Cartagena

After a weekend in Medellin we decided to take our first internal flight of the trip. After looking into the possibility of a 16 hour bus to the north coast, the decision to take a short flight was the obvious answer.

We landed in Cartagena in the evening, being greeted by the heat of the Caribbean coast. As we landed around 9pm the temperature was about 30 degrees. Everyone we had talked to before arriving at Cartagena warned us we needed to get air conditioning in our hostel room. How right they were with the temperatures rising to high 30’s in the daytime.

On our first day in Cartagena we explored the old walled city, walking around trying to find some shade wherever we could. Due to the fact it was also Easter weekend there were lots of festivities taking place with food markets and stages ready for the evening. Here we grabbed some fresh seafood and spent the rest of the afternoon seeing what Cartagena had to offer.

An hour away from Cartagena is a small mud volcano named volcan de Totumo. Here we took a half a day excursion by mini bus. Once we arrived we quickly got into our swimming costumes and bathed in the mud. Apparently the mud is meant to be very good for your skin. Whilst in the mud bath you can’t feel the floor and are seamlessly floating around. In the mud bath there are also locals who earn money from massaging the tourists. It was all a very surreal experience.

After around 45 minutes in the mud we headed to a nearby lake to wash the mud off. Here we were also flocked by locals trying to earn a few peso in trying to help get you clean from the mud.

The following day we headed out on a boat trip which navigated around 5 of the small rosario islands off the coast of Cartagena. We boarded a small speedboat and off we went with our first stop being the wreckage of an old plane belonging to Pablo Escobar. Apparently one used to smuggle drugs into the United States. Here we had around 45 mins to snorkel down to the wreckage and see some fish. Whilst there were some coral reefs here they had mostly been damaged but were still very cool to see.

Once we’d finished snorkelling we headed to an island named Cholon, a party island where we drank cocktails and ate some ceviche. Floating around where we were having some drinks was a man selling oysters. We couldn’t not say yes to half a plate of fresh oysters shucked in right front of our eyes.

The rest of the afternoon was spent visiting two more of the islands where we had lunch and watched the sunset from the beach.