which, given 95% of things were written in Spanish, was not overly interesting for us. But we did get a fun photo of a Spanish Inquisition guillotine being overlooked by the church that was responsible for the chopping.
Deciding to treat ourselves, we went back for lunch at El Bololó | Bowls del Caribe before going back to Juan Valdez for research.
Dinner was again at Vive Restaurante Bar Colombiano as we slowly got less and less impressed with the service at this place. Apparently the rival next door is much better but we wouldn’t get a chance to try it on Monday as it was closed.
Our walk over did get a bit spicy when a local took offence to Luke for some reason, opening up his body, getting too close and shouting what he could only assume were aggressive expletives but he was easy enough to ignore and walk on. A bit odd.
The previous day we had decided to wander over to the Bocogrande peninsula but on discovering the room had a TV with Netflix we ended up bingeing the Witcher and researching from the comfort of our room. This did however make us go a little stir crazy but managed to finalise a lot of what we needed to plan wise.
The only change in scenery was grabbing some arepas for lunch where Luke got his favourite photo of the whole trip, capturing the picture perfect moment Nicola turned around with her food and gave the famed and fabled ‘stare of a thousand daggers’ that strikes fear into the hearts of people everywhere. Well certainly Luke has the fear after being the subject, recipient and helpless puppy of the facial expression throughout his relationship and now is able to showcase to the world in jest. Particularly because he wasn’t the cause of the daggers, but rather an overly warm Nicola in 33 degree humid heat and having her hands burning from the hot arepas. Naturally Luke laughed and then carried all the food home.
We spent some time on the rooftop chilling with some new fruity ice lollies courtesy of the hotel before having our final meal at the same dinner place.
Our plan for our transit day was to drop our bags at the hotel after checking out as late as we could and find a place for some food nearby. Our plan changed when the power cut out at about 9.30am and managed to knock out our AC, WIFI and also the ability to use phone data. Apparently this was likely to affect the whole of downtown so we just decided to head to the airport early and sit it out until our flight to Medellin at 5:30pm.
The hotel called us a cab and we spent a few hours with a subway, coffee and chill before timing our bag drop queue terribly and ending up in line for 45 minutes. We had plenty of time though, it was quick through security and were on the plane easy as pie.
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