Cartagena, Colombia - They Are Putting Hot Dogs In My Food

By breakfast today I had confirmed a Cartagenian conspiracy. They were slipping hot dogs into my food. I’d eaten hot dogs at every meal. Ana and I ordered an entrada the first night we arrived. It was billed as grilled sausages and papas Francesas. What arrived was chopped up hot dogs on a pile of fries. Yesterday’s breakfast – eggs and sausages (hot dogs). For lunch, my premium Mexican tacos were slathered with delicious guacamole, topped with – you guessed it – crispy fried hot dogs...and some crunchy pork belly. I was sure my local casserole specialty last night was going to be wiener free, but the first forkful revealed…sliced hot dogs.

Even today, for breakfast, the meat option was a giant warmer full of steaming, fried hot dog bits, of which I took a generous helping. Ana couldn’t believe it. But I’m not one to battle destiny or cheat fate. Besides, I love hot dogs. If they served up a delicious long wiener in a fresh bun blanketed in condiments and crispy fried onions, I’d be the happiest little chappy in the bistro. I just don’t know why they need to be so sneaky about it.

Today we walked to the Getsamani neighbourhood which is just east of the old city. If we were to visit Cartagena in the future, this is where we would stay. It is a vibrant and artsy neighbourhood with hundreds of gorgeous murals, narrow streets shrouded overhead by umbrellas and vines and streamers of flags. There were street artists at work painting, sculptures, art pieces hung from walls and homes, boutique shops, art galleries, restaurants, cafes, and bars. It was an explosion of colour and artistry.

We enjoyed a coffee and some welcome air conditioning at a lovely café, then zeroed in on a local fish restaurant. I knew it was going to be the real deal after the hostess/server//lieutenant found two chairs for us and shoved them into a table where there was only a single man eating his lunch then pointed us to join him. I had a whole fried fish called a mojarra which was served with plantains, coconut rice, and a simple garden salad. I opened his little mouth with my fork to see if they had snuck a little hot dog slice in there, but nothing. This was my first hot dog free meal and it was delicious. Ana had the shrimp-cooked rice, which was okay, but not quite as good as the fish. While eating we saw a news report on a Colombian channel whose leading story was an attempted bag snatching from a foreign tourist in Cartagena. It was caught on video and the victim did not appear to get hurt, nor lose her purse as she was stronger and more determined than the little thief. Seeing this as the top news story spoke mountains of the security and safety situation in this lovely city.

After fully exploring Getsamani, we returned to the old city, explored what felt like a kilometer of kitsch and book vendors at the edge of Centenario Park. The park itself was closed Mondays for cleaning, but we circled the exterior, looking up into the trees for a sloth. Ana’s friend Carrie and her husband had been here recently and gave her a little map of where to find the sloth they’d visited most days. I don’t remember us ever seeing a wild sloth so this is high on our list of wants and needs for this trip. We’ll be back to track down the handsome feller when the park is open.

Our wanderings took us back to Bolivar Park where we saw a drum and dance show, led by a young chap blowing blistering clarinet solos. Next was Abaco bookstore and café where we enjoyed a serene cup of coffee (my coffee was a beer) and browsed the books, nearly all in Spanish, and a good portion of those from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the local Nobel prize winning author and the most important modern cultural figure from Colombia…after Shakira, of course.

It was a scorching hot day so we decided to Uber back to the hotel, which cost about five bucks -  less than the water we’d have to buy to replenish our sweat modules if we were to walk. We relaxed in the room for a while then headed back out to restaurant Merida. They did not have a table available but did welcome us in for a drink at the bar, with two rope swings for seats. It was a classy place, a place for rich tourists and local heavitos. Ana looked especially vibrant and beautiful tonight as she enjoyed her Club Colombia beer, swung in her chair, and was simply glowing from the day’s sunshine and the sweet wind blowing in from the sea.

We finished the day by picking up a medium Domino’s pizza and enjoying some slices in the sanctity and tranquility of our hotel room.

It had been an excellent day.

Cartagena, Colombia - Papaya Is Not Butt-fruit

I was up shortly after sunrise and snuck out of the room for a beach walk. The humid morning air felt tremendously fine as I sucked it greedily into my lungs. Our hotel was in the midst of a construction zone, with another hotel going up beside it and a large crane with construction materials piled up on the beach, but it was hard to tell what was going on there. I proceeded onto the beach and was stopped in my tracks by a furry carcass in my path. A rat, stretched out perfectly in the sand, pointed towards Mecca as if deep in prayer. My expired first aid training kicked in instinctually as I crouched down for a health check. Though I haven’t had a great deal of instruction in the veterinarian sciences, I did determine that the little bugger was stone dead, and from what I could tell likely expired from a sudden brain aneurism or maybe a blocked colon. There wasn’t much more to do for him, and I wasn’t familiar with Colombian last rites rituals, so I simply bowed my head for a moment, then stepped over him and carried on.

The warm and salty wind blowing in from the ocean was luxurious but the grey sand beach was not. It was a working class beach, a beach for beer and taco entrepreneurs, a beach where you might consider wearing shoes, a beach you wouldn’t want to sleep on. I slalomed around the semi-permanent and worn beach umbrellas and peeked into a few of the busted up wooden shacks with weathered and slivery boards announcing beach-fare dishes and local lagers. Within a particularly wretched one slept the owner, sound asleep on a table, covered with a blanket. I also noticed dozens of rat tracks decorated in the sand, running up and down the beach, left there by an army of rodents hoovering up the dropped tidbits from yesterday’s crowds.

I walked as far as I could before hitting another blocked off construction zone, then turned off the beach and made the return trip along the street, passing by some other hotels and more than a few locals trotting in their jogging shorts. The sun was now fully up and it was already getting hot.

Our hotel package included breakfast so we went down to the restaurant and grabbed a table. The ghostly smells of past Cuban resort breakfasts returned en force – over-perfumed holidaymakers, coffee, fryer oil, sizzling pancakes. I grabbed a plate of scrambled eggs, dark beans, and two versions of deep-fried corn treats – arepas (corn cakes) and what my internet research tells me might have been boliarepitas (corn balls). But the best was yet to come. I found a smaller side plate and filled it with fresh fruit – watermelon and pineapple – but most importantly the sweet, heavenly, glorious fruit of the papaya. Breakfast was delicious.

Last week Magnus asked me how long it would take him to learn Spanish. He and his sister are thinking of making a siblings trip to somewhere in Spain this year.

“Well,” I said, “you already speak excellent French and you understand a lot of Portuguese and your English skills are pretty solid.”

He raised his eyebrows and waited. Deciding I was not going to get a laugh I carried on.

“So how fast you learn depends on where you are. You can’t learn Spanish here, at least not to any decent level, unless you join a Toronto soccer team with a bunch of Hispanics. But you suck at soccer so that’s probably not an option.”

Still no laugh. He gave me a get on with it look.

“So basically you have to move to Spain. Or El Salvador. Or Argentina. Any of those. And I’d say if you were immersed you’d be speaking good Spanish within a year,” I explained, then added, “Within six months if you found a local girlfriend.”

“OK, that’s not too bad,” he said.

“There’s one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You have to stop calling papaya ‘butt-fruit’. Learn to love it. And the Spanish word for papaya is papaya. That will get you started.”

Our hotel was situated near the south end of a long peninsula called Bocagrande, which was a short bus ride or long walk to the old city of Cartagena. We began walking and realized we needed some local currency, so tried two different banks, but our cards worked at neither. We spoke to a security guard and he asked us what bank we used in Canada. I told him. He said oh in that case you need to use Davibank. He was right, but how he knew this was a mystery to me.

We continued walking north towards Cartagena. We walked along the busy Carrera 2 road, passing dozens of weary marathon runners (unsure of where they’d come from or how they managed to run a marathon in the same time it took us to have breakfast) then cut over to the ocean road and continued from there, snappinig photos of the impressive Bocagrande skyline. The temperature had already rocketed to near 30 degrees and it was blissful. Yes, the wintry white skin does give off a bit of smoke as the equatorial sunrays hit it, but that’s only temporary. Once you’ve fully burned off that first layer you’re fine.

The old city of Cartagena is ringed by a massive stone wall, running for 11 kilometres around the city. Construction first started in1 586 and took about two hundred years to complete, as it got destroyed a few times from invading pirates and colonizers. The old city is full of architectural masterpieces and reminded us much of the grand cities of Santo Domingo and San Juan, but also the medieval cities in the south of France which we visited not too long ago. We wandered the winding streets, taking photographs, popping into shops, and sticking to the shady sides as the sun rose higher into the sky, penetrating into the narrow laneways. A man commented on the Canadian bag tag I had strapped to my backpack and we struck up a conversation. Surbhi and Jitu were from Peterborough and this too was their first day in Cartagena. We found a lot in common and wandered the streets together for a while then sat down in Plaza Santo Domingo for drinks. They were a lovely couple and had travelled extensively since he retirement from dentistry seven years ago. During the morning walk with Ana I’d formed this excellent idea for my mid-life crisis, which I haven’t had yet, but am hoping for a good one that enables me to keep my wife and most of my money. Anyway, I was thinking of a gold tooth with a diamond in it, on the weakest of my incisors. It would look so cool and bad-ass. I ran the idea past Surbhi to get his professional dental recommendation. He didn’t say it was an awful idea.

We made plans to meet them for dinner one night this week then began the long, hot walk back to Bocagrande. We stopped at a Dollar store (which had a different name but was an exact replica of the Canadian Dollarama) and picked up two bottles of water and two ice creams, giving us time to enjoy a brief dose of air conditioning. We next stopped at a small café for a bite, but Ana was literally falling asleep sitting up, so we continued to the hotel where we cratered on the bed and had a lovely chill out session, watching part of the movie The Pursuit of Happyness on the amply endowed cable tv.

After regaining strength, we visited the outdoor pool on the hotel’s fifth level and lounged in loungers for an hour or two, enjoying the end of day sunshine and the rich offshore winds that whipped towels off chairs, leaves into the pool, and stood the hairs up on our arms like obedient little soldiers. Neither of us were particularly hungry yet so we returned to the room, watched another partial movie, then went back out to explore the area south of us then worked our way back to a Mexican restaurant we’d passed earlier in the day that advertised Caesar Salad (Nuevo). Sadly, they were out of salad but had plenty of tacos so Ana had those while I had a platter of something that resembled poutine, but instead had shredded potatoes, strings of cream sauce on top, then clumps of local cheese below and slices of what I would describe as hot dog. More on that later.

While we were eating, I saw two chubby rats race through the adjoining parking lot and disappear into the alley right beside the restaurant. I didn’t mention that to Ana so I’m going to have to watch her face when she reads this.

Cartagena, Colombia - A Break From Canadian Winter

I never use an alarm to wake up. It’s not necessary as I’ve always been a morning person and an “early to bed, early to rise” kind of guy (ok, in my 20’s I will admit to many late nights – most of them, in fact – but I was still up early). It’s a great system except when you spent the previous evening at a comfortably dingy and amazing craft brewery in Toronto with your son pounding premium IPAs then went to a crazy Gogol Bordello concert, locked in a swirling mosh pit for 90 minutes, leaping up and down, getting stepped on, sweated on, shoved, squashed, and thoroughly entertained by the frantic rhythms of Gypsy Punk, didn’t make it back home until 1am, then had to be on the road by 5am for your flight to Cartagena, Colombia. Then, you need an alarm.

We haven’t traveled since returning home last June from our epic sailing trip to the Bahamas and Ana and I had vowed not to do a winter trip this year, in the pursuit of financial jurisprudence and stewardship of the funds we will one day leave to our children if they remain kind to us and take us in once our bodies are spent and minds have turned to organic oatmeal. But one night, at home in mid-November, already in the midst of an authentic and unusually snowy and frigid Canadian winter, we were sitting in our living room and I looked over to see Ana scrolling through her phone, eyes alight.

“What are you looking at over there?” I asked

Through an aura of guilt she replied, “I found a good deal on a trip to Cartagena in February.”

“Book it.”

I could feel myself dozing off as the airplane wheeled over to the de-icing station. I was looking forward to the thin, episodic slumber offered by the claustrophobic and noisy environment of modern air travel. As I was falling asleep, a giant snore from a little kid behind me, startled me awake, and I immediately noticed the Entertainment section of the seatback screen in front of me had a link to Angry Birds. I ended up playing that for the entire flight, except for a mediocre zombie movie I fit in somewhere, and somehow didn’t even fall asleep during that.

Colombia, and in particular Cartagena, has been on our dream travel list for a very long time. Ana and I have spent many years exploring Latin America but had yet to visit five countries in South America - Ecuador, British Guyana, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Colombia. Venezuela’s a little tough at the moment, but other three are possibilities in the coming years. But for now, we’ve got a thousand things to do and see in Cartagena.

After getting settled in our room at the Hotel Almirante, we enjoyed a welcome drink at the beachside café adjoined to the hotel then went for a walk to find dinner. The area near the hotel is vibrant and busy – families on motorcycles, taxis, party busses, street vendors, 24-hour grocery stores, lights and music. We walked the main street and sat down at a restaurant that felt right and each ordered a local Colombian beer, which was cold and tasty – even Ana liked it and she drank her WHOLE BEER, all by herself. The meal was good, hamburger for Ana and grilled steak for me, both accompanied by the most classic and ubiquitous of Latin America vegetables – French fries.

After dinner we picked up a few things at the grocery store, struggling financially with the odd exchange rate of 2,700 Colombian peso to a single Canadian dollar. The food prices seemed reasonable, not particularly cheap nor expensive, and the standing inventory of plantains, coconuts, and yuca was formidable.

We returned to the hotel sometime after ten, exhausted after a long travel day and our first in this new to us country.