Where the blog left off, I had just arrived in Cartagena. I arrived on the Thursday evening and I had a flight to Panama booked for the following Sunday. For whatever reason I decided to hang around the city for the weekend, and then I kind of got stuck, and didn’t move anywhere until I took the flight to Panama, 10 days later!

I stayed in the Getsemaní district just outside the old city, in a hotel that for about £2 a night was clean and had a ceiling fan. The downside was the partitioning walls were plyboard! That and the area was a haven for druggies, prostitutes and the destitute.

No matter, it was cheap! I spent the week wandering around the city, visiting the various museums etc,. Cartagena de Indias, founded in 1533 by a Spanish commander, Pedro de Heredia, sits on the mouth of Cartagena Bay.

Originally founded as a port where Europeans landed with their merchandise, and in reverse gold and silver were transported back to Spain, the city grew rapidly during the 1500’s. Cartagena is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, due to the walled city and its contents, and the huge fort that sits overlooking the bay.

As I mentioned before I stayed in Getsemaní, about 3 minutes walk to the old walled city and its colonial architecture. The old city is very reminiscent of Oaxaca, and in particular Guanajuato in Mexico, with its narrow streets and colonial style buildings.

The entrance to the city is via the Clock Gate, or Puerta Del Reloj, which then leads out onto the La Plaza de los Coches, which at night fills up with people drinking café or the local brew - Cerveza Aguilla, and watching the world go by. Inevitably there is a festival or music playing somewhere, usually some kind of live steel drum band. Mingled with the music is the clip-clop sound of horses hooves on the paved roads. The horse-drawn carts pass, one after another throughout the evening, trying to attract tourists to take a trip around the city.

I spent most days/evenings either wandering, or sitting in one of the plazas drinking café (or Cerveza Aguilla!). There are a lot of plazas! A lot of the buildings are painted and it seems in whichever colour is on special in the hardware store at the time. This makes Cartagena a very bright place and gives it a lot of its charm. Some of the streets are continuously busy, and others are all but deserted.

As in Taganga, the variety of fruits on offer is superb, and on virtually every corner there is a stall selling some variety of tropical produce, such as papaya, mango, melon and huge avocado pears. There is also a great range of fresh juices on offer in the various ‘loncherias’.

One of the main attractions in Cartagena is El Castillo de San Felipe (The Castle of Saint Filipe). This is a Spanish fort that stands guard over both the city and harbour. This is one of the strongest fortresses ever built by the Spanish in the Americas. Built to guard Cartagena and the Spanish gold from English pirates and war ships, it took over 150 years to complete. It is laden with tunnels leading to and from various places within the walls.

As testament to its strength, in 1741, Cartagena managed to repel an attack by the English Commander, Edward Vernon, who together with 25,000 men and 186 ships, laid the city to siege for three months. His ships cannons were unable to reach the Castillo, which sat high out of range. However the cannons of the Castillo were a little more powerful, and bombarded the English ships whenever they entered the harbour. By the time he gave up the attempted invasion, Vernon had lost over 70 ships and 10,000 men.

Built to protect the city from pirates in times of war, now in peace time some buildings and open spaces have been adapted to suit the modern consumer climate, and modern modes of transport. Incorporated into the city walls, Las Bóvedas are dungeons initially built for military purposes and now house boutiques and tourist shops.

It seems the residents of Cartagena are proud of their flag, as it hangs from a multitude of buildings, from the fort, to the theatre to what seem like private residences.

I took a boat trip out of the city, passing by some of the smaller forts in the mouth of the harbour, and some more modern naval craft. This trip visited a nearby beach, Playa Blanca, which is where the two Dutch guys I had met in Pasto had spent some time the week before I arrived in the city. During their time on the beach, one of them had done some snorkelling and had acquired a very nasty eye infection. A parasite of some kind had managed to bury itself into his cornea and was slowly eating through it. Apparently it was incurable and he was in serious danger losing his sight. He eventually had to return to Holland for a cornea transplant. I never saw him again so I don’t know how everything turned out, but I wish him the best. Also while I was in Cartagena, the football world cup kicked off. I saw England play their first two group games, but I can’t remember who against or what were the scores.

Below are some photos of me in the Castillo de San Felipe. It was a hot day!

I have been thinking about what to do with the website for a while, and in browsing I decided that even before I can think about what to do next I have to finish the first piece and get the rest of the trip journal completed.

I don’t think it will be feasible to write about individual days anymore as my thoughts and memories look to the trip only with nostalgia. I struggle to remember my emotional state on any particular day, therefore to describe thoughts and feelings of those events would not be a true reflection of my thoughts and feelings of the time.

Therefore I will simply write about where I happened to be and when I happened to be there, adding in few photos along the way. Hopefully I will also write a little conclusion at the end with maps and favourite places etc.

There you have it, a very short reintroduction to roylloydjones. All that’s left to do is publish the rest of the trip….

Enjoy…

Check out was 11am. Come 10.45 we rolled out of bed and quickly tried to pack our things up and leave. I decided that I wanted to go to Cartagena and hang around there for the 10 days until my flight to Panama, so it would be goodbye to the Swedes until much later in the year when we had planned to meet up in England to take in some lash action.

We all went to the bus station together where it was a quick goodbye and I jumped aboard a bus to make a two-hour trip to Barranquilla (birthplace of Shakira) where I would need to change buses to reach Cartagena.

The journey itself was uneventful, but my arrival in Barranquilla was a bit of a shambles. As we pulled up to the outskirts of the city there was an unofficial bus station, and the driver of my bus said I could change here for a bus to Cartagena, rather than going all the way into the centre of the city.

Good idea I thought, then my bowels surprised me I was left a little short. Having no public facilities nearby I went off in search of somewhere to drop the load. I soon realised this wasn’t that good an idea. I had all my stuff with me, I was blatantly not from around there, I was in a pretty dodgy area, I was attracting strange looks, and it was pissing down with rain.

Obvious robbery target, I decided I could wait for the toilet, went back to the makeshift bus station and jumped on the first available bus to Cartagena (it so happened there was one there just about to leave) and got the hell out of that place.

The two hours on the bus weren’t the most comfortable, being soaking wet and in need the toilet but overall I reckon its better to be on a bus whist wet, still have all of your possessions, and be in need of the toilet than be on a bus whilst wet, have a few less possessions and have crapped yourself when someone pulled a gun on you and robbed you!

That was my thinking anyway.

I arrived in Cartagena and discovered that the bus terminal is actually about and hour outside the town centre. Therefore I spend another hour on a city bus, reaching the town centre and finding a backpackers hotel. The first one I tried was full but the second one was decent enough with a double bed, fan and clean sheets for 10,000 Pesos a night (£1=4,500 Pesos).

I checked in (used the toilet!) and went out to the balcony to have a look at the street outside. The first person I saw there was a Dutch guy who I had been drinking with in Pasto when we were stuck there a few weeks before. I hadn’t really got on with them when we were in Pasto as I found them to be a little annoying by constantly trying to out-do everyone. I knew what to expect from them on this occasion and I didn’t pay too much attention when they started doing it again.

One of them had been exceptionally unlucky however and was in a pretty bad way. He had been staying at a nearby beach – Playa Blanca – a place similar to Tayrona National Park, and had been snorkelling with contact lenses. Somehow one of the lenses had scratched his cornea and caused a small cut. He had left it a day or so before his return to Cartagena, however in this time his eye had gotten infected and was clouded and he had no vision in the eye.

He had been to the doctor who had prescribed some medication and carried out some tests, but nothing seemed to be working. By the time I arrived he had been wearing an eye patch for a few days, complaining of bad headaches and dizziness. This obviously wasn’t a great predicament for the lad and he was pretty down at the time.

I spent the evening having a chat with the two of them and generally not doing much, before having a much-needed early night for the first time in a while.

Waking up again a little fragile, it was straight into the sea to clear the head. The cooling water worked its magic yet again, and that together with the fruit juices made me feel almost human again.

By early afternoon I was 99% human, having sweated out the rum and I was ready for a few beers on the beach with the Swedes to relax. Pulling a chair from a beach side restaurant and putting into the waters edge, we were able to sunbathe, sit with feet in the sea & drink a beer all in one. Add to that some fine Colombian totty on the beach and it was the perfect day!

It was to be the last full day I spent with the Swedes as they were flying back home from Caracas on Sunday and wanted to make sure that they were in the general vicinity of Caracas (Venezuela) for the weekend, so they had a 20-hour bus journey booked for the following day.

To say adios we of course had a few drinks in the evening and went into Santa Marta again, back to Puerta or Puerto (Still can’t remember which it was!). We bought ourselves a bottle of Gin (random choice but we all fancied a change) and proceeded to get drunk. We soon got talking to a group of Colombian girls and were sharing the bottle around. Everyone ended up pretty sloshed and we all had a decent time. The two girls we originally talked to were a Colombian and a Venezuelan, and they had introduced us to numerous friends of theirs.

It is amazing how a little dip in the sea can clear your head after a night on the rum! For that reason the sea was my first port of call after rolling out of bed mid morning. Then it was fruit smoothie time and more reading and generally doing nothing. The Swedes and I were in surprisingly good form after a few too many the night before, but that was mainly due to our location and the fact that we had absolutely nothing to do for the whole day except sit on the beach and throw the little kids who kept pestering us into the sea.

Fruit smoothies and rum again accompanied the sunset, and the evening ended up pretty much the same as the night before. This time we actually left the building and tried to find somewhere that was open in Santa Marta, but we had no luck and after a long taxi ride around the city we decided to call it a night and ended up back at the hotel.

Aaron and Jon had to get to Bogota for their flight to Rio via Santiago before heading back to England, and they wanted to see a few places in Colombia along the way, so in order to have sufficient time to make it worth stopping and seeing they had to be off. So mid morning the six of us separated for the last time on this trip. We had travelled together off and on since Salta, Argentina in late March, and here we were in the north of Colombia in late May, a huge distance over two months and some great experiences.

After we had said goodbye to Aaron and Jon the day was another relaxing one; spent just chilling out reading a new book! Come the evening it was time to celebrate no more elections and the legal sale of booze, so we bought ourselves a fruit smoothie each and a bottle of rum between the three Swedes and I, before we proceeded to watch the sun setting over the bay whilst sipping our alcoholic fruit smoothies.

Not a day of much action, it was mainly sitting around & reading, interspersed with a dash of swimming and football on the beach. I went out for the obligatory fruit smoothie breakfast and of course the fish lunch, just to break up the hardship of sitting on the beach and relaxing.

I wasn’t planning on going to the cinema but come the time the boys were about to set off I was hankering for a bit of air conditioning, so I went along to the mall in Santa Marta. We watched Clive Owen and Denzel Washington in Inside Man, one of the best films I have seen for a long time. For me about ten times cooler than Oceans Eleven, it is the story of a bank robbery in New York. If you haven’t already seen it, hire it today!

Waking up with enforced freshness (due to no alcohol sales) I made my way to the beach. That took me all of ten seconds as I walked out of my hotel, down 5 steps and there I was. Then it was straight into the water to cool off.

For breakfast I made my way along the small row of shops that passed as the village centre, stopping only when I reached my preferred juice lady. There I ordered a litre of fresh fruit juice (passion fruit) and watched as she cut up the fruit, blended it with ice and served it to me. For only 1,500 (£1 = 4,500 Pesos) I had a beautiful fresh fruit juice breakfast.

I had to keep my t-shirt on during the day as I could feel that I had overexposed the previous few days and didn’t want to fry up in the strong rays of the sun. I therefore tried to stay out of it as much as possible, a task made a lot easier by the bar that lay on the sand, in the shade of the trees.

For some reason the police weren’t enforcing the ban on the sale of the local beer during the day so I sat and had a few whilst reading, now and again taking the time to cool off in the calm waters.

At some point during the afternoon we took the short taxi ride back into Santa Marta to see if anything was open, and we found the local mall doing a small trade. We noticed that the cinema was open and noted the times of Inside Man for the next evening’s entertainment.

The rest of the day wasn’t that eventful, however one thing of note was a great fish lunch for 15,000 Pesos. The owner brought out a platter containing about ten Red Snapper, and asked us to select our desired fish. He then went away, fried it up and served it with a generous portion of coconut-flavoured rice and a normal salad.

In the evening I managed to finish Atlas Shrugged, which was a monumental effort if I do say so myself. To finish took me the best part of two months (although I did read some other, less challenging books in between), and I would say it was up there with Dostoyevsky as one of the most in depth works I have read. The story follows the fortunes (and misfortunes) of a group of corporate and social high fliers, and their struggles against a society and government that punishes excellence and rewards mediocrity.

Considered Ayn Rand’s crowning piece, Atlas Shrugged is a book that takes a lot of perseverance, however it is certainly worth the effort. To anyone who is considering trying to read something other than the usual Dan Brown or Stephen King (I had read about 30 of these kinds of books since starting the trip) and wants a little bit of a challenge, Atlas Shrugged will start you thinking about such ‘interesting’ things as governmental interference in society and its impact, and whether the effects of the interference are actually beneficial to the society it is trying to aid.

Overall, the message portrayed is resoundingly against any kind of governmental interference in society. Ayn Rand argues that forward thinkers and entrepreneurs will create a better system purely through their new ideas and innovations. Inventing some method of production or a new machine will make a task that much easier to accomplish. If a task is that much easier to accomplish, less time needs to be spent on producing the same amount. Therefore the overall saving is time. The time saved can then be spent trying to find ways of improving other things.

Throughout Atlas Shrugged the government are continually trying to create a society where every person in the world is equal. By imposing ludicrous Regulations that are designed to limit the effectiveness of the leading entrepreneurs of individual markets (steel, copper, transport) they set out to achieve their goals. This in effect hinders the hardworking and helps the lazy.

As the story progresses it becomes apparent that as more rules and regulations are imposed, the less efficient all production and the free-markets become, meaning that the policies introduced by government have totally the opposite effect to their intention.

English lesson over, that was my quick synopsis and review of one of the main issues in the book, however it covers a whole spectrum of social, political, financial and personal issues which revolve around the disintegration of a social system.

In reality after getting to bed at 5am, an 8am start was never going to happen. I thought we all did well to get up at 9am and start preparations for our trip to Parque Nacional Tayrona, the pristine Caribbean beach where we would be kicking back and relaxing for the next few days whilst the elections were going on.

Things weren’t going entirely well, the immense heat, humidity and 3 hours drunk sleep weren’t conducive to productive activity. It took us about two hours to work out what we needed, go to the supermarket, wander around for a bit, buy our food and provisions for the next few days, wander about some more, pack our things and catch a taxi to the park entrance.

The taxi turned out to be a bit of a nightmare as well, as it couldn’t cope with 4 lads and all the shopping and beach stuff, so it just gave up the ghost, forcing us to make a quick substitution. After a little delay we got going and drove the half hour to the entrance of Tayrona.

Co-incidentally for the second time in as many weeks, at the entrance to the Park we bumped into the Swedes and Jon, so the six of us were all back together for the Swedes last few days in the sun before they headed back to Sweden and real life.

There are two ways to get into the Parque Tayrona, the legal way and the illegal way. The legal way (the way we opted for) involved getting a taxi to the entrance, paying an entrance fee of about 20,000 Pesos (£1 = 4,500 Pesos), and then walking for about an hour and a half through the jungle to the beach where we would be staying. The illegal way involves getting on a boat for about 25,000 Pesos, not paying an entrance fee, and sitting in a boat for about an hour and a half before landing on the beach where we would be staying.

20 minutes into walking through the jungle in about 1,000% humidity, literally melting with sweat, carrying about 15kg worth of food and other stuff, I began to wish we had taken the illegal option.

I had bought a 5 litre bottle of water with me, which in itself weighed 5kgs, not helping matters. I think that I probably sweated out as much water as I drank just to reach the beach, and I arrived with only about 2 litres left.

Arriving was one of the best moments ever! We rented hammocks, hung them, minced about for a minute then got ourselves straight into the sea to cool off. That dip in the Caribbean after walking through the tropical jungle for 90 minutes was an absolute pleasure.

After cooling off for a bit it was time to get down to the serious business of doing absolutely nothing for the planned 5 days I was to stay there. My routine was to be something like:

Get up, breakfast, swim in the sea, lay on the beach, have lunch, read, swim in the sea, play some beach games, swim in the sea, have some dinner, watch the sun setting, drink some rum, talk some crap, listen to some music on someone’s iPod, sleep in a hammock, before doing it all over again the next day.

The beach was simply amazing. White sands, crystal clear blue waters, with deep green jungle covered slopes leading sharply up to the tops of the hills in the background. The photos I took don’t really do it justice.

To get from one beach to another meant a walk through the jungle. The beaches were very different, even when they were only separated by a few hundred metres of jungle. Around one bend a small cove would mean the sea was calm and flat, whereas if the beach was long and wide the waves came crashing in from the Caribbean Sea.

Overall we spent three days doing nothing on that beach. The boys decided to head back to a small fishing village just outside Santa Marta and I decided that as it was their last weekend I would go with them and see them off.

So Friday afternoon came and we all caught a small motorboat back to the village of Taganga. We still had no idea if we would be able to do anything or buy anything due to the elections but we decided to take the risk.

As we made the 90 minutes journey from Tayrona to Taganga bobbing along on the open waters, we watched the sun going down over the sea and the cliffs and jungle-covered mountains, in what for me was one of the most tranquil experiences of my whole trip. It was a very contemplative moment; one of those unplanned times when there is nothing in the world you would rather be doing at that particular time, than sitting in a tiny wooden boat with the hum of the motor, the motion of the waves and the sea, some spectacular scenery and all the while the sun setting over the water.

We docked in the natural harbour of Taganga as the sun had set and darkness was fast approaching, walked 200m along the beach and checked into Casa Blanca, the hotel on the beach that looked out over the harbour. We lucked in and scored a room complete with private balcony.

After checking out the hotel and sitting watching the harbour and kids playing football on the floodlit beach for a while we went our for a traditional meal of burger and chips in one of the local restaurants before heading back to the hotel for a quiet night.

I woke up about 8am and we were still moving. Apparently we had suffered no more hold ups and we were progressing nicely. The bad news was that we had been held up for about 3 hours, which meant that instead of 22 hours it would take 25 hours. But what is 3 hours between friends!

When I woke up I decided I needed a change from Atlas Shrugged, so read Of Mice and Men. All I can say is I think the Valium hadn’t worn off because I cant remember a thing about that book!

From 8am when I woke up, until about 5pm, we sat on that bus looking out of the window and reading. We were late and it began to feel like we were never going to arrive. By this time we had been on the bus for 26 hours. Eventually we reached Barranquilla (birthplace of Shakira) where we changed buses to head to Santa Marta. Getting to Santa Marta took another 2 hours. By the time we reached a hostel we had been travelling form 3pm Monday to 7pm Tuesday. 28 hours.

So naturally you would assume we would just head straight to bed. Wrong. We got into the hostel and everyone was preparing to have a party. Not people to miss out on a good old-fashioned knees up, we bought some beers from the hostel bar and commenced the evenings activities.

After a few rounds of the local firewater, a beer named Brahva, which at 6.5% is a pretty good way to blow your head off, we made for a local nightspot, guided by the girl who worked in the reception. We arrived at a bar that reminded me of a cross between the old Birdbrook Tavern and Vita in Sudbury and all settled down with some more of the local brew. The bar happened to be empty apart from the eight or so of us, and about 15 prostitutes with pimps in tow. Trying to convince us to part with some of our hard earned for a sample of their services, they quickly flocked around. I tried my hardest to convince Aaron to pay the quoted price of 30,000 Pesos (£1 = 4,500 Pesos) for a night with the best looking one, but he totally refused.

On these occasions there is always one lads the girls pick on, and this time it was a poor American lad who got the full attention of the big black mama who was giving him the hard sell, grinding away in front of him, pulling him out of his seat and making him gyrate with her in the middle of an empty dance floor. We all had a great laugh at this lad who just couldn’t get rid of her no matter how hard he tried.

By about 4am it was time to call it a night and we all made our way back to the hostel, where some sleep was needed if we were going to make it up by 8am to go to camping on the beach for a few days.