Escape from Cartagena

We're not in Cundinamarca anymore.

Impossibly, there is still more to be said about Colombia. I believe I left off a day or two ago somewhere around Puerto Colombia, and I will, surprisingly, pick up the story sequentially (as far as I can recall). Rising at the unholy hour of 6:00, Emanuel and I left the house in Barranquilla one morning to take another bus, specially chartered and priced for tourists, to the neighboring city of Cartagena, the famous colonial gem and cruise ship-magnet.

Arriving a few hours later, we worked our way from the bus terminal to the walled, colonial portion of the city, a process slowed by the frequent pauses we took to photograph the sparkling sea on our right, the modern skyline before us, and the enormous stone wall to our left, until at last we reached the gateway to enter the preserved ‘city within the wall.’

Taking a lap around the fortified sea wall, squinting into the reflection of the sun off the water, we finally descended into the narrow streets that recalled the best of Barcelona, though somehow more tropical and much, much warmer. If not for Emanuel’s inherent sense of direction and the fact that I’d made him promise to keep us on schedule, I could’ve easily and happily gone lost in those streets. But late morning had somehow worked itself into mid-afternoon, and so, with one last stop at one of the many vendors so accustomed to tourists, I purchased my first Cartagena souvenir, a woven and beaded bracelet (Emanuel, too, purchased one, so I know that even domestic tourists were susceptible to souvenir impulse buys) in gold, blue, and red and a bottle of Sprite (in an effervescent lemon-lime color).

The colonial streets of Cartagena.

On foot, we set off for the Castillo San Felipe de Barajas, a fortress more than a castle, set on top of a steep hill overlooking the city. Legs aching, we climbed up the winding, paved road, not so extremely steep as it was unrelenting, to the gate. Much to my eternal regret, the Castillo was also the location where my camera decided it had had enough of my dragging it to the ends of the earth and would no longer record anything beyond blinding shots of washed-out white light, something like a near-death vision, and not at all resembling the Castillo around us. Forced to enjoy the panorama with my own eyes rather than from behind a camera, I continued on, following Emanuel from the blinding sun into a series of staircases and tunnels, disorienting in their complete darkness, and out of which, I’m convinced, we found our way only by following the voices of the Spanish couple in front of us.

Meandering back to the more commercial (fine, the less cheap-tourist-crap and more restaurant-oriented) area of the city, we stopped for dinner, seated under a canopy at a crowd of tables where Emanual purchased some combination of fried sausage-things and arepas (fried cornflour cakes made with cheese and usually butter — no calories, though) while I retrieved soft drinks from the refrigerated case in the corner.

Attempting to return to Barranquilla from Cartagena provided slightly more difficult than it had been to arrive, as our bus was unable to provide transport for one of the dozens of rumored reasons overheard — it was broken down on the road, there were rocks blocking the road, there was water flooding the road, there was no road left — the take-away here is that there was no bus. A fleet of smaller vans, run by competing companies and enterprising, quick-to-react drivers were available for our transportation back to Barranquilla, but at that hour of the evening, most of the vehicles were already gone. Unfortunately, there were a greater number of stranded travelers with useless return tickets than there was space in the vans, even with the creative Colombian seating arrangements. The departing van drivers promised to return for the rest of us in a matter of hours. Emanuel, determined not to spend a night in Cartagena staring at the inside of a bus terminal, begged pardon and took off for unknown watering holes, saying he’d find his way back in the morning. I remained behind, straggling behind the rest of the stranded passengers as we moved from the gate to the bus station parking lot. An hour later, when the station closed, we headed in a long, tired line to a gas station across the street where we hoped the van drivers would find us upon their return. I sat, somehow glad for the unprecedented solitude of being among only strangers after having spent the week in the generous, but (as a result of the presence of Emanuel and myself) tightly packed home of our hosts. Munching on dried salted plantains, I opened my journal and proceeded to write long and hard while the Cartagena traffic passed through the gas station and the surrounding streets.

At long last, the vans returned, and we piled in under the harsh orange light of the street lamps, heading off into the darkened road that led

This is what my camera decided to start doing at the end of the trip.

outside the city. The wind whipped through the open windows, the quiet of conversation dying down into the soft, even sounds of breathing, and I sat, surprisingly comfortable between the driver and another passenger in the front seat, watching the dark land sweep past on either side of us. A favorite part of travel for me had become those short, overland trips by night or in the late evening, the windows open to the warm air that swept in, the sky bright with the deep violets and oranges of sunset or the stars themselves. The sounds of insects and water and wind, muted conversations, isolated lights passing by outside — what I enjoy most about these trips is being able to feel a place more than you can see it, like the place becomes impossible not to know when its own inhabitants have drifted off to sleep.

The peace of the trip evanesced suddenly upon our return to Barranquilla in the early hours of the morning, when, in my half-entranced state, I missed the stop where I should’ve disembarked. As the last of the other travelers departed and the driver asked me where I needed to be, it turned out that we were on the opposite side of the city. At 2:00am. The driver, however, needed to go back in that direction anyway to drop off the van, and so had no problem with transporting me along. In the conversation that followed, the driver inquired about my travel plans, my occupation, and my nationality and proceeded to tell me that there was something about American women, las estadounidenses, that he’d always admired, always had a weakness for, and did I have any weaknesses? In what I’m almost convinced was a worryingly large circle around our actual destination, I alternated between self-loathing for missing my stop and wondering if I was about to be kidnapped by a short, pudgy 55-year-old van driver, whom I continually reassured that my friends were indeed waiting for me, telling not-quite-truths and hoping his repeated questions didn’t mean he’d seen through them. The intensity of my discomfort never actually spilled over into fear — he was, I’m pretty sure, just optimistically forward, as I’ve learned older men in Latin America have a tendency to be toward young women — but I was intensely glad when we reached our destination and I could gracefully bolt from the van.

Emanuel returned, as promised, the next morning, and in another massive bus that, much to my surprise, was able to ford what was at least four feet of water over the road, we returned to the center of the country. Another month, and as I’ve said, I was gone from Colombia, but always glad to have braved the rains and the van drivers to visit la Costa.