A Birthday in Cartagena

Immediately after New Year is Lucy's birthday. Her intention had been to visit the nearby Tutomo, el Volcan de Lodo for her birthday, but this would have meant getting up quite early on her birthday, and since she didn't emerge from their room at all on New Year's Day this was clearly not going to happen.

Lucy's birthday cake

She managed to get up for some birthday cake about midday , after which we finally made the journey to the old town to see the walls while it was still daylight. Just. Near the centre of the old town there is a statue of India Catalina, whose claim to fame is betraying her own people and helping the Spanish defeat the natives they encountered there. I'm not quite sure why she is venerated.

Kite surfer in the sunset

We continued to the walled part of the city and took a little walk around. Silvie commented that the walls weren't very impressive by the standards of some other walled cities she had been to, and didn't think they would do much of a job of keeping invaders out. True, it's no Great Wall, and at points it does look like you would only need a puddy up, but the walls are wide enough to have large numbers of soldiers marching up and down, which is what I supposed they must have done. Soon the sun set and we entered the walled part of the city to wander around. Old Cartagena really is beautiful and it reminded me of nice bits of Barcelona, with the multitude of plazas. The bit inside the inner walls, though, is almost as expensive as Bocagrande, so when we stopped off at Cafe del Mar for a birthday drink for Lucy it had to be one only.

Horse and carriage through the old town

Cartagena

At Cafe del Mar

Cartagena

On the way home we passed loads of kitsch Christmas decorations and booked our tour to the volcan de lodo at a tourist office on the main road to Bocagrande. Then it was an early night so we could get up for the tour, Lucy having rolled her birthday over to the next day; something tells me she does this every year, but who can blame her when it's the 2nd January?

More Xmas decorations

That thing in the middle is Jesus, not a snowman, apparently

The Swedes hadn't come out with us, but didn't seem interested in the mud volcano anyway.

Mud volcano!

I wasn't that excited myself, having already had a mud bath in Vietnam, and been to several hot springs. However when we arrived I saw that it was completely different: the volcano-shaped thing was clearly made out of concrete, although I've since read that it is a natural phenomenon I can't really believe it, and everyone queues up to go into the same mud bath, which is in the crater, as it were, of the volcano. This made it a bit cramped, mind you, and we had to queue a while to get in, by which time I was thinking I would really rather not, as it looked like the whole point was the massages they expected you to take for extra money, but the couple of massages I watched from the rim of the crater didn't look like they were any good.

People after the mud volcano

Eventually it was our turns to go in and when a masajista de lodo grabbed me and asked me to lie back I told him no quiero masaje and he shoved me in the other direction. It was completely different to the previous mud bath: this mud was very thick and it was too deep to touch the bottom, so we were suspended there, helpless. Over the next fifteen minutes or so we slowly drifted away from the ladders we came down, towards the other ladders. I think it happened just because of pressure from the new people coming in behind us, as well as a kind of vacuum left by the people ahead climbing up the stairs.

On the way to the lagoon to wash off

Finally we made it out, completely covered head-to-toe in the sticky mud, and waddled off down to the lagoon to wash off. Not exactly a wonderful experience, but strange and fun nonetheless. On the way home they stopped off for lunch really near to Zdenek's favourite after-hours club, and left us on the beach for two hours without telling us what was going on. After standing around for a while, people eventually got bored and started swimming or sunbathing.

When we got back, I tried desperately to contact Joanne, because it was also our first anniversary that Lucy had hijacked by spilling her birthday over into the next day. Nothing: no email, no chat, not responding to texts. I went to bed depressed. What an anniversary!

I had to take a photo - they were always like this

Then it was a few days more of the same: late nights, in particular "one last night out" happened a couple of times, the Swedish boys never seeming to do anything except for sleep, until finally it was time to leave and I went into the old town to try and find out about a boat to Panama. Several people heading south had told me that they took a boat through the Canal, past the San Blas Islands, and onto Cartagena; everyone had said it was fantastic, but I spent all day and hadn't been able to find a boat that included the Canal part of the trip. Eventually the hostels I was asking in told me that I should go to the Club Nautico and ask there. I didn't have time; I needed to get to Santa Marta that night, and hopefully begin a Ciudad Perdida trek the next day. Hanging around the hostel area for a day, I really regretted not having been there the whole time I was in Cartagena: the area is just outside the inner walls and nothing like as well maintained, but it has a nice, old, shabby charm to it - and it's much cheaper.

The walls

I had to leave without organising a boat, deciding i would go directly to Club Nautico when I returned from the Lost City. An absolute planning disaster and misreading of the guidebook caused me to get on the wrong bus: instead of a bus going to Barranquilla, halfway to Santa Marta, I had got on a bus to La Boquilla, which was the very same small fishing port we had been taken for lunch after the volcan de lodo. I'm not sure how it happened, but it was probably just not paying enough attention and the fact they are mentioned on consecutive pages in the Lonely Planet. After changing buses another three times, I was finally on a direct bus to Santa Marta, far too late to sensibly arrive and organise accommodation.

written by

The Happy Couple on January 6, 2010 from Cartagena, Colombia

from the travel blog: Michael's Lonely post-Honeymoon

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