“Change is not made without inconvenience.”
Samuel Johnson
Colombia had always been the place where problems were most likely to arise. After all, the first thing that springs to people’s minds, when you mention the place, is the drugs trade. It’s about the one thing that it’s famous for - maybe one of two if you count coffee. The trouble is that the production of drugs is so ingrained into the culture and economics of the country that it’s very hard to do anything meaningful about it despite the efforts of either the Colombian Government or the US Government who would dearly love to stamp out the trade completely. Lately things had been getting worse, much worse, especially in the central and southern parts of the country. Advice about Colombia was not to go there and if you have to go there don’t go south and if you have to go south don’t do it by overlanding, fly. While the advice about El Salvador had been too extreme this was perfectly sensible. The result was that overlanding companies were taking the advice and not going through Colombia. Unfortunately that was exactly what my plans called for. I was to fly on to Cartagena from Panama City pick up a truck and head south. Dragoman cancelled the leg of the trip and substituted a completely new itinerary which involved an extended stay in Cartagena on Colombia’s north coast - just about the only safe part of the country - a flight direct to Quito in Ecuador and then a trip up into the jungle and to the Otovalo market. It was a very good substitute and of no use to me whatsoever. I already had trips into the jungle and to Otovalo booked with another company. I rather reluctantly decided to leave the trip at Quito and stay in the city for the several weeks until I was ready to move on again. I wasn’t terribly pleased to find out that in spite of the complete change of itinerary I was leaving the trip of my own accord and not entitled to any refund of the money I had paid. It seemed very unfair but as I had already spent several weeks of fruitless e-mails pleading my case I was finally forced to accept it as the way things were.
First though I had my stay in Cartagena.
Cartagena is an odd place. It looks as if it has been assembled piecemeal from the left over bits of other cities. It has over half a million people but if you discount the suburbs - using the word loosely - its heart is quite small. You can comfortably walk around the whole perimeter in a few hours. This compactness is one of the things that gives it a strange feel. All cities, as I’ve remarked before, have good areas and bad areas, business areas and residential areas, smart areas and shabby areas. However whereas in most cities they merge gradually into each other so that the transition becomes all but invisible, in Cartagena it happens between one step and the next.
The Old City districts of Centro and San Diego are a labyrinth of quaint narrow streets lined with buildings whose balconies hang out over the stalls of the street vendors. Pedestrians are forced by the number of those stalls and by the press of the people into dangerous games of chicken with the cars and motorcycles that hurtle with suicidal - or perhaps homicidal - abandon around the confusing one-way system. The streets open out unexpectedly onto wide courtyards with massively impressive colonial buildings. Even the Plaza de Coches, notorious for its thieves, pickpockets and dishonest money changers, looks appealing with the rows of artisan shops and tiny restaurants tucked under the colonnade that faces the clock tower and the city wall.
Step under the arches though and it's another world. Beyond the city wall is the narrow commercial strip known as La Mantuna. The buildings are modern, the road works ubiquitous and the people hurried and preoccupied. Two blocks further on and it all changes again. This is Getsemeni but a less garden like place is hard to imagine. Superficially the buildings resemble those in the quaint part of the Old City but they are shabby and tumble-down. No-one has looked after them and no-one here cares very much for tourists. The people are aggressive and unfriendly. If you race through the area and over the bridge towards the fort - one of the major tourist attractions - things get even worse. Here the buildings are mainly corrugated tin and wood. It's scarcely more than a shanty town.
From the walls of the fort you can look out across the whole city, this perspective making the separate sections even more obvious, as clearly and distinctly differentiated as the squares on a chessboard. Away to the left is the final part of town, Bocagrande, with its high rise office blocks and luxury hotels at only a little more than ten times the cost of my more modest out-of-town accommodation. Bocagrande occupies the L-shaped peninsula to the South of the city. Its streets are wider but possibly even more dangerous as the thousands of taxis there ignore traffic signals and all conventional rules of the road, change lanes without signalling or slowing and generally behave as if they are indestructible. The street vendors here know that this is where the money is. They are less good natured and more persistent than their Old City counterparts as they try to sell you their sunglasses, T-shirts, paintings and cigars. Every five or six paces draws another one to your side and you find your polite protestations of 'No, Gracias' becoming harsher and cruder as you attempt to make them leave you alone.
Visiting Cartagena wasn't like visiting one place it was like visiting half a dozen different ones, some of them more interesting than others, some more photogenic, some more friendly. If plans could be relied upon to go smoothly I would have been there only two days and missed almost all of it. I would have seen perhaps one or two of its many faces. It made me wonder how much I had missed of the other places I had passed through on this whistle stop journey. Did Panama City, which I saw for only one day, deserve the scorn I felt for it? Were San Cristobal and Antigua the beautiful and serene places that I took them for in my brief visits?
I felt that was fortunate to have had a chance to get to know at least one place a little better. It did not occur to me that I was about to spend almost seven weeks in one place and come to know it very well indeed.
