Before Christi and I leave Medellin for Cartagena, our last destination in Colombia and South America, there may just be time to get the dreaded laundry done. It’s almost an embarrassment now to give our faded, grungy unmentionables to the lavendaria, Clean and Clean – let alone expect them to have our freshly laundered clothes returned to us by noon today. Indeed, the owner of Clean and Clean shakes his head vigorously initially, but as I repeatedly improve my offer the shaking reluctantly becomes a nod. We do the deal for US$30. Now that we’ve spent all our money on the laundry, Christi and I have a great excuse for relaxing in our very expensive hotel room at the Park 10 and completing the usual chores of diary writing, editing photos, and confirming onward travel arrangements. Our time in South America is drawing to a close and the Dark Continent of Africa looms ever larger on the horizon. And travel in Africa will be considerably more problematic than the relative ease with which Christi and I have floated gently around South America. For this reason, if no other, a relaxing few days in Cartagena seems like a good idea ahead of a long campaign in Africa.
Clean and Clean are a little reluctant to return our laundry at noon, but it comes eventually and it is wonderfully clean. Phew! Pack rather in a rush and leave the comforts of the Park 10 for Medellin’s Jose Maria Cordova International Airport. In fact, the transfer takes almost as long as the 40-minute flight! It’s only 294 miles from Medellin to Cartagena, but it’s across rough, mountainous terrain. The journey would take 13 hours by bus. I don’t think either Christi or I could face that kind of bus ride again. Our flight takes us out of the Andes for the very last time and back to the hot and humid conditions we encountered on Margarita Island, only now we are in one of the jewels of South American tourism – the historic town of Cartagena on the shores of the Caribbean sea.
Our hotel, the Casa Veranera, sends a car to meet us from the airport – so different from our nervous arrival in Quito 6 months ago when we mangled the spanish language to get a taxi into town. The staff at the Casa Veranera is very friendly – Colombia is a very friendly place – but our room is odd. There is a living room with no air-conditioning (and boy do you need air-conditioning in this town) facing a glass-fronted shower and toilet. The bathroom has no curtains and hence no privacy. Doing one’s business is now a spectator sport, unless all the spectators leave the living room. The bedroom does have air-conditioning, but no door. The bedroom also has stairs leading to a roof-top balcony, which means the exterior humidity and interior cool air clash right over the bed, creating stormy conditions as one person freezes and the other sweats. This has got to be the weirdest place we’ve stayed in. I can’t even begin to imagine what the designer had in mind when he created this aesthetic.
We escape the weirdness and begin exploring Cartagena, a laid-back town with surprisingly few tourists at the moment. Cartagena Old Town is one of the best preserved colonial towns in South America, while the modern city sprung up around it and now dwarfs it.
Blog post by Roderick Phillips, author of Weary Heart – a gut-wrenching, heart-wrenching, laugh-wrenching tale.
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