After Bogotá I jumped on a plane to Cartagena de Indias, which is on the Caribbean Coast. Its very, very hot and muggy here and feels like a different world to Bogotá.
The centre of Cartagena is an old walled city, full of colourfully-painted colonial buildings and yet more cobbled streets! The guidebooks describe it as the most beautiful city in Colombia, and that’s probably true, but I have mixed feelings about it. It's almost TOO beautiful! It's as if they said “OK, we’re going to paint this building blue, so we must have a yellow balcony, and purple flowers draping down the walls and we’ll paint the house next door orange.” (Too cynical?). And of course its beauty attracts a lot of tourists and everything that entails, e.g. people following you around trying to sell you beaded necklaces, or fake Cartier watches, or a tour of the city in a horse-drawn carriage. It's the complete opposite to Villa de Leyva. But there’s no denying it is very, very beautiful. And I couldn't stop taking photos of those flower-drenched balconies!
Next day I took a trip to the Volcán de Lodo El Totumo: a 15m high mound which looks like a volcano, but spews out mud (apparently forced out by the pressure of gases emitted by decaying organic matter - mmmm). You drop yourself down into the top of the crater and have a mud bath - apparently it contains minerals with therapeutic properties. A more cynical person might wonder whether that’s true, or whether the locals are actually suppressing a smirk as they watch all these gullible tourists lining up to pay to drop themselves into a muddy crater! :) Either way it was good fun, and definitely a new experience. You just float there in the mud, unable to touch the bottom. My instinct was to try to swim but the mud is really thick and you can’t really drag yourself through it - you have to get someone to give you a push in the right direction! Afterwards you squelch down to a nearby lake to wash yourself off.
The following day I moved on to Taganga, which is a small fishing village about 4 hours from Cartagena by bus. I didn’t spend much time here as it was more of a stopping off point for Parque Tayrona....
The centre of Cartagena is an old walled city, full of colourfully-painted colonial buildings and yet more cobbled streets! The guidebooks describe it as the most beautiful city in Colombia, and that’s probably true, but I have mixed feelings about it. It's almost TOO beautiful! It's as if they said “OK, we’re going to paint this building blue, so we must have a yellow balcony, and purple flowers draping down the walls and we’ll paint the house next door orange.” (Too cynical?). And of course its beauty attracts a lot of tourists and everything that entails, e.g. people following you around trying to sell you beaded necklaces, or fake Cartier watches, or a tour of the city in a horse-drawn carriage. It's the complete opposite to Villa de Leyva. But there’s no denying it is very, very beautiful. And I couldn't stop taking photos of those flower-drenched balconies!
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| Cartagena |
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| Cute Houses |
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| Flower-drenched balconies! |
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| Mud Bath |
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