What a difference a year makes. A year, and about 15 degrees of latitude in a southward direction. Last year we spent the holidays shivering through one of the coldest Decembers on record in Vero Beach, Florida; this year we are half-dressed and languid, hoping a breeze will blow through and cool us down.
Cartagena is hot in more ways than one. The streets are busy, people bubbling out of houses and shops in a nearly round-the-clock stream. The air is filled with loud music and the calls of street vendors selling cold water or hot coffee. Something is always happening; there have been opera presentations, concerts, and dance performances, and we hope to see the bullfights next week. Christmas lights drape elegant and historic buildings like jewelry. And the women wear very tight and very skimpy outfits, and are possibly even more beautiful than in Venezuela.
We attended a Christmas Eve dinner put on by the Club Nautico marina, then walked around the neighborhood looking at Christmas lights. Nearly every family had dragged chairs and a table out into their front yard, and sat drinking, laughing, listening to music. Each house had its own stereo system on, and they clashed and competed and added together into a cacophonous, joyous din. Everybody waved and smiled at us as we walked by, peering in at their family celebrations. The next day we stuffed our faces again at a cruiser potluck
There
were maybe 35 cruising boats here at Christmas, although many have
left in the past few days, and to our surprise, at least four are
from Colorado. In addition to us (from Boulder) and Infidien
(from Golden), there is Ventana
from Conifer and Leonore of Sark, which despite the British
flag belongs to a couple who live in the mountains between Boulder
and Golden during the six months each year they are off the boat. A
cruising couple we met from Austria asked us whether Colorado was a
very populous state, since they saw so many cruisers from there. Of
course they were aware that Colorado and Austria have the same amount
of coastline!
Club Nautico is the center of cruiser life here, as well as a hangout for many Cartageños who boat. It's a somewhat run-down marina -- Club de Pesca, down the block, is much nicer -- but the important thing is that they welcome cruisers and help make things easier for us. There is a laundry, a trash service, free water, and a reasonably secure dinghy dock. The restaurant and bar is casual but pleasant. It makes a good base for exploring the city.
It's interesting being in a country with a bad reputation. Most boat insurance (including ours) excludes coverage in Colombia, and as a result most westbound cruisers go directly from the ABC islands to the San Blas area of Panama. But although drugs, violence and kidnapping are major problems in much of the rest of the country, Cartagena is a popular tourist destination (particularly for cruise ships) and considered quite safe, apart from the usual tourist-related crime that plagues big cities everywhere. One story we heard was that the drug dealers cleaned up Cartagena because they wanted a safe place for their mistresses to live, but probably the truth is that nobody wants the lucrative tourist trade to dry up. As far as cruisers are concerned, it's like Venezuela or Trinidad; lock the boat when you're not around, don't leave portable and attractive items on deck, and hoist and lock the dinghy at night. The immediate neighborhood around the marina used to be mansions and embassies, but now is mostly moderately upscale apartment buildings. It's a safe, middle-class sort of neighborhood, a long walk or a short cab ride from the old walled city.
As in every other Latin Caribbean country we've been in, the only people who consistently rip us off (for, as usual, trivially small amounts) are the taxi drivers. Each fare is apparently based on a complicated formula involving the time of day, phase of moon, number of letters in the taxista's name, and the last song he heard on the radio before picking us up; and once he's decided how much he's going to charge, there is no arguing with him. We shared a cab once with an expatriate American who's been living here for over 20 years. When we were asked for 2500 pesos, he informed the driver in fluent Spanish that he lived in Cartagena and knew the fare was only 2000. The driver shook his head: "Dos quinientos." Our friend angrily denounced the cabbie as a rip-off artist, did he think that he was some ignorant tourist? and so on and so forth. But the driver stood firm, and we paid the 2500 pesos -- a little less than $1.25.
Yup, if we felt wealthy in Venezuela, with 740 bolivars to the dollar, we are filthy rich here in Colombia, where one measly US greenback gets us around 2200 pesos. The ATMs spit out 10,000 and 20,000 notes, "almost-fives" and "almost-tens" respectively (a quick way of approximating the conversion is to drop three zeros and divide by two), so we walk around with bulging wallets. The smallest coin is a 20-peso piece but most prices are in round multiples of 100. As the dollar sign ($) is frequently used for prices, the numbers look staggering. We bought a spare propeller for our dinghy outboard (there is a Suzuki dealer here, a nice surprise), and the receipt says we paid $135,000 pesos. A new outboard motor would cost us nearly five million "bucks"!
In general, though, prices are pretty good. A restaurant main dish in a fairly fancy place in the old city is $7-12 , a scoop of chocolate almond fudge in a waffle cone at the ice cream place on the corner is $1.25, and a beer in a bar is a little less than a buck. At the incredibly convenient grocery store (only a block from the marina where we leave our dinghies) the prices are better than those at Margarita for everything other than alcohol, and the selection is a mix of Colombian and international products. As usual, it's an adventure to discover the flavors and packaging used in another country. The preferred fruit flavors (for yogurt, juice, and sweets) in Colombia seem to be peach and blackberry; we hadn't seen blackberry flavored anything in a long time, and suddenly there are whole aisles of blackberry drink mix and blackberry pound cake and blackberry yogurt. Yogurt, incidentally, is almost always liquid (meant for drinking rather than spooning) and very sweet. Next to it on the refrigerated shelves are boxes and bottles of some sort of drink that as far as I can tell is based on oatmeal. Fresh milk comes in plastic bags, stacked in a cooler. Chicken parts, naked of any wrapping, are piled up in another cooler. I took one look and decided to go for the meat counter instead (as we finished our last tuna steak a few days ago), where I managed enough Spanish to have the clerk cut and wrap a pound -- or rather, half a kilo -- of tenderloin for about $2.50.
Other than the grocery store and a few restaurants and shops, we really haven't seen much of the city yet, because we've been busy working on the boat. Mornings, which are usually hot and still, we remain below, as with our awnings overhead it stays fairly cool in the boat until near noon. After the afternoon breeze begins, we emerge to work on exterior projects, the biggest one of which is refinishing all the exterior teak. (Not that there's a lot of it, but every inch seems like too much when it needs maintenance!) We have almost finished the sanding phase; the boat is covered with teak dust, or rather a dust composed of flakes of old Cetol and a little wood. With luck (and copious elbow grease) our boat will soon look again like it's owned by people who actually care about what it looks like. Sand sand sand, work work work. But we'll be getting out soon to see the sights and explore this neat old city.
