Tuesday, March 20, 2018- Cruise Day 56; Cartagena

Tuesday, March 20, 2018- Cruise Day 56; Cartagena

We awoke to find the ship entering Cartagena harbor, following a very long series of green and red buoys.  It was surprising to us to see how modern Cartegena appears as you approach it from the sea.  Parts look like industrial New Jersey, but other parts look like Miami with glistening highrises.  Yet other parts look like Europe with cathedral towers and red tile roofs.  We had breakfast as the ship executed a Y turn into it’s slip.  We tied up with the stern to the head of the dock, and bow out towards the harbor.  We could see the Holland America ship Westerdam coming into the harbor a short distance behind us.  They had transited through the Panama Canal in the same lane as us, but 3 slots behind.  We could see them in the distance from the stern of the ship.  

We boarded our tour bus on the pier and proceeded to drive into the center of Cartagena.  There is lots of traffic, although it appears much better organized and uniform than in Chile and especially better than the craziness in Peru.  Our first stop was the San Felipe De Barajas Castle, which was never a castle, but one of the most advanced and important Spanish built military fortifications in the world.  It is quite an impressive sight, covering a small mountaintop overlooking the walled city of Cartagena.  When we visited in January 2015, our excursion dropped us off for pictures at the base of the fortress, but we only had 5 minutes to take pictures and run the gamut of vendors before reboarding our bus.  This time, our excursion did include a walking tour of the fortress.  It was in the mid to upper 80’s with high humidity and blazing sunshine, so scaling the ramps leading up to the fortress was a bit of work.  But we took it one level at a time, and nobody in this particular group had physical disabilities that slowed the group disproportionately.  This fortress had all the must-have features of fortifications of the late 1500’s, with multiple layers of defenses and plenty of places to ambush and kill attackers.  There was also a series of tunnels throughout the fortress.  We climbed to the top of the fortress and walked through a few hundred feet of the tunnels.  The Spanish were pretty short compared with British invaders, so the low clearance in the tunnels would have been an impediment for taller races to attack.  They eventually dug some of the tunnels deeper so that tourists wouldn’t all exit with aching backs.  The views from the top of the fortress are very impressive.  Apparently, some of the scenes in the old movie  “Romancing The Stone” were filmed around the fortress.  We could have easily spent another hour there, but our guide rushed us out and onto the walled city for a walking city tour of the markets, cathedrals and a monastery.  There was a small museum of the Spanish Inquisition, but it had only a tiny collection of replica torture devices.  All the original torture devices were destroyed by the local population after the fall of the Spaniards.  Imagine that.  

We were also dropped off at Las Bovidas, which were originally dungeons and military store rooms, and now house a large crafts and emerald jewelry market place.  It seems our tour guides had some favorite vendors that they wanted us to patronize because they would take us into those particular stores and let the staff there give a sales pitch, and then say the group would meet back in that location in 15-30 minutes.  Frankly, we wished we could have spent more time in the fortress, rather than in those stores, but at least some of the stores were air conditioned.  The tour wound up in the Naval museum, which had dioramas depicting various naval battles around Cartagena and had some exhibits about Privateers and Pirates, including the famous Sir Francis Drake, who blew off the top of the fortress in one attack.  However, neither the French, nor the British were ever able to take Cartegena, largely due to the heavy toll the mosquito borne illnesses took on foreign soldiers.  

The tour ended with a sort dance program.  It looked like a local dance troupe of African dancers.  It didn’t even vaguely resemble what we would have thought to be Columbian folk dances.  The show we had seen in 2015 was much more professional and informative, but this show was fortunately very short and we got to drink some ice cold 250mL Pepsi bottles (Smallest Pepsi bottles we have ever seen). Then it was back on the bus to return to the ship.  

We dropped off our backpacks, hats and sunglasses in our room and relished in the air conditioned marvelous environs within the ship.  We had lunch, and then wandered back off the ship to visit the tourist visitor center at the head of the cruise pier.  They had a surprisingly well stocked and interesting little zoo there, complete with more peacocks than you can shake your fist at.  There were also pink flamingos, Kapuchin monkeys, anteaters, parrots, Maccaws and a tiny Columbian deer.  And the best part was it was all free.  You could get very close to the animals- sometimes too close.  Apparently, someone had bought some fruit at a market and set it on the ground next to their chair.  Some monkeys snatched the bag and started picking the fruit out of the bag.  When the man tried to grab his bag back from the monkeys, one ran up and bit him on the arm.  So cute, and yet so nasty- those monkeys.  

We returned to the ship and took cooling showers and then had a nice dinner in the dining room.  The Showtime presentation was a second performance by the Cuban singer, who spent most of her time on stage during her first show talking about Cuba, so we opted to skip her show.  There was a new sort of gameshow in the Explorer’s lounge called “Shylock Hole’s Musical Mystery”.  The cruise staff put together a radio play with several characters, and as the plot developed, blanks in the script had to be filled with words that came from the titles of songs that they played clips for.  So you had to guess the songs not only on the sound, but also with the hint given by the context of the script at that point.  For example, the script read “they bent over and picked up the remnants of…” and then played a short clip of the Benny Goodman band playing “Little Brown Jug”.  A lot of the clues came from ancient songs from the 40’s.  But the whole thing was new to us, and as entertaining as it was challenging.  We didn’t win by a long shot. We scored 16/25, while the winning team managed a perfect 25/25, which was very impressive.  

We move our clocks forward an hour at bedtime tonight.  We have another installment of our Progressive Trivia tomorrow morning, so we’d better set an alarm clock so we don’t oversleep.