It's just a flesh wound!

Cartagena de Indias :: Colombia

"This reminds me of a Caribbean beach" - Canadian backpacker on Playa Blanca, a Caribbean beach.

Places: Cartagena de Indias, Islas de Rosario & Playa Blanca.

Coolest thing I did: The boat ride back from Rosario and Playa Blanca, where the driver seemed to think safety wasn't that important and decided to see just how fast he could go over the massive waves. Better than any roller coaster.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Just to be different here in Colombia they don't use the word gringo to describe the whities, but rather mono, which I think means monkey.

For some reason when I heard that Cartagena was on the Caribbean sea I assumed it would also have beaches you could swim in. This wasn't a great assumption. However, what you do get from Colombia's second oldest surviving Spanish settlement is a whole heaping spoon of colonial history and old buildings. Due to the rise of tourism in the wake of Colombia's newfound security the old walls and buildings have been lovingly (if not historically accurately) restored to their former glory. This is really about looking at a town that has been living within it's history for centuries and is now going about using it for something useful. Instead of trying to dress everyone up in costume and pretend it's the late 1500s the city walls have been converted into working markets, bars and nightclubs and you don't get the same feeling of total sanitisation I got in central Salvador.

This leads to interesting accidents, like Cartagena being home to what must be the world's most beautiful welfare office, so the people who come to collect their dole cheques do so in the courtyard garden of an old colonial casa. A far cry from Centrelink at Blacktown.

In order to show there is some new culture as well as the old a fair proportion of the world of local sculptor Edgardo Carmona has been dropped into the squares either side of the Naval Museum (which I didn't go into). He seems to be into flat surfaces and hard lines, but his subjects, like the bunch of old guys playing dominoes or the fruit seller with the basket of pineapples on her head have the look of rusty robots. There is also a single lone Botero gorda who is nude and lounges on her side looking directly into the entrance of one of the many city churches. It's a nice, irreverent contrast.

Of all the history probably the forts are the bit I found most interesting, mostly because I hadn't seen them anywhere else on these trips. The most impressive of these is Castillo de San Felipe, whose cannons now point menacingly out at the high rise apartment blocks of the rich peninsula Bocagrande. It's massively thick walls are filled with tunnels that are designed in such a way that shouts are amplified along their length (a good design feature before walkie talkies and mobile phones) and was part of a fire signal system designed to warn of attack to sister forts all up and down the coast. All this became necessary due to the fact that Cartegena was shipping massive amounts of gold plundered from the interior and the English had a fairly lax tolerance of it's nationals becoming pirates and taking said gold.

One of the most notable was Sir Francis Drake, a favourite of the first Queen Betty. Having already made himself unpopular with the Spanish by doing such things as plundering Panama for it's gold and silver, Frank (as he was known to his mates) became a large part of the English defeat of the Spanish Armada. As part of this first actions in this fracas Frank sailed to the New World, put Cartagena to the sword and ransomed it back to the Spanish crown for as much gold as he could carry. It was a direct result of this kind of chicanery from the English that Castillo de San Felipe, with walls sloped to deflect cannon balls like a stealth bomber deflects radar, was built.

In the 1700s the British tried to take Cartagena for good, and it's forts were under the control of one Don Blas de Lezo, who was already the veteran of many battles. This showed mostly due to the fact that Donny B had already at this point lost one arm, one leg and an eye. For some reason this brings to mind Monty Python and the Holy Gail and the Black Knight yelling out "It's just a flesh wound!". So the British fleet of 180 ships attacked and despite Donny B being wounded in this thigh and remaining arm the Spanish managed to ward off the British until they had no choice but to retreat back to Jamaica. There's a statue out the front of the Castillo that makes you assume that every pirate in fiction is somehow based on Donny B.

So my day trip out to find salt water I could swim in was to the Islas de Rosario, which are about 2 hours from Cartagena by speed boat, a bit quicker when driven by the complete lunatic we had. When you get there the options are to visit the aquarium (which all the old people did) or to go snorkelling in some of the clearest water I've ever seen. Despite the fact the Caribbean sea breaks directly over the reef there's still large schools of colourful fish to see. I was lucky enough to spot a barracuda, but beyond that it's only little fellas. The coral, unfortunately has been heat bleached and also seems to have taken it's fair share of tourist kickings. For some reason you never get to rent fins out here, which means the many tourists who can't seem to swim end up standing on all the coral and breaking it. People do dive here too, but I hear it's had many of the same problems. Still, it's nice to get out there and swim with the fish in bathtub temperature water.

The other story worth relaying is the fact that there's lots of little islands big enough for a single house, one of which is the ruin of the mansion once owned by Pablo Escobar. It's apparently still ransacked in the hope of finding a modern day version of the pirate legend, for many still say that somewhere on the island is Pablo's Gold. Of course, most of that went into numbered accounts in Panama (apparently a key factor in Papa Bush invading Panama in 1989 was to cut off the money laundering done there by the Colombian cartels) but that doesn't stop the chancers.

Landing on Playa Blanca you get the feeling you've found the most perfect stereotype of what a Caribbean beach is supposed to look like, with it's white sand, palm trees and water so clear it looks like the boats are embedded in the surface of someone's coffee table. What also becomes clear is that during the peak of the high season it must be absolutely rammed, with huts and shacks selling food lining the entire beach. Being there on a Tuesday most of them were closed, but it's also dawned on me that they probably aren't all open on a weekend at the moment, as someone I've drifted out of high season and into spring. While I wasn't looking the needle on my tank of time on the road has drifted well past half way. I'd say this could me my last stop on the beach. With hindsight I could have slept overnight at Playa Blanca, but I only realised that when I got there so it was a little late.

That would have been a good idea because after spending a morning people watching the extreme heat has forced me back indoors in the middle of the day. This last day of just lazing around the place drinking coffee has given me time to watch what the Colombians sell to each other, rather than what they try and sell to us. In all the cities have been people carrying around boxes of bashed up looking old Nokias and a sign "llamadas celulares 200", which I've since worked out is why there aren't any payphones left in most places here. It seems these people rent out these phones by the minute to anyone with 200 pesos (about 10c), but in the big cities they take the precaution of tying the phones to their wrist first. It also seems the guys that sell cigarettes and gum (and usually can source bad quality cocaine) to the monos also sell single cigarettes to the Colombians with free use of a lighter. I guess it's like the poorer parts of the US, where people buy loosies so they don't have to have everyone bludge cigarettes off them if they buy a whole pack, even though it's much more expensive to buy them one at a time.

So my plan now is to head 2 hours to the north tomorrow to Santa Marta and it's little beachside suburb of Taganga. The idea is to then arrange to go on the six day trek to Ciudad Perdida (the lost city), which used to be quite dangerous in the early 2000s (see this bloke who got kidnapped by the ELN back in 2003) but is pretty must standard fare now. It was funny, but when I was looking for that article Google also threw up an early article in the Guardian (same newspaper) travel section telling people about the trek only a few months before the kidnapping took place. I wonder if the kidnappees read it too...?

Ski Instructor

Cartagena de Indias :: Colombia

Only one of the many euphemisms used to sell gringos Bolivian marching powder in this country.

Places: Medellin & Cartagena de Indias.

CoolestStrangest thing I did: Had my picture taken behind the window bars of one of Pablo Escobar's old city pads with his only surviving brother, Roberto.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The yellow stripe on the Colombian flag is bigger than the others, to represent just how much gold they have (or possibly had, as I guess a load of it is busy decorating churches in Spain these days).

Coming into Medellin by night (you know, because your bus journey is 5 hours longer than it was supposed to be) you can see nothing but a constellation of lights consuming both sides of a steep valley, which is only a hint at just how far from it's centre up the valley walls it's grown. During the daylight hours you can see the same terracotta and concrete cinder block construction that characterises the favellas of Rio, showing that urban slums are pretty much a common feature of all growing developing world cities. I'd been told to expect Medellin to be a much easier city to love than Bogota but outside El Poblado, the swankier part of town holding the shopping centres and nightclubs I found it a fair bit more threatening and unattractive than the capital. The thing is, you can see the area around the centre where some more of Botero's best statues of gordos/gordas (fatties) might have been nice if it wasn't overrun with dudes forcing panama hats on you using standover tactics.

Botero is a Medellin native and some of the best work of the cities favourite son (as opposed to it's more famous sons for the wrong reasons) is dotted around the place. I especially liked the fat Roman soldier, and the fat Sphinx. The most famous is the Parrot of Peace (the man was once obsessed with parrots), which used to stand on it's own but now has a twin that is twisted as if it's exploded, in memory of victims of one of Medellin's many car bombs. During the late 80s and early 90s Medellin spent over a decade at the top of the world league tables for world's most dangerous city and though that title has since moved on to Central America (Honduras now holds the title) along with the pointy end of the drug trade violence has left it's mark on the popular image of the city.

You simply can't tell the modern story of Colombia in general and Medellin in particular without talking about it's most famous export: cocaine. Just the same, you can't tell the story of cocaine in Colombia without talking about the countries most famous corpse: Pablo Escobar. During the rise of cocaine as a glamour drug in the US in the 70s, but especially with the rise of crack in the 80s Escobar headed the Medellin Cartel and pretty much controlled most of the supply side, making Forbes once estimate he would be the world's 7th richest man on their Rich List. He dabbled in politics (mostly to avoid being extradited to the US on trafficking charges), funded right wing paramilitaries to stop the FARC from kidnapping his people and kept Medellin under his violent thumb right up until his untimely death in a hail of bullets in 1993. His cartel gave the world such inventions as the Colombian Neck Tie, the creative use of chainsaws in punishment of their enemies (that gave rise to a fairly gruesome scene in Scarface and gave a market to the uniquely Colombian trade of motorcycle pillion mounted hitmen, who would ride up to a target in Medellin's terrible traffic and put 3 bullets in someone's face for about $30. They controlled the drug trade simply by the face they were willing to do what their competitors would not.

The Pablo Escobar tour is now run by his younger brother Roberto, who due to a letter bomb incident in prison now has replacement corneas and is pretty much deaf so you're not always sure he knows where he is. After Pablo's grave they take you to one of Pablo's old city houses where Roberto now lives full of blown up pictures of his brother in jail and getting out of his private jet so tourists have something to take photos of. It's an entirely strange setup, but apparently he wanted to stop other people using the family name so despite not actually needing the money he does it to fund the Escobar AIDS charity. Years ago I read the book Killing Pablo which is about how the end came about and based on that alone I think the tour gives a slightly sanitised version of the truth, but it's at least not totally one sided or tries to pretend Pablo was a misunderstood Robin Hood figure. He did fund housing for the poor, and was instrumental in funding the Colombian football teams' rise to the 1994 World Cup, (which unfortunately led to the death of team captain Andres Escobar, who is no relation, after an own goal) but that hardly makes up for turning a country into a war zone for 25 years.

After the death of Pablo Escobar things got really, really bad in Medellin, as the Cali cartel took over the drug trade every part time hood tried to claim the crown of King of Medellin and the streets ran red with blood. There is footage of drug traffickers fighting the police in armoured cars - only it's the traffickers with the light tanks. It was that bad. It's hard to imagine just how bad it was when you're able to walk the streets now and the worst you have to experience is poor people shoving their babies in your face as you walk by.

The only other seriously touristy thing I did was to get out of town for the day to the town of Guatape, which spreads over a whole load of islands in a beautiful lake and climb La Piedra de El Penol which is a rock strangely similar to the Sugar Loaf in Rio to get a view over it all. Instead of a cable car they have some fairly utilitarian looking stairs that seem to have been built by the same people who make all the slums on the hills of Medellin. The view is spectacular over the lakes, but you're constantly reminded it's a militarized town by the fact Blackhawk helicopters keep buzzing you the whole time.

What most tourists are in Medellin to do, however, is party. I was told legends of it's nightlife from far and wide since I've been in South America but to be honest, with the honourable exception of the rooftop pool bar I ended up in after St Patrick's Day I found most of the clubs and bars to be full of under-age kids and prostitutes. I'd also heard of the legendary beauty of Medellin's women, but unless you're really into improbable feats of silicone engineering I wouldn't expect to be bowled over. I do suspect it is vastly improved by two things: local knowledge and a lot of cocaine.

Despite the fact Colombians seem to want nothing to do with cocaine themselves, probably due to the havoc it's wreaked on their country throughout it's modern history, coke is both readily available and cheap. If you don't want to buy it from the guys selling gum at 2am (hmmm) then you simply have to sit in any tourist friendly hostel or cafe looking vaguely gringo-ish and someone is sure to come and give you a card advertising something along the lines of "snowmobile repairs". While most of the gringos dabble in it I've found the young Aussie kids to be by far the consumption kings here. I suspect that may be due to the fact the price for a gram is $10 rather than $350, which also explains the zombie like behaviour you see around the hostel pool every morning as people are trying desperately to come down enough to sleep. That alone makes me not want to have anything to do with it, not to mention having the high chance of coming into contact with a totally corrupt foreign police force or the moral argument that you're also helping fund violence in both Colombia and all through the trade route to the US via Mexico and Central America.

This kind of neatly exposes the view of the drug trade from the view of places like Colombia, and now especially Northern Mexico, which is experiencing something like a low level civil war at the moment for control of the export routes into the US. The growing and transit countries seem to be fully aware that while the Western world consumes all the drugs, it's the growing, processing and transit countries that suffer most of the violence (with the honourable exception of New York and LA during the Regan era when the crack epidemic got way out of hand). The Presidents of several Latin American countries have recently mused openly about what their countries would look like if the US legalised drugs, even though they know there's little hope of that ever happening. The simple truth is cocaine became the most valuable commodity in the world mostly because it's illegal in the places 90-odd% of it is consumed. It's not an easy problem to solve.

So after spending St Patrick's Day with Irish people trying to kill me with beer I've moved on the night bus to Cartagena, one of the oldest cities in the Spanish New World as the gateway to the Colombian Caribbean. I've mostly spent today wandering around feeling like I'm jetlagged so I'll write on that once I've given it a fair shake.