Our first stop was a restaurant around the corner from our Hostel that was packed with locals, which we ended up making our staple lunch for 4 days of sopa y seco and an excellent agua de panela (a drink of lime juice sweetened with panela, the dark brown cake of unrefined cane sugar). Meals were $4-5 per person. It was the first restaurant on the trip that had a menu! Reading the choices was so much easier than understanding the options being announced to us. Our language prep with Duolingo really lacked an oral conversation component. Although, having a number of native Spanish speaking friends in Kalamazoo, I had no excuse not to practice more.
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| Old and New. Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas built in the 1600s, overlooking the Miami-esque high rises of Bocagrande. |
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| Symbolic Knockers around Old Town |
Our hostel, La Buleka, was in the Gesemani neighborhood just outside the walled city, and close enough to walk to the major sites including Old Town, Castillo San Felipe, and Bocagrande. We took a "free walking tour" of Old Town, where Maya bought some street art and we learned what the various door knocker shapes meant. Our Hostel was near the plaza at Iglesia Trinidad, which was full of street food nightly for dinner. Each afternoon we walked a mile and a half to Marbella Beach north of town, or once to the touristy Bocagrande Beach. We ate a lot of fruit and enjoyed several icy limeades sold in a fish-tank-like glass box on a street cart. It was easy to find the classic street foods, arepas or empanadas, filled with meats, eggs, potatoes, or cheese. It was NOT easy to eat vegetarian on this trip!
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| Maya perfecting her aloof cool-dude pose. |
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| The brown sand beaches and grey seas of Cartegena pale in comparison to the turquoise Caribbean we are accustomed to. But the water was warm and the waves were inviting. We couldn't keep the girls away. |
Massage! Cervesa! Mariscos! Empanadas!
Touts were worse in Cartegena than anywhere else we went in the Country. In town and on the beaches vendors would shout out their goods and services. All the reading and videos we heard implied that these touts are annoyingly persistent in Cartegena. While they were many, they were not insufferable. The standard no-eye-contact or a "No, gracias" would send most of them off. FYI, an empanada that has been rolling back and forth in a beach cart all day is not at its peak of freshness.
"A la orden" is the single most frequent phase we heard the whole month. It means something like "at your service" and would be called out from every street vendor, shop keeper, and restaurant host we passed. It is generally announced as a polite greeting, rather than giving you the feeling of incessant hawking.
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| Ceviche from a beach cart? No thank you. But freshly shaved snow cones, YES please! Maya made a friend at the beach who gifted her a 2 liter bottle "fish tank" containing a fresh water fish and a snail. I don't know what he expected us to do with it. Papa gave him his phone number in case he wanted to connect with her later. The fish was dead in the morning and Samuel hasn't called yet! |
From Cartegena, there are many options for a brighter beach experience. Most go west to Santa Marta and Tayrona National Park. As intriguing as it was, being in proximity to the world's highest costal mountain range (19,029 ft peak, 26 miles from the sea) we couldn't get on board with Tayrona because many of its currents are unsuitable for swimming. That wouldn't fly with our kids.
We had originally planned on trekking to Capurganá, so far west, you can walk to Panama. But the difficulty in figuring out transportation logistics defeated us. We caved and figured something Cartagena-adjacent would give the kids a taste of beach time with minimal travel stress. The Rosario Islands were pretty booked up within our price range so we turned to Playa Blanca on Isla Baru. The research prepared us for inflated prices and minimal services. Think: night-only power via generator, mosquito netted beds, bucket showers, pour-flush toilets.... all for $89/night. This would be our most expensive accommodation of the trip. We like to think of ourselves as pretty low maintenance and can handle a lack of amenities but we did not count on our beach-aversion taking us down for the count.
Now we'll enjoy a beach excursion from time to time. Some of our favorite travel memories are of exquisite snorkeling in the Virgin Islands or Thailand. Since all our Boyan family members live in the Caribbean, we are spoiled to visit some of the best beach locations on earth. But when distilled down to its basic elements of sunburn, sand, salt, and expensive food - the beach is not our thing.
The sea here is clear and warm. The "off-shore snorkeling" promised in most online descriptions was really just some rocks near shore and the "reef" at the southwest end of the bay was just a concentration of these silty rocks where you could see a few un-colorful fish. Each girl spotted a sting ray and Maya encountered a "pack" of squid. The morning is the best time to snag a fresh empanada from a vendor walking by with a plastic tote full of them. The beach gets crowded from 10-4pm with day-trippers, vendors, and loud music. At night few restaurants were open in this "low season" so dinner was slim pickings. The room was rustic - as described, and impossible to keep the sand out of. The "friendly house pets" raved about on TripAdvisor seemed a little mangy to me. When Maya saw a cockroach in the bathroom, she was done!
Econ 101: The Sunk Cost Theory
We booked 3 nights at La Buena Onda on Playa Blanca but bailed after 2 because the experience was too much (or too little) for us non-beach-bums to appreciate. In hindsight, we would have preferred to day-trip this place. The girls got a lesson in cutting your losses. Our host did not offer to refund the $89.  |
| Maya escaping a swarm of squid in the clear waters of Playa Blanca. (Just out of frame: jet skis, water delivery boat, day trip boats, banana boat, and beach vendors) |
Next stop, Medellín...
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