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.
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