¡Buenas!

Throw away your guide book - it wont prepare you for how beautiful Cartagena is!

We arrived in Cartagena in the day and found ourselves a neat twin room in a hostel.Despite being the principle backpacker place in Cartagena, the set up was much more to our liking.Quieter (yes, we are getting old), with a nice kitchen to use, and free Wi-Fi.

As with many Latin American cities, Cartagena has an old colonial district surrounded by a large modern city.In the old days Cartagena was the main port where all the treasure the Spaniards had plundered from South America would be loaded up onto Galleons and sailed back to Spain.Consequently the English would frequently turn up and sack the city, stealing all the gold and spoiling their fun.In the end the Spanish built a wall around the city and turned it into a heavily fortified port, and all of this remains today.Almost every street inside within the city wall is picture-postcard beautiful; we have never been anywhere before with such a large area of beautifully restored buildings.

The old town is quite swish and upmarket, and the restaurants and shops are fairly pricey; but there are surprisingly few bars or cafes, and there doesn´t seem to be much of a café culture there surprisingly.So, again, if you want to make some money, open a café in Cartagena.Anyway, we´d definitely recommend Cartagena to anyone wanting a romantic city break… in fact Colombia in general was shaping up to be an unexpected dream destination.

We did two activities here.The first was a really funny day trip to a nearby mud volcano, where we treated to a massage whilst laying on top of the mud in the crater - a very strange experience.The mud is very smooth, like cream, but very difficult to move about in.Occasionally a big bubble of sulphurous gas would work its way up the 2km deep column of mud to the top, where it would rudely emerge at the surface, usually splattering someone´s face with mud.Afterwards we were washed by some old ladies in a nearby lagoon, then whisked off to a lovely lunch of fresh fish at a lovely beach.

The second trip we went on was a disasterous boat tour to las Islas del Rosario, and specifically to Playa Blanca.Its supposed to be one of Colombia´s finest Caribbean beaches, but unfortunately its been ruined by trashy package-holiday charter boat tourism, and is teeming with pushy locals trying to sell you necklaces or give you a massage.Even the Colombians on the boat with us were disgusted with the place.Don´t bother going there!One good thing that came out of it was meeting a lovely young Colombian couple and their two kids, who were on their first family holiday.They come from Bogota, and we might even meet up with them when we are there in a few days time.

A quick note about cars: in a continent dominated by Asian, Brasilian and American cars, it was a pleasant surprise to find lots of old Renaults zipping about Cartagena. There are literally hundereds of old renault 4s, 9s and 11s about, and some even older renault 12s. A Colombian company actually manufactured the renault 9 until recently, and so bizarrely the renault 9 is the quintessential Colombian family car.

We left Cartagena on a night bus to embark on a 16-hour journey to San Gil, and on to nearby Barichara. This was the last time we would see the Caribbean on this trip, so I said a teary goodbye to my favourite sea! One thing we were happy to say goodbye to was the heat - it is ridiculously hot and sweaty in Cartagena, up until the evening that is, when a pleasant breeze would blow through the streets in the old town. Central and South West Colombia are very mountainous, so the climate was about to take a dramatic turn for us heading South.

R&M

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