Cartagena

What do you think of when you hear of Cartagena? My sister Juanita and I both thought of the same thing before I left to Colombia: Romancing the Stone, the late 80s adventure-comedy set in the jungles of Colombia and the city of Cartagena, and as I'm now discovering, in dubious relation to one another as movies are so adept at doing. In the film I remember Cartagena as very mysterious, an old Euro-ish city with massive stone walls, moats filled with man-eating aligators and luxurious inner-city haciendas. So before I actually set foot in Cartagena I played that game: I tried imagining what it would actually look based upon the incomplete set of information I had about the place, the majority of that, embarrasingly, coming from a Hollywood feature, so that I could compare my prior expectations with my observed reality.

My first impressions were nothing of the like as I rode through the outskirts of the city towards some "inner city" I'd heard about, and I asked locals on street corners which direction at every major intersection. All day I'd been riding through a 35-degree swelter for the 4th day in a row and on this day I was definately ailing from some heat related dementia. I think that I was suffering from the early stages of heat stroke because no amount of food would cure this terrible bonk -- believe me, I tried -- and it wasn´t until I dunked my head in a bucket of cold water that I felt some relief, and so the remainder of the day I kept pouring water over myself. At 30-kms to Cartegena I needed a break but would have none of that: I was ready to check into a room, take a shower and hit the town and stopping in some hot dusty village to recover was not an option despite my sorry state. And then came the hills. I'd been riding on nearly perfect flat roads for days and now when I least needed it came a series of rollers that set me back and left my already noodley legs rubbery-er. Then came the traffic: uncompassionate trucks and buses honking and belching and creating an air even less suitable than just a scorching heat, and I suffered into the city. Okay, I wasn' t in the best of spirits in the first place and so I was exceptionally disgusted with all that I saw of this city: dust, horrendous traffic, flat sprawling crumbling buildings in various states of decay or construction, I couldn't tell which. Then I reached a huge, heavy stone wall and passed inside...

And all was different. It was a wonderland of narrow streets with pastel lined buildings and flowering plants dripping from the wooden porches, cool shadows, plazas that opened up to the sky where huge shade trees and palms shaded benches and bronze statues. This was the Cartagena of my inner-eye and remarkably close to my prior expectations, and with the exception of the aligators its not far from the Cartagena of Romancing the Stone. But still, you need to come see this place Joanie!