The colours of Cartagena and MUD!

From Taganga, we headed off to our last stop in Colombia – Cartagena. SAD!!!!

The ‘old town’ of Cartagena has to be one of the most beautiful colonial towns I have been to. It is a world of colour - buildings are electric blue, orange, and pink; purple bougainvilleas cling to windows and doors;  local women meander through the streets balancing baskets of mangoes on their heads wearing long skirts, blouses and head scarfs of deep red and orange. It is a spectacular site. We spent hours getting lost in the old town, with many a drink break along the way (any excuse to escape from the stinking heat and get into some air-conditioning). From mango smoothies and iced-chocolates, fresh watermelon and crispy pastries, we sampled the best Cartagena had to offer, complete with an obligatory drink at Cafe del Mar (though I have to admit that I’d never heard of it…) perched on big red cushions, looking out over the wall to the boats on the horizon.

Walking on the wall that surrounds the old town.

From Cartagena, we ventured through the Islas de Rosario, with a quick stop at an Aquarium to watch a dolphin and catfish (?!) show, to Playa Blanca on a ‘disco boat.’ Seriously. The steward thought he would double as a DJ. He’d make an announcement, pause, pump a bit of reggeaton as he tried to rap, then turn the volume down and keep chatting about the islands – much to the enjoyment of the locals who sang and clapped the entire several hours to the Islands. Us gringos were not impressed. We were well and truly keen to escape the boat when it finally pulled up at the beach some hour later than the journey was supposed to take, we didn’t care that it was raining - we wanted out!

Actually, I am starting to sense a pattern with wanna-be DJ’s here in South America. There was also one in the bread isle of the local supermarket, all set up with his trillion CDs of songs trying his best to rap about bread. Hmmm.

 
Playa Blanca

The water at Playa Blanca is beautiful - so transparent, so clean and so warm. I wish that I could say the same for the beach. Though the sand is a brilliant white, the rest of the beach is spoiled. It is smothered in little huts and their vendors who nag and pester you until the sun goes down and the mosquitoes come out. You cannot even sit on the sand and read your book. You are surrounded every second by people who literally pull at your every limb to sell you a massage, ugly piece of jewellery, rent you a snorkel or give you a jet ski ride. What is worse is that they don’t take no for an answer – our polite reply of “no gracias” was soon much more curt, accompanied by fierce looks of “get lost.” Poor Claire mistakenly said “maybe later” to a ‘masseuse.’ In English we all know that that means no. To Marie the masseuse, this translated to – I will follow you down the beach and sit on the sand where you’re swimming and wait for you to get out at which point I will harass you again. We stayed in the water for at least an hour in the hope that Marie would give up. Instead, she got reinforcements. By the time we got out, there were 5 masseuses sitting on the sand, waiting to harass us. In the end, we succumb to the greasy massage they were offering – and I’m sure got extremely ripped off in the process.

Luckily, we’d decided to spend the night there so when the beach finally cleared out of tourists and pesky sales people, we finally got some peace and quiet. We sat on an old washed up log and watched the brilliant pink sunset. Unfortunately our peace didn’t last long. Mosquitoes were out full force that night. By morning, I was one walking big red itchy lump.

Sunset on Playa Blanca

 

Having enough sun, sand and mosquitoes to last us a while we traded it in for MUD!
A couple of hours by bus from Cartagena sits a weird, yet amusing freak of nature - a 20m ‘volcano’ that spits out mud. Atop, in a makeshift pool you float around in it. Well, you don’t really have any other option than to float because for some bizarre reason you cannot go entirely under, no matter how hard you throw your hands above your head, though supposedly the pool is over 2 kms deep. It’s not a very nice feeling paddling your heart out and getting absolutely nowhere. You are forced to pretend to fly like superman along the top of the mud, aided by someone pushing you along by your feet, to get anywhere. Not that there is anywhere to go – the pool quickly filled up leaving you with not only an inch to move.

 

Trying to push Slurry under

Though you couldn’t go under, we all soon looked like monsters from the deep. We had mud everywhere - mud in our ears, eyes, and hair. We were still finding traces of it days later even though we’d been thoroughly washed down by the scary washer women waiting for us in the river below who left us all in our birthday suits when they stripped us of our swimmers without warning to get mud out of them.

Monsters from the deep