Latinalicious: The South America Diaries (22 page)

I love Cartagena! I can’t say this loudly or enthusiastically enough in written form, but picture me jumping on a sofa Tom Cruise style in front of Oprah shouting, ‘I love Cartagena!’ and you’ve got the right idea. I think I’ve been looking forward to Colombia the most, ever since Farzana told me how hot the boys were, how sunny the coast was, how much everyone welcomed her in wherever she went.

Of course, it wasn’t so long ago that Colombia was one of the planet’s black holes as far as travelling was concerned: a lawless country full of drugs and crime, torn to shreds by civil war, the kind of place that, should you tell your parents you were about to visit, would induce a shaking of the head and a stern talking to about safety. Buses were, and occasionally still are, hijacked.

Drug cartels continue to control small towns, and the country is still the world’s largest producer of cocaine (although some might argue that Bolivia still produces more) in spite of ‘Plan Colombia’ — a US policy aimed at drug smuggling and left-wing guerrillas — driving the violence off the main tourist trail. Most people I’ve met so far who’ve been mugged in South America have had it happen in Colombia, but even still it remains most people’s favourite country on the well-worn Gringo Trail and tourism is booming year-by-year.

To get to Cartagena I took the ten-hour speedboat from Iquitos to Leticia, where I had to stay overnight, and then an afternoon flight to Bogota, which was cold, dark and depressingly rainy when I arrived. The next morning I flew Copa Airlines to Cartagena and as soon as I stepped off the plane into the muggy sunshine I knew I’d made the right decision. I made my way in a yellow cab to a hostel called Casa Nativa in the walled city, where I was shown to my bed in an air-conditioned dorm by a cute, ponytailed guy called Carlos. My bed, a bottom bunk, had a curtain around it for privacy, as did all the others, which I haven’t seen in any other hostels on my travels. It’s such a great idea, right? Sleeping in bunk beds in shared dorms does tend to make you feel a little cheap, not to mention exposed. Why don’t all hostels put curtains around them?

The bunks here at Casa Nativa are all custom built and bolted to the walls, like someone’s dad’s been in with a measuring stick and some chunks of wood and power tools, which only adds to the charm.

After ditching Winnie in the dorm and playing with my private, sliding curtain in my bunk like a kid who’d just been built a tree house, I met a Canadian called Michelle and an Aussie called Naomi sitting in the common area, sweating under a fan with their laptops. Upon learning of my hunger, they marched me out through the maze of narrow streets to a soundtrack of salsa, horse hooves and carriages on cobblestones and pearly-toothed black men shouting, ‘
Dulce de coco para los locos!
’ and on to a place called Crepes & Waffles. My God. Where has this been all my life?

It occurred to me, sitting in air-conditioned bliss, feeding my face with an artery-clogging whipped cream and almond concoction, that even if I never saw anything else in Cartagena, I could leave happy for having discovered my bunk bed and Crepes & Waffles. Granted, Crepes & Waffles is not the most authentic choice for dining in a uniquely preserved UNESCO World Heritage site but when you’ve been subsisting on unsalted rice and hallucinogenic tree sap in the Amazon rainforest for the past six days you tend to think, ‘Screw it.’ I was instantly grateful.

With full bellies, Michelle, Naomi and I set off back to the hostel, but it took us literally two hours to make it. The streets were even more alive as dusk crept in and, after taking in a streaky pink sunset from the wall overlooking the crashing Caribbean Sea, I swear, we stopped at least nine times to talk to various people, all of whom wanted to sell us stuff, but who also just wanted a nice chat.

I was introduced to the
arepa
— a delicious and addictive grilled corn patty stuffed with butter and cheese that may just be the greatest food item on earth. We bought beers for 4000 COP ($2) from a vendor and walked along, chatting with others selling coconuts and mango chunks sprinkled with salt, as well as other tourists, butlers outside hotels beckoning potential customers inside, and buxom black ladies with cleavages spilling out of frilled red dresses … we even got our tarot cards read by a hilarious guy called Ricky, who pulled out one card for each of us and then proceeded to read the meaning word-for-word from a tatty book, in bad English.

We tipped Ricky extra because, after informing us of our decidedly generic destinies, he went on to tell us about some great places to visit in the vicinity and we all sat round on the street together drinking wine from a box. In a city that looks as though a secret gem could be sparkling behind each humongous, colonial bolted door, you definitely need a few tips from the locals. You can do without the wine in a box here, though, to be honest. It’s not great. Stick with the $2 beer.

Cartagena’s history has inspired many an artist, author and movie-maker over the years. Walking through the Plaza de los Coches, I was reminded that this was the spot in which more than a million Africans were once sold into slavery. I also thought how, unless you read up on the topic, or made an extra special effort to read every plaque in this tantalising tourist trap, positively bursting at the seams with five-star dining opportunities, boutique hotels and bougainvillea, you’d never know it now.

This Spanish colonial town was a major maritime hub for ships that would offload African slaves to work in gold mines and on cattle ranches, sugarcane plantations and large haciendas. The Spaniards would then sail back to Spain, full of exciting stories of pirates and pillage, dripping with the glorious riches of the New World.

Such riches created a land that was rife with violence, of course. Long before cocaine production came into play, Colombia’s wealth of gold, silver, exotic birds and tropical fruits caused pirates to loiter with intent around the neighbouring Caribbean islands, attacking at random and trying their best to take what they could from the Spanish, who, poor things, had tried
their
best to take what
they
could from the natives already (karma, anyone?).

When England’s Sir Francis Drake came onto the scene with a ho ho ho and a bottle of rum and possibly a talking parrot, the Spanish kings, sick to the back teeth of his antics, ordered the construction of the city walls and fortifications, which cost a fortune and took more than two hundred years to complete. Imagine! King Charles III, when informed of the ridiculous costs for this project halfway through, whipped out a telescope and proclaimed, ‘This is outrageous! For this price, the castles should be seen from Madrid!’

He didn’t get his way. You can barely see them from Bocagrande, the gentrified strip up the road with high-rise buildings so tall they make the place look not too unlike Miami. But the walls did create the most scenic, jaw-droppingly awesome maze of old colonial splendour inside. Back in the day, the rich lived within these walls, all the viscounts and snooty governors, while the poor crossed over the drawbridge every day to work for them. They were promptly ejected after dark — a bit like most of the tourists are now, when they’re ushered back onto their cruise ships.

The next morning I woke up late feeling ill in my curtained bunk, thanks to sitting up most of the night drinking rum shots and listening to a famous Colombian guitarist who, as a friend to the ponytailed Carlos, played an impromptu acoustic gig in the common area. With an aching head and still feeling tipsy, I stumbled back onto the streets for a coconut (because they always cured my hangovers in Bali) and found myself lost until I was found again in the rabbit warren of the walled city, taking in the Christmas trees and flickering, swaying decorations, even more colourful street art, hat stalls, vendors with plastic cups full of watermelon slices … and dodging cruise passengers in their hundreds.

These gaggles of lost-looking crinkly folk are dumped in Cartagena while their captains run off and seduce hot young Colombian girls with salsa moves and sweet-nothings in darkened corners, probably. It appears to be the unwritten rule that, while on land, these passengers must run around spending as much of their money as possible in extortionately priced gift and clothes stores, before heading back to their ships, drooping with perspiration and shopping bags. Judging by what I’ve seen, most do play by this rule. The rest sit in Crepes & Waffles and moan that they’re too hot and that there’s not enough whipped cream on their super-sized, calorie-laden sundaes. Like me.

With a fading rum-over, I eventually found myself at the home of what my free, downloaded audio iPod tour told me was the home of Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez, the Colombian novelist, screenwriter and journalist. ‘Gabo’, as he’s known here, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. His most famous books perhaps are
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1967) and
Love in the Time of Cholera
(1985), which was also, if you remember, a great but ultimately depressing movie. I’m told that this tale of brooding love and suffering in the time of a cholera epidemic was in fact a slightly exaggerated version of his mother’s life story.

As a writer with no home, I was quite excited to see this famous writer’s house, which stands in full ochre-coloured glory just beyond the seafront. I could almost imagine a writing room inside, with one of those old clunky typewriters and a window looking out over the ocean, and all those romantic couples, pecking at each other’s cheeks and lips like lovebirds from their perches on the wall.

Gabo penned stories of the endlessness of death, of loneliness, the beauty in solitude and the search for peace and truth. And as I sat with my coconut, as close to his house as possible, I imagined him gazing at the same sights and felt inspired by the thought of him feeling inspired. Gabo has a very impressive home, it can’t be denied, but I bet he doesn’t have a bunk with a personal sliding curtain around it. I love Cartagena!

11/12

I keep forgetting how hot it is in Cartagena. Today, in my bedraggled, slightly deluded state, I decided to take the tour bus. The first stop was within staggering distance of the wall on the outskirts of the historic centre, about a five-minute walk from the hostel, so all I had to do was hand over my money to the nearest ticket tout and cross the road. It didn’t require any thought or brain power whatsoever, which was perfect.

The tour bus is one of those big, red, double-decker embarrassments that you instantly hate yourself for boarding. As I climbed the steps clutching my ticket, I saw the Japanese couple with their huge Nikon camera, and the American ladies with their bleached knee-length shorts and varicose veins, and their husbands with T-shirts too bright for their fading skin tones and I thought, Jesus, Becky, has it come to this? Can you not even think for yourself anymore? Is it really so hot that you can’t plan beyond getting off a bus and then onto it again, two hours later, shuttled about on a pre-arranged schedule like a sheep with
tourists
?

And then I thought,
yes
, yes it
is
that hot! It is that bad! And I am a
tourist
! I plugged myself into the American man talking history through my headphones in the air-con and off we rolled around Cartagena. I actually learned quite a lot.

I have fallen in love with Cartagena in a way I never expected to. I feel like I’ve embarked on a beautiful relationship, one of colour and music and romance … just minus the man. I decided to extend my stay at Casa Nativa because I know everyone there now and, even though it’s a bit more expensive than some other hostels (AU$15 a night), I’m loving the privacy curtain, and you always need to pay more for air-con anyway. And also, ponytailed Carlos and Juan Carlos, the manager (you can never meet too many men called Carlos in South America), were both really nice to me after ‘the incident’.

It’s kind of hard to talk about ‘the incident’. I guess I should start by telling you that a few days ago, on 7 December, it was Día de las Velitas, or Candle Lighting Day. It’s one of the most observed traditional holidays of Colombia and is celebrated every year on the same date on the eve of the Immaculate Conception.

Día de las Velitas is a country-wide public holiday and the unofficial start of the Christmas season. It’s the time when people place candles and paper lanterns on their porches, on the pavements, on their windows, balconies, in parks, streets and squares late at night and let them burn for twenty-four hours.

Looking forward to the event, Naomi and I, and another girl we met at the hostel called Jen, went out to see the sunset, as I’ve done every day since I’ve been here. This time we watched it from a table at the famous Cafe del Mar, which is an overpriced tourist trap on the wall overlooking the sea and the Bocagrande skyline. When we arrived, the serving staff seemed to be having a competition among themselves called ‘Who can look the most uninterested in customers?’ A group of corpses would have done a better job.

Here’s a tip. If you’re going to watch the sunset in Cartagena, go down to the marina at Manga, which is much less touristy, or settle yourself on the sand close by, in front of some seriously luxurious holiday apartments. Alternatively, if you want to stay in the walled city, buy yourself a cheap bottle of rum and a couple of coconuts and go grab yourself a cannon to sit beside, up the way from Cafe del Mar a little bit. If you’re lucky you’ll be able to bag yourself one of the arched windows in the wall, which are big enough for two to sit in. These are frequented by snogging teenagers. I always get slightly envious when I see them, because I can’t help but think back to when I was their age and how the most romantic place to snog a boy in my town was on the window ledge of Woolworths, or in a phone booth.

After Cafe del Mar we drank some more beers on the streets, chatted to a million more people and discovered that, contrary to what we’d been told, they weren’t going to celebrate Día de las Velitas in the historic centre, and if really we wanted to see people lighting up thousands of candles between 3 and 4 a.m., we would have to go out of the city in a cab. Feeling a bit deflated, we started walking back to the hostel. It was, after all, after midnight at this point. And then we met Jonny.

Jonny told us all about his nightclub and how he would love it if we went inside so he could get his commission (not in those words exactly). A lot of the guys in the historic centre are employed to be nice to tourists on the streets, in order that they visit their various shops and restaurants. When we told Jonny that we really just wanted to experience the Día de las Velitas celebrations, he beamed and said, ‘Well, I’m finishing up now, why don’t you come to my neighbourhood? We’re having a party and we’re all gonna be lighting candles!’

Of course, the last thing you should do as a trio of slightly drunk girls is get into a cab with a guy going to a distant neighbourhood, in Colombia, at midnight but, like I said, we were a trio of slightly drunk girls and … well … Jonny seemed nice, and we really wanted to see the candles! So we hailed a cab and drove roughly fifteen minutes out of the city, with Jonny in the front seat telling us how his girlfriend’s mum was going to be so glad we could come.

At one point, the driver stopped and put some black, mesh screens up over our windows, which I thought was a little odd because it meant we couldn’t see out, but pretty soon we pulled up outside a house, where we were promptly thrown into a scene from the movie
Step Up
.

People were dancing on every balcony and front porch, music was blaring from a host of different speakers, and groups of people drinking from bottles and plastic cups were sitting around what looked like open sewers, running like concrete-walled rivers through the streets. It smelled a bit iffy. A few small fires were burning on the sidelines but Jonny ushered us along (after making sure
we
had paid for the taxi) to a little shop, where he made sure
we
paid for the bottles of rum he said were essential.

Then, gradually gathering more and more people behind us as we all walked through the streets, Jonny led us to his girlfriend’s house. A large lady called Mama Maria (her mum, we assumed) welcomed us in, took one bottle of rum, which we never saw again, and started pouring shots with the other. We started dancing. We spoke to everybody, although no one spoke any English. We were clearly the stars; the only white people for miles.

I was dancing with a guy on the porch, with my back to the railings and a giant pillar, when suddenly the side of my head was yanked into the pillar at full force at least three times. It took me a second to realise that someone was grabbing the strap of my bag from behind the railings and, seeing as the strap was around both shoulders, they couldn’t get it over my head, so they just kept pulling me instead. Naomi tried to get the bag over my head so that whoever it was could just take it and stop whacking my head against concrete, but after a couple more attempts the mugger ran off and I never even saw who did it. I reached up and felt the giant golf-ball-sized lump forming on my head and realised I had gashes on my arm and neck from the strap, too.

All hell broke loose in the neighbourhood. It was
Step Up
mixed with
City of God
all of a sudden. Mama Maria ushered me into the house, followed by Naomi and Jen, and we were instructed to climb a ladder up to the attic. We crouched on the floor while a man with a towel around his waist — I’m assuming Papa Maria — ran outside with a machete. People were shouting. Jonny’s girlfriend, who I’d been dancing with, too, was trying to touch my head, sobbing hysterically like she thought I was going to die in her house, while I just thanked my lucky stars it wasn’t my actual face he’d smashed against the pillar. He could have broken my nose!

He was also a shit mugger because he didn’t actually get my bag. After all that, he didn’t even break it and it was only a cheap, shitty thing from H&M. You’d think he would have been a bit smarter and brought some scissors to at least cut the strap but, as it was, he completely failed in his mission
and
got chased with a machete. I dread to think what happened to him, but I’ll never underestimate H&M again.

Just as we were wondering how to make our escape, one of Jonny’s mates pulled up in yet another car with blacked out windows (which now made sense) and sped us off through the streets like we’d robbed a bank or something. On the way back to Cartagena we saw a lot of candles being lit along the streets, which is what we went out in search of anyway, so it wasn’t a total disaster. Mind you, it could have just been that I was seeing stars.

We thanked Jonny as he made sure we got back to our hostel safely. He also made sure we paid his mate 25,000 COP for driving us ‘the scenic candlelit route’, and him 10,000 COP extra for escorting us home. He also kept our rum. Thanks, Jonny.

So, hmm, it wasn’t a very nice ending to the night, but it hasn’t stopped me falling in love with Cartagena. We shouldn’t have been in that neighbourhood but you can’t just sit in air-conditioned tour buses and Cafe del Mar when you’re trying to explore a new city, can you? Besides, everyone else, apart from the shit mugger, was really nice.

I just emailed my friend Charlotte (the girl I met on the dreaded Colca Canyon trip back in Peru) and she’s decided to travel up this way to spend a ‘British’ Christmas with me, purely because I’ve been going on about how awesome Cartagena is since I got here. We can’t let one guy ruin things now, can we? I was having one of the most exciting and fun nights of my entire trip so far, before that happened. It’s not every day you get to be in a street scene from
Step Up
.

If he’d managed to nick my iPhone and credit card, however, well, that would have been different.

16/12