Normal - Cartagena, Colombia
Cartagena, Colombia
On Tuesday afternoon, we arrived in Cartagena half an hour late. We got our luggage and stepped out into the waiting crowds of welcoming families and taxi drivers and looked for a driver holding a sign with our name on it and. Nothing. No one was there. And no one came. I started hyperventilating, the boys began kicking each other, and Guy said "This country sucks. We're going home." And we turned around, re-boarded the plane we’d just disembarked from and got back to Hood River in time for the snowday Thursday.
Just kidding.
We got in a cab and asked the cab driver to take us to hotel Las Tres Banderas, and he did. It cost $4. When we walked into the hot little hotel lobby, the girl at the front desk was on the phone with a driver that was supposed to pick us up, wondering where we’d got to. Apparently, he was waiting for us at the wrong terminal. I don’t know if he felt bad about deserting us like that or not, but at least he knew he’d failed, which is satisfying.
Cartagena is really, truly, freaking, dripping, steaming, smoking hot. All the tour books say it’s a remarkably hot city, but those books are downplaying the reality. Standing in the street on a Cartagena afternoon is like standing in the burning hiss that comes out of an iron. Yet people live here anyway, and have for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. We saw a world map drawn in the 1400’s. The map had a Colombia and most of the rest of South America penciled in, but in place of North America was a gargantuan sprawl of Cuba, spreading northwards, attached to Colombia by the slender finger that is now what we call Panama.
In the evening of the day that the cab driver forsook my family, I dragged them out of the air conditioning into the narrow, twisty, seemingly nameless streets of Cartagena’s old town. We got lost. If my worst travel nightmare is arriving with my family to an airport in a country I’ve never visited before and having the person who is supposed to arrive and take care of us neglect show up to take care of us, the worst travel fear of the rest of my family is getting lost at night in a nosy, crowded, honking, everyone knows what’s going on but me situation.
What a day! We had a twofer!
We had a map, but it didn’t make any sense because the names of streets change every block, and most blocks don’t even show up on the map. The streets in the old town were built before cars, and once modernity added sidewalks and pedestrians and motorbikes and street vendors cooking arepas and empanadas and men pushing carts of coconuts to stick straws into for drinks, and hippies hawking jewelry and kids walking along licking ice cream cones, it gets pretty crowded.
I kept expecting to emerge into one of those glorious colonial plazas dominated by a reassuringly holy cathedral, to sit by a fountain and catch our breath, but we must have been one street off over and over again because we were lost. I felt the tension in my travel-worn country mouse family ratcheting up. When I saw a huge black bat jiggling just about over heads I knew we were in serious trouble so Guy and I did the unthinkable—we turned us all around and marched us right back down the route we’d come. We walked until we found something familiar, then we walked a few blocks more until we were closer to our hotel and in the upstairs of a pizza restaurant overlooking a quiet square were we sat and sighed and ate melted cheese and promised each other that all would be better tomorrow.
We were all asleep by 7:30.
The next day, we used a different map. After a leisurely breakfast, we walked to the Palace of the Inquisition, which I referred to as the “torture museum” in order to generate crowd buy-in. At the torture museum, we hired an “English speaking” guide but he might as well as been speaking Spanish because we could only understand every fourth or fifth word. Mostly what we understood him to say was “Remember what I told you!!” while he wagged his finger at us.
The gist of the torture museum is this: the Spanish Inquisition wasn’t just a European event, probably because the Catholic Church. There are a lot of random torture devices in the Palacio de la Inquisicion”, not all of which were used in actual Cartagena. Our guide didn’t care whether the torture instrument he was showing us was used in Munich or in Cartagena, he loved them all. He called the torture museum his “second home” and showed a special affection for the metal spikey claws that would wrap around various body parts of bigamists and witches, squeezing the skin until “POP!” that body part just came right off. “They are size adjustable,” he chortled, looking at me and spreading his hands apart like he was holding a watermelon. “Some witches are larger than others.”
He was nice, though, really. At least he showed up and did his job.
After the torture museum we were hungry, so we stopped into a quaint café for lunch. There wasn’t air conditioning but we thought we could make do with just air from the fans, for the cultural experience. Then we got the menus. Each dish was more than $20 American money which translates to something like 78,000 Colombian Pesos which is not the sort of culture we were looking for. So we left and had lunch in another place without charm, a place with air conditioning and nachos and fried empanadas and Top Chef on the TV and adorable bus boy who kept finding excuses to stand behind the boys so he could watch the finger-video-basketball game they were playing on Toby’s phone.
In the afternoon we took a tour of some of the highlights outside the old city-the “popo” where the saint of Cartagena, the Virgin Candelaria, lives and a monstrous fort, the Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas. The hero of the Convento del Popo is, of course, Candelaria, and the hero of the fort is a man named Blas de Lezo, the might “half man” who, despite missing his left leg, his left eye and his right arm, was able to lead his troops to victory in the battle of Cartagena de Indies between Great Britain and Spain. Mediohombre didn’t have a hook for a hand, just an empty sleeve, but he DID have a peg leg and he was way beyond Captain Hook in badassery because he lived in real life. I can’t get enough of Blas de Lezo. More on him later.
We were feeling quite brave about Cartagena by the time we went to bed on Wednesday night, but that confidence was short lived. Thursday morning the front desk of our hotel informed us that our van transport was arriving at 7:15 instead of 8:00. As you can imagine, this through us into quite a tizzy. Luckily, it didn’t appear until 7:45, so maybe our reputation for lateness preceeds us? The worse part was that I had enough time to down three cups of coffee before we left.
Before we left, I told the boys that the day would be an easy one—a three hour drive to Santa Marta, a colonial town along the coast east, towards Venezuela. The air would be cooler there, I promised, and there would be less people, and less confusion. We would have the afternoon to relax and prepare for our jungle hike.
This was a lie.
Our ride took 5 ½ grueling hours because the driver of the van was doing his best to carry as many passengers and contraband as he could during his run.
We were the first ones on board the ten person minivan, so we were tossed around the back for almost two hours as he accelerated and swerved and cursed his way through the crowded city of Baranquilla, a city with speedbumps on most of its streets. Our Lonely Planet book notes that Baranquilla is a city obsessed with making money, and our driver is clearly a native. He spent most of the drive shouting addresses and obscenities into his phone. He would randomly swerve into a side street where a man would be waiting with a motorbike and a package. Our driver would give the motorbike man money, take the package, and strap it on the top of the van along with our luggage; the long flat parcel marked fragile and the square box labeled “Medical Supplies: Do not Freeze”. The tightly wrapped Styrofoam box that looked like it was transporting body parts, however, he put on top of the console between the front seats and rested his arm on it while he drove.
One man, the one who parked his car sideways in front of us, wanted more money for his package than our driver was willing to give him. When our driver shook his head, the unhappy customer cupped the driver’s pudgy cheek in one hand and gave him a titty twister with the other. It reminded me of Mathew Broderick in “The Freshman”. I think our driver is in over his head.
Our driver was mean and angry and I was afraid that he was going to crash our van into a motorcycle and kill someone. On about hour five, when we were five kilometers outside of Santa Marta, driving about 90 miles an hour while shouting at one of the other passengers in our van, I decided that I hated him, not enough to send him to the Inquisitor for a torture session, but enough that I hope tonight he has terrible heartburn and his wife doesn't get off the couch to fetch him the Milk of Magnesia.
This blog post is unorganized and doesn’t have a theme. The four of us are crowded into our air conditioned hotel room, waiting for the water to turn on so we can take showers, or just maybe use the toilet. Tomorrow we are leaving on a five day hike through the Sierra Nevada mountains to find “Cuidad Perdido” an ancient city. If we lucky, along the way we’ll meet some indigenous people, and maybe some Colombian soldiers who are protecting us from FARQ.
I am totally rat-****-freaking-out about this hike because it has a lot of uphills and mosquitos and river crossings and downhills and trees and wilderness and it’s like camping except we have to walk all day before we get to curl up in our clothes and try to sleep outside. Today I read and re-read information about the trek on TripAdvisor out loud to Guy, hoping he would tell me it was a stupid idea and give me permission to pull the plug on the mission.
“Is this a normal thing that people do?” I asked desperately, after we visited the tour company and the man there told us that A. it’s not really that much cooler in the mountains than it is here and B. why didn’t we have sleeping bags? And C. he’s seen eight year old kids that do this hike so unless my kids aren’t used to walking, he thinks they should be just fine and D. maybe we should hire a mule to carry our stuff. “Aren’t we just a family, having a family vacation, like families do?”
“This is not normal,” Guy said, like he’s already tried this line of reasoning and rejected it. “Nothing about this trip is normal. We left normal in Hood River.
We’ll be back from the hike in five days.