Day 5- Cartegena, Columbia

Cartegena Columbia! Never in my life did I think I would ever walk down the streets of Columbia- but I did! It was amazing!

As we walked out the port they had this cool Aviary with the most beautiful birds!

Notice the sweat- it was so flipping hot there!!

Before we left the ship in Cartegena we found out which Taxi's were the reliable ones to take. As soon as we walked out the door of the port we were again bombarded with people wanting us to take a tour with them. We quickly found the taxi drivers with the blue shirts and they had a negotiator waiting to get people hooked up with Taxi's. He asked us where we wanted to go and we told him the wall. We had heard there was a wall around the old city that you can walk on and see everything you would want to see. He told us $15 and sent us on our way. This was less than we had been told to expect so we thought we were starting off pretty well (little did we know...). We got in the beat-up Dae Woo (huh) and headed into the old city. We quickly began to fear for our lives as there are NO traffic laws in Columbia! We were driving down a one lane road with 2-3 cars trying to fit and motorcycles squeezing in between the cars wherever they could! Holy crap!! I seriously am surprised we made it in one piece!! Everyone is cutting each other off and there is constant honking! Our driver, who only spoke Spanish, was pointing out the interesting landmarks. He pointed out an old Fort built in the 1500's and asked if we wanted to go there. We thought it sounded interesting so we said yes. (Of course since he spoke Spanish and we don't this was all done with hand gestures and guesswork-lol) When we got there he said he would wait for us. We had been told to expect this so we said ok. It was a very interesting place although it would have been nice to get something with our tickets that told more history about the place.

There was a long tunnel that went waaayyyy down into the ground that Shawn was following. It was too creepy to me and I was getting claustrophobic so I just waited at the top. He said he could hear water dripping and it just kept going down, down, down- he finally gave up and came back up. I also must say this is the hottest, humidest place I have ever been in my life! I'm not even that wet when I'm in the shower! We were sweating places we didn't even know you could sweat! Yes, it was THAT hot!

This was a midget policeman. Just kidding-haha-he was just much shorter than us! There were police everywhere. Contrary to popular belief, Cartegena is actually a very safe city as long as you stay in the tourist areas (because of all the police around I'm sure).

There were tons of people there trying to sell souvenirs. It was crazy, they hounded you every step of the way and as we came down they were all saying "Remember me, you buy something from me??" It was actually pretty sad. We did end up buying a couple of t-shirts and this one guy kept trying to sell Shawn some jewelry for me. It was a very pretty silver necklace- it started out at $18, I said I didn't need it and he added matching earrings and dropped the price to $15, I still said no, he added another pair of earrings and dropped the price to $12, I said nothing and he dropped the price to $10. I'm sure if we stood there longer the price would have gone down more but it really was a good deal and Shawn couldn't resist anymore. It was so sad to see the poor people begging! As we got to the bottom of the hill we came upon this round little black woman yelling "NO" every time someone started to ask her to buy something. It was so funny! We decided to follow her out because she was quite the deterrent!

When we finished at the fort we headed off to the wall.

When we finally got there (without dying!) our driver dumped us out in the middle of this shopping market where they were selling everything you could imagine. Then he sends his cohort over who spoke English to tell us that our original price was only for one stop- now there had been two so it was $50. HA! No way were we paying that! Shawn negotiated around for awhile and got it down to $40- which was still less than they told us to expect on the ship. We went and walked the wall for awhile and ventured down some city streets to see some sights.

This is us sweating our guts out in the Taxi.

When we were finally done walking around and were ready to go back to the ship we went and found our Taxi driver who was blocked in by a shuttle bus that had no one in it (that was parked in the roadway!). He started honking the horn of the bus until someone came out and moved it. He then proceeded to drive us back to the ship- we thought. When we finally came to a stop it was at ANOTHER shopping marked. We were so tired and hot we just wanted to go back to the ship. We were trying to tell him - No shopping! We want to go back to the ship. - He wasn't really understanding us until Shawn got really frustrated and said- Ship, TOOT, TOOT! while doing hand gestures of a ship leaving port. The driver finally understood- Oh, Ship! I was seriously trying not to laugh because it was so funny but Shawn was so frustrated it wouldn't have been good for me to laugh then. But we laughed about it later- yes we did- we laughed our guts out later as I was describing the scene to him- so dang funny!!! A couple of blocks before the pier the car stalled and we were sure we had ran out of gas because the gauge was on empty. The driver got it started again though and we were never so glad to be back!

We stopped in the port to have a nice passion fruit smoothie because we were so dang hot and dehydrated! It was so yummy! We watched them make it from fresh fruits and no, we did not get sick from drinking something in a foreign country! :)

This was a pirate ship replica that we could have gone on a tour around the harbor in. Some of our friends did and they said it was a lot of fun.
Here we are leaving Columbia- such a pretty place.
Here we are that night after nice cold showers. It was a very neat day in Cartegena! I am going to have to rent Romancing the Stone now for Shawn to watch- can you believe he's never seen it???

PS- I did add a few forgotten stories to the Aruba post so if you don't know about the "box" then you missed it. :)