Saturday 28th November

d*** took a taxi to the airport, driven by an extremely aggressive matron but he didn't get there early enough at 8.20 & he found Jenny wandering away from the meeting point having flown in from London via Bogota. We returned to the hotel & Jenny rested for a few hours while we went to see St Nicholas’s square, in the old part of the city but unfortunately the church was closed. The surrounding streets were lined with market stalls selling a variety of goods & the streets teemed. Returning once again to the hotel we prepared to leave for the hotel in Cartagena, in an 8 seater taxi bus..
Te hotel is in the historic part of the city in a fine old precinct not far from anywhere. We walked out to the old sea wall a few hundred m. away & watched as a wedding took place. Later we had a meal & wandered again in the old town but it was very hot & humid even in the evening.



Sunday 29th November

All of us had a good night & after breakfast, we set off to explore. Unfortunately ,soon after we ate the place blacked out & we were left, literally, in the dark as our room has no windows. Luckily the power was restored in the late afternoon after we had sweltered in the courtyard. Our wanderings took us eventually to the Naval Museum, which showed how the city developed as a naval centre in the Spanish empire. Unfortunately nearly all the exhibits were labelled in Spanish only which made most of the descriptions unintelligible to Jane & Dick. We stopped for a meal at lunch time & then found a somewhat unhelpful tourist bureau as we tried to work out how to move on on Tuesday morning to Mompos on the Magdalena River.
Found a door to door carrier to Mompos & phoned him to try & book seats.

Monday 30th November

Had a reasonably early start, as Jenny had to ring the guy before 8am & after a couple more calls, booked to be picked up at 4.30am tomorrow morning to go to a hotel in Mompos.
After breakfast we took a cab to Castello San Felipe D Barajas, a huge fortress built by the Spanish to defend Cartagena. It really is immense being the largest Spanish fort in the Indies. We took audio guides & spent the next 2.5 hours exploring it. It was attacked several times in its history but was only taken once, by French privateers, by force. The complex was built after Sir Francis Drake had sacked Cartagena in the 1500s. It is full of tunnels cut through the hillside to allow the garrison to move troops, stores & munitions.
Leaving there exhausted we returned to the hotel & had some refreshment across the road in the very cheap but cheerful, bar cafe.