Cartagena and Santa Marta (11/29-12/15/2017)

Wednesday November 29th

We woke up early this morning because we were informed last night that water for the whole city would be shut off starting at 7 AM and lasting at least 24 hours. We filled up every water receptacle we had and flushed the toilet one last time. There are routine water shortages in Cartagena, but this time it’s being shut off for some sort of maintenance.

The hostel offers 2 pancakes with a drizzle of panela (sugar bricks) syrup. We resisted them and went for groceries instead. We were very warmly welcomed to Colombia by a man sitting outside the grocery store. He called himself Tony Montana and grabbed my face and kissed me on the forehead and gave Jeff a hug. Everywhere we go people shout welcome to Colombia! I wish we weren’t so conspicuous!

We ate fruit and granola on the outdoor patio, then hid out in our air conditioned room. Sadly the WiFi signal doesn´t reach our room! We are wilting in the heat, and the walk to the grocery store was very demanding! 

Eventually we gathered the willpower to leave the hostel again, and went forth in search of Citibank. We unfortunately pay a lot of ATM fees when we travel, so we figure out quickly which ATMs let us take the most money out. In Colombia its Citibank. We have to take a bunch of money out to pay for our sailboat ride to Panamá. Credit cards aren’t as widely accepted as I would like, and often when they are it comes with a fee. It’s a 7% fee to pay for the boat with a credit card. We pay about 4% for ATM withdrawals, so even though it’s a pain going repeatedly to the ATM, it’s cheaper than using a credit card. In the future we will hopefully remember this and get a fee free ATM card! We´ve dealt with this on every other trip, but conveniently seem to forget about it!

Once we got some cash we went to the travel agency to pay a deposit and reserve our spot on the boat. The agency is called Blue Sailing. They specialize in boats to Panama and serve as a regulatory agency, so that tourists know that the boat they are going on is safe. 

After that was taken care of we went for a set lunch at Girasoles, a vegetarian restaurant. We are a little sick of meals of the day, but they sure are cheap! For just over $3, we got pineapple juice, plantain soup, seitan, rice, cooked veggies and salad.

After lunch we went clothes shopping! We got a tank top for Jeff made by the brand 1985, so it has 1985 advertised across the front. That happens to be the year Jeff was born. It cost $6. It’s not a special fancy piece of clothing, just a random Colombian brand. Unless you go to a fancy name brand store from some other country, the clothing is made in Colombia. I tried on several bathing suits so I could have an extra one for the boat ride. The ride is 5 days, and I heard it’s nice to have a dry suit to change into since you live in your swim suit the whole time. It was disgustingly hot in the changing room, and none of the suits fit right.

By the time we got back to our hostel, we were so exhausted that we had to take a nap and do some more hiding out in the air conditioning. We have just over two weeks before we set sail. Our goal is to try to get used to the heat and sun before that time and maybe develop a little bit of a base tan so we don’t fry in the sun. So far we aren’t doing so well! We also must use this time to adjust to wearing our xero sandals.

Once it had sufficiently cooled off in the early evening, we ventured back out for dinner. Cartagena is famous for its historic quarter of the city that is surrounded by a massive stone wall. It was built by the Spanish to protect from pirate invasions. It took 200 years to build and was started in the 1600s. The city used to be fully surrounded by the wall, but at some point in more recent history, a part of it was taken down, so it is now open on one side. This area of town is known as the walled city and has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Here the streets are narrow and cobbled and many of the beautiful old buildings have balconies that overflow with colorful plants, the most common being bougainvillea. There are mostly pristine fully restored buildings, but there are still some vacant buildings in need of work. Unfortunately it has become tourist central and is loaded with designer clothing stores, high end hotels, jewelry stores (emeralds) and fancy restaurants. I imagine few if any locals can afford to do anything there other than sell crap to tourists.

Our hostel is located just outside of the walled city. To get in we have to walk through an archway that goes through the wall. This is where we went for dinner, to a chain restaurant called Crepes and Waffles. We have seen them in every city, but always ignored them, assuming they would have nothing of interest to us. I recently discovered that they have an excellent value salad bar, so we decided to try it out and were blown away! For 10,000 pesos ($3.30) you get to fill a bowl with as much food as you can fit. It’s not a huge bowl, but the offerings were very good. Kamut, quinoa, pickled onions, baby potatoes, crispy lentils, sunflower seeds, white beans, spinach, eggplant bacon, celery, carrots, roasted red peppers, tomatoes, lettuce, beets, steamed broccoli and cauliflower, cucumbers, mango salsa, green goddess dressing, and probably even more things that I can’t remember. I was in food heaven! 

After dinner we went out for gelato to a place that has many vegan flavors. Out of the 20 or so options, half were vegan!! It was really hard to choose, but we settled for one cone with chocolate and basil-pineapple and guava and guanabana in the other. It was food heaven again! It could very well be the best vegan ice cream we have ever tasted! Usually when you get vegan options at a gelato place, it is watery fruit sorbet, but these ones were somehow super creamy like ice cream!

Thursday November 30th 

We woke up even earlier today than yesterday and were out of hostel by 6:30 AM, in an attempt to be productive and beat the heat. We walked up and down all the streets in the old town and along the wall as well. It was neat to see the streets mostly empty and be able to walk without someone constantly trying to sell us something or lure us into their store or restaurant. The only other people we saw were early morning runners. There seem to be a lot of them in town because there is an upcoming iron man race. It must be over the weekend and we will be gone by then. It would have been neat to see how they could manage such a demanding race in the horrible heat.

We walked around for 3 hours. By 8:30 or 9 it was already quite hot and by 9:30 when we made it back to the hostel it was roasting. On our walk we accidentally found a Cosechas (smoothie) location and gladly stopped for a refreshing frozen watermelon smoothie. We also bought fruit salads from a fruit vendor on the street for $1 per take out box full. We got back just in time for the tail end of pancake breakfast, to which we added peanut butter, bananas and honey. 😋

The clock tower and gateway to the walled city

View from on top of the wall towards the tall buildings of Boca Grande.

Café del Mar, an expensive restaurant on the wall that faces the ocean and the sunset.

Plaza de la Aduana

Jeff near the judgement window at the Palace of the Inquisition. No one was ever found innocent and all were sentenced to death.

Palacio de la Inquisicion

Simon Bolivar on horseback in Paque Simon Bolivar

A lot of fruit for $1 each. I wish it came without styrofoam!

A quiet street in the San Diego neighborhood of the walled city.

All of the archways below are now tourist shops. The willys jeep out front sells fancy coffee drinks.

After our walk, we hid out for hours in the air conditioning, reading our guide books and researching where to go next. We have 2 weeks to kill before our boat ride. I also used this time to prep food for tomorrow, I cooked a 1/2 bag of garbanzos and the last of our steel cut oats. They both cooked so nice and quickly at sea level! 


In the late afternoon we ventured back out for late lunch/early dinner. We couldn’t resist going back to Crepes and Waffles again and for gelato again! After dinner we did some more walking around and marveled at how different it was from the morning. On the way back we stopped at the grocery store for some food and I bought a mystery banana leaf wrapped food from a guy outside the store. Research back at the hostel revealed it to be a bollo, basically a steamed log of starch! A dream come true for me. They can be made of yucca, taro or homony corn, are generally vegan and sometimes you can find a sweet one with coconut. I ended up with a coconut one with little bits of fennel. I really enjoyed it, but Jeff did not! I can’t wait to try more!

A bowlful of salad bar at Crepes and Waffles, and a mint lemonade with real mint blended in!

Colorful mochila bags for sale inside of the walled city.

Passionfruit and guanabana gelato

This plaza was totally empty in the morning!

Coconut fennel bollo

I was very pleased to find good quality soy milk powder and soy milk (both in bags) at the regular grocery store. Not made of isolated soy protein!

Friday December 1st

We packed up this morning and put our bags in storage at the hostel and left in a mini bus for El Totumo Volcán de Lodo, a mud volcano. The volcano is only about an hour from Cartagena but like all of nature in Colombia, it’s hard to get to without your own car or a guided tour. Most everyone goes on a tour, and the tour is offered in every hostel in town, so we just signed up at the front desk of our place. The cost is 45,000 pesos per person or $15, but it doesn’t include the “optional” services at the volcano which include, massage, photo taking and clean up.

We rode around town in a mini bus for an hour picking up at other hotels. We were the first ones on. The last person we picked up was at the hostel across the street from ours!! 😠😡 Then we rode another hour to the volcano. The view as we pulled into the giant dirt parking lot was extremely underwhelming. There were lots of bamboo shacks full of locals desperate, as always, to sell food and beverages to tourists and recycled soda bottles full of mud to take home. In the middle of it all we could see what resembled a giant ant hill, the mud volcano. Just a big pile of eroded looking dirt with two steep wood-slat stairways, one for going up and the other for going down. We were rushed out of the van and into the shack that is owned by our tour operator. There we changed into swimsuits and gave our camera phone to a guy with a fanny pack full of cameras, optional service number one. We then climbed the steps to the top and the sight very nearly caused me to chicken out, a literal pit of mud, packed with muddy people. The pit was a wood framed box of about 20 feet by 20 feet with a ladder going in on one side and another muddy one for going out the other side, another underwhelming view. I really don’t like being so close to strangers, nor do I like them touching me. Even so, we got in the line that wrapped around the pit, and watched as people were called down one after the other. Somehow more and more people were fitting and no one was getting out. While we waited we saw lots of interesting swimwear, many oversized thong butts and very enhanced and oversized breasts. 

Finally it was our turn. I made Jeff go first. You are asked to lie down by the guy at the bottom of the stairs, then you are pushed over to a guy who massages the mud into your skin for a few minutes, optional service number two. Then that guy pushes you into the corner near the exit stairs and there you remaining bobbing like an apple and trying to remain up right. The mud is so buoyant that Jeff and I were unable to shove the other under it’s surface. It was a very unique feeling being in the warm mud with all the muddy people around and being so floaty. It’s hard to stop laughing and smiling, and it certainly clears your mind of any other thoughts! All the while camera man is up above you taking photos. After 20 minutes or so, camera man informed us that time was up. Trying to swim through the mud to the staircase is quite a challenge. A guy at the bottom of the ladder squigees you off with his hands splashing mud into the eyes of the people remaining in the pit. Once out of the pit camera man takes more photos, then you descend down the other side of the volcano to a lake where local ladies grab you and begin vigorously dowsing you with bowls full of water and cleaning the mud from your every crevice, optional service number 3. We were given limited time go back into the shack and change before leaving. At this time the locals come to collect the money for the optional services that cost 4,000 each ($1.30). It all felt quite rushed, but was fun and we are glad we did it. It is definitely one of the weirdest things we have ever done. I would say the optional services are not really optional. The locals definitely force themselves on you.

When we got back to our hostel I made us lunch, a curried garbanzo bean salad with rice and avocado. The rest of the day was spent in route to a new city on a sprinter van bus. We were given the opportunity to buy snacks at one point in the ride and chose a fried ball of mashed potatoes from the display case, cause it was the only thing without meat or cheese. There was a whole hard boiled egg in the middle though! We definitely weren’t expecting that! 😂

These are our Xero sandals. We are having to get used to wearing them quick, now that we are in the heat.

Fried mashed potato ball

Curried garbanzo bean salad

Our new city is Santa Marta, 4 hours Northeast of Cartagena along the coast. It isn’t really an exciting destination in itself, but it makes a nice base for exploring the nearby Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (mountains). We chose an obscure hostel off of Hostelworld because it was really cheap for a private room with bathroom. The check in guy tonight is not the usual greeter, basically just the night watchman. He doesn’t know any English and he is the first person whose Spanish I can’t understand, so we had an interesting time trying to get checked in. We definitely don’t feel very welcome, weren’t given any information about the hostel at all, other than a finger pointed in the direction of our room. We also had to change rooms because the first room was facing the noisy street and there were drunk people singing in the streets and loud music coming from the bar next door. The room is nice, and we were supposed to stay two nights, but we will probably move to a more mainstream hostel tomorrow. 

Saturday December 2nd

We packed up and moved to Masaya Hostel this morning. We stayed at their location in Bogota when we were there, it was the hostel with fancy rooms and a big breakfast buffet. We chose to stay in the cheapest option here, the 12 bed dorm, which sounds a little scary, but there are only 3 other people in our room. They also have 4 and 6 bed dorms, and I think most people go for those, thinking it will be nice to have to deal with fewer people, but all of those rooms are full and are less spacious. Each bed has curtains surrounding it, so it’s pretty nice. We could afford to stay in our own room if we wanted to, but we choose to spend less. Prices have been going up since we are getting into high season. The facilities are really nice here, so we won’t spend much time in our room. There are two pools and a nice rooftop deck and kitchen. 

Nice plants and fancy furnishings in the hostel

The ground floor pool

We had ambitions to take a bus to the next town over, Taganga, to spend the afternoon at the beach but the intense heat sapped all of our energy. We are doing a poor job of adjusting to the heat. We did a little bit of exploring around Santa Marta. We walked the water front and a few of the streets in our neighborhood. We are in the historic downtown, there is nothing visually special about it, but it is the oldest Spanish settlement in South America. The Main Street through the area is Carrera 5, and it’s an incredibly lively place. It’s probably also the most unbearable and unpleasant city street we’ve ever visited, because of Carrera 5. Block after blocks there is endless traffic, endless shops and every square inch of sidewalk and street corner is filled with sidewalk stalls selling everything you can imagine. Makeup, socks, pants, electronics, electronics repair, locks, tools, nail clippers, hair brushes, crocs, handbags and more! It was insane! There are also fried foods and grilled meats and fruits for sale. It is definitely sensory overload! And since the side walks are occupied by vendors and there are masses of people walking through and shopping its very frustrating trying to get anywhere!

We bought some groceries and went to lunch at a Govinda’s location. It was a special day at Govinda’s and there was something more to choose from than just meal of the day and they even had some live Hindu music going! It was rather interesting to hear the chanting while dining on vegan delights. I had a whole fried green plantain loaded with toppings. I love plantains and can never eat enough of them. Jeff got a seitan steak with veggies and roasted potatoes. We usually pick two things at restaurants (when there are options) and share them. Both were very good.

The Santa Marta waterfront with views of shipping containers. You can rent a shade structure.

The rest of the day we spent in the hostel, enjoying the pool and sunset from the rooftop. We had leftover garbanzo bean salad for dinner. We found out this afternoon that the water in this city is not recommended for drinking. We unfortunately were not told that by anyone at our other hostel this morning or last night, and drank a bunch of it! It tasted fine. I hope we don’t get sick!

Probably the nicest hostel we´ve been to. Nice rooftop pool and sunset!

Sunday December 3rd

Breakfast isn’t included in the cost of the dorms, so I made us a vegetable scramble to eat. I got half of a nice winter squash for free from the fridge, and added to it beets, criolla potatoes, bell pepper, onion, garlic, tomato and cilantro. We put a bag in storage and departed Santa Marta for Taganga. 

Over the next several days we will be visiting Tayrona National Park. It’s one of the most hyped up destinations in Colombia. It has post card perfect beaches. The most common way to see the park is to hike in to the remote beaches and camp for a few nights. We have been dreading the hike in the heat under the weight of a big backpack full of food and water, so we chose to take a boat from Taganga to the park. The hike takes a few hours, but the boat only an hour. The cost of the boat is $17 per person vs a few dollars for the bus, but we think it’s worth it! We sure are wimps when it comes to the heat! 

We rode on a simple 30 or so foot boat that had the capacity to carry at least 30 passengers, but there were only about 10 of us. No one informed any of us that the ride would be rough or that we would get wet. As soon as we left the shelter of the bay, we were blasting though huge swells, catching air and then crashing down into troughs in a huge splash. Walls of water were slapping us all in the face and the wind was whipping like crazy. It was a wild ride! Everyone in the boat was hunched over bracing themselves in misery, eyes burning with salt water, expect me. Miraculously my eyes were ok, and for me it was like being on an amusement park ride. I have always loved riding in speed boats, it reminds me of my childhood summers spent with my family in Michigan. Every time I looked around, I couldn’t help but laugh, everyone else was so miserable, I even likened one lady to a sad wet dog! Everyone else on the boat was just going for a day trip and would have to ride back later that afternoon. We would be the only ones camping. We arrived to the beach (Cabo San Juan Del Guia) in refreshingly cool condition having exerted ourselves very little. We were all soaking wet, one guys phone was ruined!

The bay at Taganga

The speed boat

Although the beach was pretty, we were a little underwhelmed by what we saw. It’s very overdeveloped and looks kind of dirty and overused. The facilities remind us of a homeless encampment, with rows and rows of crappy rental tents, private “cabins” covered in black plastic sheeting (like garbage bags) and a palm thatched hut full of rental hammocks. We chose hammocks in a palm hut on top of the rocks overlooking the beach. The cost for a hammock is $10 per person per night. Once we were checked in we took a seat in the open area dining area and made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. There is a full service restaurant available, but we probably won’t be eating any of it. We brought food and the food here is over priced and not very exciting. 

There are lockers for storing your stuff.

The tent camp and hammock shelter

The restaurant

The bathroom 

Some sad looking horses that are used to carry tourists and supplies to the beach.

It was sunny when we got on the boat, but stormy looking by the time we got here, so we didn’t feel compelled to swim. With our soaking wet clothes we weren’t feeling overheated, so we spent most of the afternoon lounging in our hammocks. Our entertainment was people watching, an endless parade of people on selfie photo safari! They can never stop at just one! We left our hammocks only briefly to return to the dining area for dinner. We just ate papaya and bananas and dried fruits and nuts. While we were eating the skies darkened, visibility decreased and it started to pour. We felt sad for the miserable people riding back on the boat at this time. We waited for a break in the rain to return to our hammock hut. It’s kind of on an island depending on the tide. It’s on a hill that separates two bays and a river flows out of the mountains between the bays. The river must be crossed to reach the trail that goes up the hill to the hut and in the dark after intense rain, it was a bit scary crossing the rushing river! The tide was up and the river was raging. We were in up to our thighs and both almost fell over and would have swept been out to sea but managed to make it across. Luckily there is a locker room next to the dining area, where we left most of our things, so we weren’t carrying much. By 6:30 it was pitch black and we were in our hammocks for the night! 😄 The rain resumed and the wind began to rip through our hut sending a cool mist through the air. We were lucky not to be on the side of the hut where the wind was coming in, because those people got soaked! We hunkered down in our hammocks, wrapping them around us, while the whipped in the wind. Some of the others ventured out for dinner and when they returned we learned that the river was now waist deep! The storm raged up until about 10 pm and we were finally able to get some sleep when it quieted down.

This guy sells delicious warm filled breads from a cooler. We tried a chocolate filled one. The bread is really dense and rich. I´m guessing it contains coconut milk. So delicious!

A sleepy dog in the hammock hut

The view of the two bays from our hut

People take selfies even when they have friends with them that could take a normal photo of them!!

View looking the other way from the hut

16 hammocks on the bottom floor of the hut. The upper floor has two private rooms with actual beds.

Our table in the dining area. We were glad we were allowed to use the area and not buy anything.

We felt bad for the poor people in the crappy tents during the rainstorm.

Monday December 4th

Sleeping in a hammock wasn’t as bad as I had expected it to be. We slept ok and weren’t too cold after the storm died down. We are lucky to have brought our own inflatable camping pillows and sleeping bags liners (like a sheet) from home, because nothing was provided. There were 16 hammocks in our hut and it’s always full. At $10 per person per night, they are making a killing. 

Where you see the person in the water is river crossing from one cove to the other and also the place to cross to reach the hammock hut

Beautiful view in the morning

Where we slept

After waking up we left the hut never to return. We ate overnight oats for breakfast (that had fermented in the tropical heat!), then forced ourselves to take a hike into the mountains, even though we didn’t feel like doing anything. An hour and a half up the trail are some ruins from the Tayrona people that inhabited this area between 450 and 1600. We weren’t expecting much, but it was a surprisingly pleasant hike. The forest was really pretty, the ruins were neat, and we even got to see monkeys. We saw lots of other gringos on the trail, but instead of doing a round trip back to the beach, they were hiking through another 2 hours past the ruins to the highway and an alternative exit from the park. Our guide book made it sound like that was something nobody ever did and that you would get lost if you tried, so we didn’t even consider it, but we would have liked to!

Restaurant menu. Veggie options: veggie pasta or veggie fried rice with french fries

Some big beautiful trees in the forest

Nice trail engineering

More big trees

Amazing stone steps built by the original inhabitants 

Hundreds of terraces like this were built for constructing their houses upon

Traditional huts where people still live

Not the best photo, but were saw lots leaf cutter ants. They use the same paths over and over, so much so that they get worn down and can easily be identified as ant highways! 

This monkey was yelling at us!

He was one of at least 15!

His yelling alerted chief monkey to our intrusion, and the giant monkey came crashing through the trees above us, and successfully scared us off!

When we returned to the beach, it actually got sunny for awhile! We enjoyed PB and jelly sandwiches for lunch along with an icy smoothie from the cafe, then we took a little walk on the beach. It was nice to see the beach sunny instead of stormy. We learned of another beach that you can walk to a little further on called Playa Brava, but it was getting late in the afternoon at this point and although it was finally looking nice out, we had planned to move to another camping area called Arrecifes that is a little less crowded. We doubted there were any remaining hammocks at our current beach (Cabo San Juan), so we left. We had planned to hike a maximum of one hour to the next campground. The beach at Arricifes isn’t safe for swimming due to rip tides, so if we want to swim tomorrow we would have to backtrack to the beach called La Piscina, or swimming pool. We found the trail to be so disgustingly muddy and miserable that we knew we’d never do any hiking back, so when we passed La Piscina and then Arrecifes, we just kept going to the park entrance. Arrecifes looks much less inviting than the accommodations at Cabo San Juan! We were tired after already having hiked 3-4 hours in the heat this morning and were sinking in almost to our knees in mud. We hiked barefoot because our shoes would have gotten sucked off into the mud. The going was very slow. It was nerve wracking sticking our feet into a muddy abyss not knowing what we’d find with each new step. Thankfully we didn’t find anything too sharp! We’d been expecting it to take 1 1/2 hours and it ended up taking 3 hours! It felt like a death march! We couldn’t believe how awful the trail was and that no one we talked to and nothing we had read mentioned how horrible it was. We are out of the rainy season for this area, so it must get worse when it rains more. Horses routinely carry tourists along the route, so that definitely contributes to its poor shape. If we had know it would be unbearable we would have gotten a horse! I think the park sees overuse in general and poor management, so that doesn’t help either. We paid $16 each to enter the park, but I guess they aren’t putting that money toward infrastructure. To make matters worse, 20 minutes into the hike, I had a branch flung into my eye. I don´t really know what happened, I don´t think I just walked into it because I wasn´t going fast, and it came out of nowhere and hit me so forcefully that it almost knocked me over! There were a lot of people in front of and behind us and going the other way, and it was a narrow stretch. Someone must have been holding the brand for stability, then let it loose in my face. It hurt so bad, I imagine like being punched in the face. That certainly put a damper on my mood! My eye was swollen the rest of the day and I was sure I would have a black eye.

This is the view you see in all of the tourism photos.

You don´t see this in any tourism photos!

We made it to the entrance as it was getting dark. We were thoroughly exhausted and very hungry. There was of course someone there to sell us something refreshing! A guy with a cooler full of popsicles! After popsicles, we began pounding our remaining food, mandarin oranges, bananas, guava and peach juices and dried fruits and nuts. We were lucky to make the last bus out of the park. 

We got back to our hostel in Santa Marta around 8, showered and collapsed into bed. I feel really disappointed about our experience. I really wanted to like it and to have a good time. I did tons of research, read several different guide books, travel websites and the blog posts of others, but still found it was difficult to understand until you go there. Maybe there will be a next time and we will know how to do it better.



Tuesday December 5th

We woke up still feeling exhausted and with little motivation to do anything other than lounge around the hostel. Our next planned destination was the mountains outside of Santa Marta where there are an abundance of nice forests and rivers and waterfalls. With this on our minds, we forced ourselves into action. We had some errands to run, like grocery shopping and finding a place to have Jeff’s shorts repaired. Jeff’s shorts are split at the seam. We asked at the hostel what they might recommend, and they told us to go to the street two blocks up and keep walking down it until we saw a lady with a sewing machine. On our first attempt the power was out, so we had to go back later. We had lunch at a 7th Day Adventist vegetarian restaurant called Vital. The food was really good and served cafeteria style, so we got to choose from a few different options for filling our plates. After stocking up on groceries, Jeff went back out alone to try to get the shorts worked on. He was successful and came back with shorts good as new for less than $1. 

There are always huge check out lines at the grocery store!!

Lunch at Vital: mashed pumpkin, steamed veggies, lentil meatloaf, salad and whole grain rice.

Carrera 5. The photos don´t accurately portray the mayhem!

Carrera 5 looking the other way

We got out of town around 2:30 on a very crowded bus headed for a town 30 minutes away called Bonda. We knew to look for either a football field or police station where we would get off and take motorcycle taxis the rest of the way. We had no clue where we were going, and since the bus was so crowded, I didn’t get to talk to the driver. I tried to pay attention, but I often zone out. I was brought back to the real world from outerspace when I heard a man shouting Carpe Diem into the open bus door as it was rolling away from a stop about 30 minutes into the ride. Carpe Diem is the name of the hostel we had chosen. The guy yelling was a motorcycle taxi driver who wanted our business! I yelled for the bus to stop and in a flurry we were off the bus and each on the back of our own motorcycle taxi, being whisked up a 4WD dirt road into the mountains. Jeff was lucky, his driver had placed his backpack between the handle bars, but I was stuck riding with mine and also had a big bag of groceries in between my legs. It was a fun and bouncy ride. The road was rough, and was even so bad in one spot that we had to get off and walk, me with all my bags and Jeff footloose and fancy free! The ride took about 25 mins and cost $7 each. According to directions given by the hostel, it should have cost less. We are frequently ripped off by taxis drivers, but I really don’t blame them for taking advantage and the ride was really fun, and we were grateful that they got us off the bus!

Jeff´s driver was much more enthusiastic than mine!

We are staying at Finca Carpe Diem. Finca means farm, and it’s kind of like a farm. We’re certainly in a rural area. We are staying in an 8 bed dorm. The buildings are made of local materials, in the traditional style, palm roofs and bamboo siding. They have lots of cute individual palm huts, but this is a pretty popular place, and when we made the reservation this morning dorms were all that was left. We don’t mind though, there’s lots to do here and the communal areas are very nice, so we won’t spend much time in our rooms. There are two pools and lots of hammocks for lounging in. A 5 minute walk on a trail across the road leads to a swimming spot in the river that they call the jacuzzi. It’s called the jacuzzi because a waterfall cascades into a small rock framed pool that is the exact size of a jacuzzi and the water froths and bubbles up within the pool. We spent awhile enjoying the river and jacuzzi, and were surprised to find no one else there.

View of the mountains, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountains in the world. The mountains reach elevations high enough for snow!

Jacuzzi

Bananas growing at the hostel. With each layer of the flower that opens up, a new layer of bananas is formed! Neat!!

Bathroom and shower huts

Our dorm room

For dinner we had big plates of veggie pasta with lentils. I managed to find 15% whole grain pasta in the grocery store today! That’s a major step up from the usual 3%!! We spent the rest of the evening in the hammocks. It is so nice to relax. My mind it generally always going a mile a minute with a million thought running through at all times. I think our stay here will be good for me.




Wednesday December 6th

We had a quick breakfast of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a banana. Our peanut butter supplies from home are beginning to run low, but luckily I found a free jar at our hostel in Santa Marta! We still aren’t able to drink the water, so we’ve been either boiling water and making tea or filtering it with a filter we brought from home. The water tastes fine. I wonder what’s in it that’s so bad.

The hostel offers a few tours. This morning we took the waterfall tour. There are a few waterfalls you can walk to yourself and a few others that are a little harder to find, so that’s why they offer the tour. All of the falls are in the same main river. We walked about 1 1/2 hours up river, mainly following the 4WD road that we got here on. We visited 3 waterfalls, all of which we could swim in.

Me getting pushed under by the weight of the rapidly falling water

After the walk back, we were hot again and went back to the jacuzzi pool. For lunch we ate leftover lentils that I cooked yesterday with corn crackers, cucumbers, avocado and papaya.

In the afternoon we walked up the road and visited an organic chocolate farm. We got to learn the whole process of chocolate from cacao fruit to chocolate bar. The farm has been around for 14 years and has around 1,500 trees! The trees were covered in fruits and flowers. We got to taste the fruit and the cacao beans at each stage of the process. The fruit is harvested, fermented for 5-8 days, dried in the sun, then roasted over a cook fire and hand ground (using an old fashioned meat grinder) into paste. We took the paste and added cinnamon and sugar and formed them into shapes. Our shapes were turned into fresh hot chocolate and we also got to try chocolate cake at this time. At the end the remaining paste we had ground was mixed with hot water, and we were given chocolate facials! 😄

Cacoa fruit

The fruit at the top has a hole in it because squirrels like fruit too!! They are the only pest that can break through the shell of the fruit. They are allowed by the farm because the fermented broken open fruit attracts pollinators.

Fermented cacao beans drying on the roof and a cacao fruit. The fruit is mostly bean and only a thin membrane of fruit.

The flowers only bloom for 3 days each, then fall off, and they don´t have any scent, so they often go unpollanated  

Toasted cacao beans

Toasted and shelled by hand

Hand ground

For dinner I turned the last of our lentils into soup by mixing with potatoes, rice and water. I got the potatoes and rice as free leftovers from the fridge. People sure buy a ton of food and leave it at hostels!

Thursday December 7th

We had more sandwiches and bananas for breakfast then went on the beekeeping tour. We started with a presentation/talk and were given the basics about bee keeping and learned some  facts. Everything here is done in Spanish, so I’ve been having to translate for Jeff. We learned some interesting things, none of which we will likely remember, but the really neat part of the tour was putting on suits and going to look inside one of the colonies. I’ve never seen so many bees in my life. They were flying all over the place and angrily stinging my phone while I took photos. We got to see sections completely packed with honey, the perfect geometrical shapes of the wax, propolis and lots of the combs that were filled with developing baby bees. One fact that I will remember and found interesting was that the bees make the wax out of tree sap! Also any one of the growing babies has what it takes to become a queen. When it´s time for the hive to select a new queen they just feed royal jelly to the developing bee of their choosing and that gives it super powers to become a queen, the other bees continue eating the standard food and become standard bees! That´s a real good example of the power of food, what you eat really matters!! Wearing a bee suit with long pants and long sleeves in the tropics is like wearing a sweatsuit into a sauna. We were totally drenched in sweat when we took them off, so when I tour concluded we headed straight to the river for some time in the jacuzzi.

The bees seal the hive shut with wax, so it has to be pried open with a screwdriver. They will have it resealed within an hour or two of putting the lid back on.

So full of honey

Jeff is in the suit on the left

We had more veggie pasta for lunch. We’ll be here a total of 4 nights, 3 days. I brought about $15 worth of food and that is enough that we probably won’t have to buy food at all while we are here. They have a restaurant/kitchen on site that prepares a pretty varied menu, but it’s a little on the expensive side for Colombia. They have a vegetarian meal of the day for 20,000 pesos, which is only about $7, but the last meal of the day we ate in Santa Marta only cost us 9,000 pesos, $3! Most everyone else buys all of their food in the restaurant. I haven’t had to compete with anyone else for space in the guest kitchen.

After lunch we took a tour about coffee and learned about the roasting process. They have their own coffee plants here, enough to supply the coffee for the restaurant. We got to shell the sun dried beans, toast them over a fire, grind them with an old fashioned hand cranked grinder and make coffee. The campfire wood was wet and crappy and took awhile to get hot. It put off a lot of smoke, and when it finally did get hot, I think some of the beans got burnt. When it was time to make the coffee a Portuguese girl who likes extremely strong espresso like coffee chose the amount of coffee to put in the filter. We made her cup first, and since it was so much coffee, we just kept running water through the same grinds. My water was the last to go through, and it was still really strong. I can’t say it was anything special for me, but it was interesting to go on the tour and see how they process the coffee for the restaurant.

Roasting the beans over a campfire

The grinding was hard work

It was just before sunset when we finished the tour, so we decided to take a little hike to the viewpoint above the farm. It only took about 30 minutes, but it was straight up. At the end we had a view back to Santa Marta, the ocean and the surrounding mountains. The best part of the walk was seeing the forest covered mountains all around us.

If you look carefully, you can see Santa Marta in the right 3rd of the photo

I have been trying to use up all of the odds and ends of food I have accumulated from hostels, so in the evening I cooked a stew of mixed beans. There are pressure cookers here, but they have no lids! So I had to boil the beans for hours and hours. They will be for tomorrow. We had big bowls of mashed potatoes topped with avocado for dinner. Simple meals are the best. While I was cooking Jeff met a guy who is booked for the same sailboat to Panama with us. His name is Brian and he is a teacher from Sacramento, CA. He seems nice and has a lot in common with Jeff.




Friday December 8th

Today was our last full day at the “farm.” We were going to walk to some additional waterfalls and swimming spots nearby, but ended up doing nothing all day. Jeff finished a book he got several hostels ago, and I was busy having repeated diarrhea. 😫 I think I may have swallowed a bit of river water on the waterfall tour the other day. Jeff is fine! I am glad to be in the middle of nowhere without the temptation of exciting foods! I took it easy on my stomach and ate only small quantities of simple foods, oatmeal, brown rice and PB&J sandwich.

Saturday December 9th

We had considered hiking through the mountains to the next town over, Minca. It has similar nature to the area we have been in, but has many more hostels and is more well known as a tourism destination. I was still not feeling 100% better today, so we decided to just take the moto taxis back to the highway and bus back into Santa Marta. Rather than go all the way back to Cartagena in one day, we decided to stay a night in Santa Marta. We chose the Dreamer hostel this time. There are always a ton of luxury/boutique hostel options everywhere we go, it’s overwhelming! This hostel surrounds a lovely central courtyard which contains a pool, lots of shade trees and AstroTurf for lounging on. 

We are a little ways outside of downtown, so we won’t have to see the crazy street 5 ever again! 😜 We are across the highway from a big mall, so we hung out there while we waited for our room to be ready. It was our first time in one of the big Colombian malls. We rather enjoyed the air conditioning! We needed WiFi while we were there because we wanted to withdraw money at an ATM, but forgot to check our balance first, so we went to Juan Valdez. That is the Colombian version of Starbucks. If you buy something they will give you free WiFi. Since we don’t care for coffee or other sugary beverages, we decided to try some pastries. We started with two, then bought another! Probably not the best things for my recovering stomach, but I was feeling deprived and ravenous!

Pan de bono and almojabana

There happens to be a giant hyper mega grocery store attached to the mall, so of course we ended up there. It’s been a few days for me not having visited a grocery store! I get way too excited in the produce aisle! I have a VERY hard time not buying more than I need. I always want the beautiful giant avocados, and yucca and delicious ripe plantains and all of the tropical fruits! Also in the grocery store we found the bakery and discovered that the pastries were way cheaper than Juan Valdez, for the same kinds. We got 4 more pastries for less than the cost of one at the coffee shop! They even had a microwave to heat them and tables to sit down and enjoy. It’s a slippery slope with those pastries!! As always it was an ordeal to check out. I don’t think we’ve been in a store yet that didn’t have a long check out line. It always looks like a natural disaster is coming and people have come to stock up and buy out the store! I got bananas, a dragonfruit, plantains and what looks like a sweet potato! The first sweet potato I’ve found!!

Guava ring, buñuelo, almojábana and pan de bono

4 siamese plantains, I wanted all of them!! 

The rest of the afternoon and evening was spent enjoying the pool and courtyard at our hostel. 

Resident cat

beans, rice, plantains and avocado for dinner

Sunday December 10th

We moved back to Cartagena today. Moving every couple days is beginning to wear on us, so I picked a hostel, and made a reservation so we’d be committed to stay in one place for 5 nights, until we leave on the boat for Panama. Our hostel is called Genoves. It´s located within the walled city and I also chose it because it has a pool and rooftop deck. The pool is about the size of a jacuzzi though and not much deeper! 

We decided we’d like an escape from Colombia for awhile, so we made plans to go to the movies! The movie theater is located a little over a mile away, inside of a big fancy mall, in the fancy area of town called Boca Grande. We headed that way plenty early because we had nothing better to do. It was an hour or so before sunset, and the walk took us along the ocean. Boca Grande is on a long skinny Peninsula one side is ocean, the other side is harbor. We hadn’t realized it was Sunday when we left and ended up finding the beaches very busy! Leaving the old town and walking to Boca Grande is like leaving Colombia for Miami. Thousands of people on the beach, and high rise hotel and apartment buildings everywhere. We ended up walking until sunset and covered most of the length of the peninsula because it was so interesting walking the beach and seeing all of the Colombians on vacation or perhaps locals enjoying a day off. We saw only 2 other gringos! The water was full of swimmers and kids playing in the surf. Jet skis and boats towing tubes and hot dog like floats full of people made laps just beyond the waves, while fit young men pushed new floats full of people through the waves to meet the boats. Every few hundred feet there was a small rock jetty, creating cove after cove of protected beach. The sand was covered in all sorts of shade structures, tables, chairs and loungers. Vendors selling fruit, jewelry, beer, ceviche, grilled meat, shrimp cocktail and massages. The carts, baskets, bicycles and grills used to carry the goods were fun to see as well. The street vendors are very clever and I admire their endurance. There was music playing too, and bars set up right in the sand. The atmosphere felt so festival like, that it seemed like it must be some special event, but it was just a regular Sunday!

We made it to the mall for the 7 pm showing of Daddy’s Home 2! I pretty sure we saw the first Daddy´s Home while travelling, I think while we were in Chile. We don’t ever go to the movies in the US, but they are cheap here and the mental escape means so much more to us when we are away than it ever could in the US. It’s like getting to visit the US for a few hours and it always feels so good! There seem to be fewer movies in English here in Colombia than in Argentina and Chile. We’ve looked into going to the movies a few times, but it seems they often put the English ones in the late night slots, and we are generally never up late. 

The mall was multiple stories, had air conditioning, many fancy shops, a big food court, tons of lights and sparkling decorations for Christmas. We rarely visit malls at home, but going in one down here makes us feel at home! We will probably be back!

After the movie it took us about a half hour to walk back to our hostel. It’s nice walking at night and being in a safe area full of tourists. Cartagena is supposed to be the safest city in Colombia. 

Monday December 11th

Our hostel has free breakfast, bimbo bread (like wonder bread), scrambled eggs and fruit. It is prepared by a kitchen lady. We asked for fruit only. Everyone else at the breakfast table gave us weird looks. We met another person who will be on our boat to Panama though, Matt from the US, who is just finishing up two years in the Peace Corps in Paraguay. Matt´s friend Kirby, also a Peace Corps volunteer will be joining us as well.

We didn’t accomplish much today. The main goal was to get laundry done because we haven’t had clean clothes since Salento, and that’s a long time when you don’t have many clothes. We went to a place called Beer and Laundry where you can order beer and pizza while you wait for your laundry. We didn’t end up ordering any food, but they did get our laundry done in 2 hours, so that’s nice! Normally you have to turn it in at the hostel and hope to get it back in 12-24 hours.

We also decided to book a tour to Playa Blanca. It’s the nearest “nice” white sand beach. There is a guy literally on every corner in Cartagena displaying an 8x10 color photo of the beach trying to sell tours. You can go by boat or by bus. After our boating experience to Tayrona, we thought it might be nice to go on land. The beach is only about 45 minutes away and will include lunch. We were promised a vegan option for lunch, beans!

Free lunch! Left behind whole grain bread and avocado found in the hostel kitchen!

I read about a fried foods restaurant in the inflight magazine on our airplane ride from Medellín. Donde Magola is it’s name, and it serves all of the common street foods, but from an actual store front instead of a cart on the street. You go to the counter where you can see all of the options neatly displayed behind glass and point to what you want from the 15 or so options. They pile them onto a plastic platter and then you choose from an array of different condiment options in squeeze bottles. It was extremely cheap and they also had yucca (steamed) and fried green plantains (patacones). We sent 7,000 pesos, just over $2 and ended up with more of a meal than a snack! We got 1 egg arepa to try. This is a Caribbean coast specialty. They take two simple corn arepas and join them around the edges, fry it, then open it up like a pita. A whole egg is cracked inside, the arepa is closed up and then it’s fried again. We also had an empanada made with yucca instead of corn, called a carimañola. We had a sweet anise arepa (my favorite), a fried plantain and a portion of yucca. It was all delicious and very filling.

Simple menu

Doesn´t look like much but it sure was good and filling

We had planned on that just being a snack and going out to dinner still, but we were too full. We took an evening walk along the wall to try to make ourselves feel less fat. The wall is mostly intact, making it possible to walk quite a distance, and with nice views of town and of the ocean. There are always people trying to sell you stuff though, and it gets a little annoying constantly say “no gracias.” There are guys with stacks of traditional hats to sell, people with jewelry, selfie sticks, waterproof bags for cell phones and all sorts of other things. They are mobile, walking the crowds constantly shouting about whatever it is there are selling a often why you need it too. They approach every one they encounter. There also also guys with coolers, some of them on the move, some stationary. They all sell the same things, bottled water, Coca-Cola, beer and sometimes Gatorade. They use the sort of styrofoam coolers that would be considered disposable in the US. We try keep a wide berth when we hear the shouts: agua, agua, agua! Walking the streets is also annoying, every restaurants employs people to stand outside and drum up business, they are all at your service, same with the gift stores. You have to walk in the middle of the street and avoid eye contact!

After we felt like we’d burned off enough calories, we went out for gelato. We tried a different one this time. It wasn’t as good as the other one, but wins points because it had indoor seating with air conditioning, a bathroom and reusable cups and spoons to eat with. It was definitely good, but more sorbet like and not creamy and ice cream like. I don’t know how they do it!

Panorama, walking along the wall at sunset

City sponsored Christmas lights

Live music and dance at Simon Bolivar Square

All the streets are lit up beautifully at night

These are similar to bollos, containing steamed sweet corn masa like a sweet tamale. I love them, Jeff doesn´t

Guava and guanabana sorbet

All of the flavors with blue tags are vegan

Tuesday December 12th

We were gone on our Playa Blanca tour from about 9:30 to 5:30. We were picked up at our hostel in a mini van. They packed it full of people, and even though we were one of the first on, we got separated as more and more people got on. Our “tour” guide spoke English and Spanish, but I could only understand the English because I got to hear the Spanish first. He didn’t really do any guiding, just gave us an over view of what we would be doing for the day. Once the van was full, it was only about a 45 minute ride to the beach. I wouldn’t really call it a beach. Like everywhere we’ve been in Colombia, there´s more to it than just the beautiful photos you see. The beach stretches for maybe 1 mile along a white sand cove, there are lots of palm trees, and the water is indeed all colors of turquoise. The waves break right on the beach though causing swimmers to violently knocked to the ground and thoroughly covered in thick gritty sand on their way out past the waves. After the waves break, the water rushes into the endless rows of shacks/huts that line the beach. Perhaps there was once more of a beach, and the seas are now higher? To walk the “beach,” you must walk through huts and lounge chairs, chairs and tables full of people. People leave bottles and other trash around there chairs, and then the waves take it out to see, making the beach rather polluted. The endless shacks that line the beach are restaurants and hotels, each one identical to the last. People selling stuff walk up and down the beach constantly holding stuff in your face and lingering there even after you say no and avoid looking at them. You can’t help but feel really bad for them. There are also ladies relentlessly harassing you to pay them for a massage. 

We were promised a more secluded section of beach than the main area where the boats drop off. Our guide led us about 5 minutes down from the parking lot to one of the hostel/restaurants. We made the mistake of going to the bathroom to change first and when we were done there were no lounge chairs left. Our guide scrambled to put together some pallets and cushions on the ground for us, right next to what seemed to be the “office” for the massage ladies. They asked us our names and where we are from, the signature move of all of the people who want to sell us stuff. For the rest of the day they asked and asked: how about now Jeff? Do you want a massage now? They couldn´t understand my name when I said it, haha! They even went as far as touching us on multiple occasions and commenting on how tense we were! 😄 You have to move away and firmly say no or they will try to charge you even for that! 

One nice thing about our stretch of beach was that it had the only trees and shade around. There was no running water though and the toilets were flushed with buckets of ocean water. Thinking about where the water goes when it’s flushed kind of grossed us out, especially when thinking about how they might prepare food there without water. There were probably 50 similar establishments lining the beach. 😝 Our lunch was really disappointing, oily white rice and oily veggies, 2 fried plantain disks (the only good part of the meal), and a few leaves of ice berg lettuce served with a tomato slice and a cucumber slice. There were no beans, and an egg instead. We gave the eggs away to our table mates. Our lunch was at least more appetizing than the dry fried to a crisp whole fish that everyone else had. Probably should not have eaten the veggies, but we did. 

We were bored and mostly hid out in the shade. We took about a 20 minute walk in each direction, one before lunch and the other way after. We stared in disbelief at the overcrowding and disgusting conditions. Late in the afternoon we finally managed to get some regular lounge chairs. When it was finally time to leave, we were more than happy to go.

The photo makes it look nicer than it is! We we at the widest section of the beach, the waves didn´t quite make it into the shacks in this area.

Lots of rocks for tripping over and stubbing your toes!

Jeff with our lounge chairs in front of the massage lady station.

The ride back took twice as long in traffic. Our driver was impatient and drove like a maniac. He ran two different motorcycles off the road, got in an accident and drove off and was on and off the brakes constantly and swerving all over the place. It was also really hot in the van. The air conditioning was very weak, and we rode with all the windows closed. Once back in town we had to weave back through the city to each hotel/hostel to drop everyone off. We decided we couldn’t take it any longer and asked to get out at the second stop. We were in the back of the van and the driver sped off before we could even get out of our seats. We pushed our way to the front and literally jumped out of the moving vehicle! Good riddance!

We were quite hungry when we got back, so we stopped for some fruit from a street vendor. At our hostel we combined that with a pineapple I had squirreled away from the beach. It was the remains of someone’s elaborate cocktail inside of a pineapple, but a lot of fruit was left!

Leftover pineapple and a sapote. This is a different kind of sapote than what we had in Medellin and Bogota, it is silky smooth and soft like custard or pudding. It´s very sweet and strange, never had any other fruit remotely like it, but I really enjoyed it!

I was really full after the fruit, but we went out to Crepes and Waffles anyway. I had salad bar and was feeling a little ill by the time we finished. Afterward we searched for large trash bags. We were told to buy them for lining our backpacks on the boat trip. We have to pack a small bag for everyday use on the boat, and pack everything else away in our large bag in a storage compartment. You can buy the bags individually if you find the right kind of store. We were successful in doing so. We also went in a few souvenir shops and considered buying things like linen shirts, hats, and a dress for me, all for sun protection, but in the end we bought nothing. We are scared of the sun that is to come. Before bed we discovered we are both pretty badly sunburned from our short walk in the sun. 

The Christmas lights in the parks are so nice, they should keep them all year!

Wednesday December 13th

I was awoken in the middle of the night with diarrhea. I don’t think I’ve ever had to wake up in the middle of the night to poop. It was very unfortunate. I thought back to the salad and the scary kitchens of Playa Blanca. After 3 rounds I was able to get back to sleep. When morning came I was dreading the rest of the day because we were signed up for a tour to the Bazurto Market, a traditional local market. The tour would involve eating eating and a lack of bathrooms. It’s only been 2 days or less since my last horrible stomach illness! 😫

Mercifully my diarrhea took a break during the tour. It was just us and our guide, a young lady of African descent with her hair in a weave of long ropes. She caught a lot of attention. Everybody liked her! We started by taking a public bus to the market. When we got off the bus we went into a big fancy mall that’s built right in the middle of a poor neighborhood. It was our last stop for a bathroom, then on to the market. We visited a metalworking shop on the way, where they hand make all sorts of things. One of their best sellers are BBQ grills. The market accounts for 30% of the economy of Cartagena because most locals shop there since its tax free and cheap. They sell everything you could imagine, and even say if you can’t find it there it’s because it’s not available in Cartagena at all. I expected to see more produce and food sellers, but it was more commercial goods and services. We saw blender and cell phone repair shops, clothing and shoes, party decorations, seamstress shops, housewares, appliances, hardware, movies, music. We visited a sign shop where they made us our own custom sign, the same kind that are used in grocery stores to advertise sales. We visited an herb shop where you can get traditional herbal medicines mixed up. We stopped at a music shop and listened to champeta music and got a CD. We got natural juices at a juice stand. Lastly we visited a food stall that was made famous when Anthony Bourdain visited. We were served coconut rice, yam soup (real yams not sweet potatoes or the things called yams in the US, which are also sweet potatoes), sugar water with lime, beans and seafood rice. The food was all just ok, but it’s neat to try new things. We were the only gringos at the market so everyone was staring at us the whole time. It was dirty and smelly and crowded, but interesting to see, far different than the tourist sector.

Metal working shop

Bazurto market

Champeta music seller

Motorcycles ride down the narrow paths like its nothing!

Pick any of the fruits in the jars and they will blend it with lots of sugar and water (or milk) to make a natural juice  

Custom side made for us at the market. It´s done by hand with paint.

This is the drawing that Jeff did, that was used as a guide for making the sign.

This is what a yam looks like. They are a staple food all over the Caribbean, you can´t find these in the US. The things called yams in the US are sweet potatoes, whether yellow or orange, they are both sweet potatoes.

Herbal medicine

Food stall at the market. There were many others like it. All of the food is made over fire on the grills made in the workshop we visited.

A typical plate of food you could get at Bazurto Market

We made it back to our hostel, then I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening being ill. The worst diarrhea of my life, probably 20 times. Every time I drank more water, it was immediately appropriated by my intestines, then purged out. In spite of my need for the toilet, we managed to get in an evening walk along the wall. While we were walking, we ran into Brian (the teacher from Sacramento that we met at Carpe Diem). He was taking a time lapse photo of the sunset. We stayed and talked to him until the sun had set, then we all walked together to Crepes and Waffles. I had some sparkling water and a pineapple mint smoothie, cause I thought they might both help my stomach. Having nothing probably would have been better though. I was so sick all night. Jeff is lucky to have been fine throughout both of my illnesses. 

Thursday December 14th

I began to get concerned in the night that I might have some serious stomach bug, like giardia. This got me thinking about having to take antibiotics, which I REALLY don’t like to do. Thinking about antibiotics got me thinking about probiotics. I don’t think they would be easy to find here, they aren’t popular like in the US. Supplements in general aren’t popular. I don’t think people really take them. There are pharmacies but they only have over the counter and prescription medicines. I could buy antibiotics without a prescription if I wanted to. Anyway I did an internet search about probiotics and found that there are some prescription grade probiotics that can be purchased in the pharmacies here! You of course don’t need a prescription, but they are packaged and sold just like a prescription medicine in the US would be. I found one strain that is designed to be taken after a round of antibiotics and has been clinically tested and shown to help with diarrhea. I guess a lot of people get diarrhea from antibiotics? So we went to the pharmacy this morning and got some. The probiotic is taken in liquid form from a small vial. The package contains 10 vials and you take 2 a day. I hope they help! They were inexpensive, just a little over $10 and very worth it if they help. We also bought some giant beach towels while we were out because all we have are camp towels. Then we went back to Blue Sailing and paid our balance.

Keeping it easy on my stomach, we ate some brown rice and fruit in the hostel for lunch. Afterward we walked to Boca Grande (little Miami). The streets were really flooded this time. The tide was higher than it was during our last visit, and ocean water was spilling into the streets. Some enterprising locals made a bridge across the flooded streets out of pallets and scrap wood and charged a 20¢ toll! 😄 We could have found ways around, but we gladly gave them the money. It was convenient and also nice to give money to people who are actually working for it rather than just standing around asking for a handout.

Toll bridge

Waves breaking right into the streets and some guys trying in vain to stop the flow.

We first visited the mall to buy movie tickets. Star Wars premied today, and although we aren’t big fans, we can see it for cheap here and be entertained for a few hours. We saw the previous Star Wars sometime recently on an airplane I think. We got there a few hours early because we didn’t know how popular it would be, but there was no lineup for tickets and lots of seats remaining. When you buy tickets for this theater, you get assigned seats!

With a few hours to kill we decided to take a little walk. We soon found a health food store, not a common sight, so we decided to go in. Inside was a treasure trove of all sorts of Colombian made health foods! I was so excited. Morale has been low for me recently, so it was nice to get excited about something! I carefully reviewed everything available. There were lots of fancy varieties of arepas, whole grain breads, cereals, snack bars, veggie burgers, whole grain flours, dark chocolate. 😀 I hadn’t planned to buy anything, but everything was so exciting that we bought several things and we made dinner of it. I got a package of sweet plantain arepas, vegan coconut milk yogurt, two flavors of kombucha and two little chocolate pieces. It was the first kombucha and also the first plant based yogurt I have found in Colombia! I was so pleased to have additional probiotics. The arepas were really good, carrot, beet and yucca were some of the other fancy varieties. I wish I could have tried them all.

We got to see the sunset just before we entered the movie theater. Those rocks are supposed to be a water break!

Star Wars was entertaining enough. It was hard to remember enough from the last movie to make it all make sense though! The theater ended up being mostly full and as expected there were some other gringos. They play a ton of previews which adds on a lot of time, so it was almost 9 by the time we walked back to our hostel.

Friday December 15th

My stomach seems better. When we woke up it had been 24 hours since my last diarrhea, but still being careful, I had more rice for breakfast with soy milk. It is a shame to have such a delicate stomach during our last days in Colombia. I want to eat everything! Every time we leave the hostel we are assaulted by foods, cups of fresh cut fruits on every corner, tamales and bollos, arepas always in your face. Cartagena is like a different country from the mountains, in terms of the street foods. There are so many new foods that we regularly see here and didn’t see in the mountainous areas of the country, and there are many foods we enjoyed there and haven’t seen again, like arepas de chocolo, corn on the cob, hot chocolate.

After breakfast we repacked our bags, lining our big backpack with the trash bags we bought and packing a small bag for our room on the boat. We finally left the hostel around noon, walking to blue sailing for the book exchange. Jeff has been reading a lot of books! I don’t have time too much because of cooking, blogging and always planning our next move.

We walked around Getsemaní, the up and coming “hip” neighborhood that surrounds the walled city. This is becoming a popular place for new hostels and restaurants. We stopped in at a bar with craft beers on tap. Jeff was able to get an IPA, which are very rare here. I had a lulo juice, since I knew I wouldn’t be having any again for a long time! (Panama doesn’t have lulo.)

A street vender with a box full of bollos

Sweet plantain bollo and the other one is batata, kind of like a sweet potato, but not very sweet.

In the main plaza of Getsemaní we stopped to admire a street art of a humming bird and came across a dying pigeon. 😦 A boy was watching it. He was the one who’d drawn our attention to it by telling us to look. It’s neck was broken and it was bleeding and spinning itself in circles, spreading blood all over the ground. The boy told us it had been fighting. I didn’t enquire further. I didn’t know pigeons fought each other? Maybe it wasn’t another pigeon, but a dog? Weird.

This is a famous street art in Cartagena. Not very much street art here, because it´s not legal like in Bogota.

We continued our walk, it was long and hot with no shade. We were headed to the old Spanish fort. It was built in the 1500s and has been deemed impenetrable, because no pirates ever succeeded at taking control of it. We walked to the top and admired the views of the old city and of Boca Grande and the ocean. We also got to walk some underground passageways that are built into the foundation of the structure. We were roasting during all of this and fondly looking down upon the nearby mall and dreaming of the AC.

Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas

Underground passageways

Entrance to one of the tunnels

View from the top of the fort looking toward Boca Grande

resident cat at the fort

here´s a map of what the Cartagena area looks like

The mall was our next destination, where we promptly had a Cosechas smoothie, the last one of our trip in Colombia! 😭 We then went shopping in one of the department stores and found me a nice airy dress looking thing, so that I could have something other than hiking clothes to wear over my swim suit on the boat and for future outings to the beach.

For a late lunch we went to Donde magola and enjoyed the last fried delights of our trip to Colombia. We each tried another egg arepa, knowing we won´t see them again on this trip. We also had big plates of steamed yucca. I think I like yucca even more than potatoes, it is so good!

Egg arepa

The outside of Donde Magola restaurant

The fried food display case at Donde Magola

I expect to be sea sick, so I tried to buy some ginger but the grocery store was all out. I also expect to have little to no appetite on the part of the ride over open ocean, so we got some simple foods to bring along that our stomachs might tolerate, arepas and starchy baby bananas.

Tree tomato fruits (tomate de árbol)

Back at our hostel we took showers, the last ones for 6 days! We had some leftover rice and beans, then took a taxi to the marina. We shared with Matt and Kirby. The ride is supposed to cost about 8,000 pesos, but they charged us 22,000. I’m sick of being ripped off all the time. They always have an excuse, there were 4 of us and there was luggage and we were in a bigger car, etc. We boarded our boat and had a welcome orientation and basic introduction to the boat. We learned we wouldn’t be leaving tonight and instead waiting until early tomorrow morning. We will have the wind helping us along, so we are waiting til morning so we don’t get there too early. We took a walk around the marina after our meeting and admired all of the ridiculously expensive yachts.