Thursday, November 29, 2018- Cartagena Day 2

Thursday, November 29, 2018- Cartagena, Columbia Day 2 It’s unusual to spend a night tied up to the pier.  After breakfast in the buffet, we set off to the little zoo again, with a banana in hand.  We did manage to find monkeys scampering around in the trees and on top of one of the aviaries.  The zoo keepers were putting out new food for all the animals.    

We were able to lure a few monkeys down with our banana and some dried apple.  Janet offered a walnut to a macaw, who carefully tasted it, and then threw it down on the ground.  I guess it’s not one of their favorites. 

  The included Viking excursion departed from the pier. Unfortunately they used mini-buses that had too many rows of seats crammed in. There was so little leg room that most people had their knees pinned to the back of the seat ahead of them.  

They also filled the mini-buses to near capacity. While the bus did have air conditioning, it seemed to quit working about halfway through the tour.  The windows were also filthy so it was impossible to get good pictures through the windows.  

Since we have been on two prior Princess excursions in Cartagena, we can grade this one as subpar.  The first stop was the San Felipe de Barajas Fortress.    

Our tour guide, Angelina, had everyone turn on their QuietVox head sets.  A few minutes after starting her narration, her transmitter quit working.  Instead of trying to trouble shoot the problem, she just grabbed the hardwired microphone on the mini-bus.  Since she was standing right in front of me, I could see that her battery was exhausted, and she needed to recharge it, or replace the battery.  When she turned us loose for a 5 minute picture stop at the Fortress, we got our obligatory pictures, dodging the very aggressive vendors that work the plaza, and then got back on the bus.   

I was able to get Angelina’s transmitter working after the bus driver dug out spare batteries from the Viking Guide pouch, and swapping them for the dead ones.  The bus then drove through the old city, just inside the city wall.  Angelina kept saying “Look down this street” as the bus flew past the intersections, where you might have glimpsed the narrow streets with balconies, but they never stopped to let us get out to walk at least one block.    

The bus did stop at the Los Bovidas shopping area.  The guides promptly herded everyone in to one shop at the end, packing us like cattle.  This shop had emeralds and other knick knacks, and some air conditioning, but it was clear that the guides were forcing everyone into this one shop where they could get commissions on sales because they forced us to wear name stickers with our guides’ names on them. Janet and I managed to escape, pushing out against the incoming flood of Viking passengers.  We snuck around the corner and spotted a way to walk up onto the city wall and across the top of Los Bovedas.  There were views of the bay, and one of the streets of the old city.  We even spotted a local napping under a cardboard box.  We found some old cannons propped up on cement blocks so that it would look like they were properly mounted when viewed from the street below. While this was not officially on our tour, it was something we hadn’t done on our two prior tours in Cartagena.    

The bus loaded up after the mandatory shopping period and took us to the part of Cartagena that looks like Miami. It is called Boca Grande.  There was a long beach along the Caribbean side with lots of beach umbrellas and chairs, but the bus did not stop anywhere to allow us to take any pictures or step out on the beach.  Our guide did say that all their beaches are public access.  The number of high rises in Boca Grande is impressive. Several have cellular transmitter towers integrated in the roofs.  On the bay side of the peninsula, the bus pulled over and Angelina pointed out the view of the cruise ship port and bay.  The bus had stopped and Angelina said to take pictures as she handed out evaluations, but I had to ask if I could step out of the bus to snap a picture.  She looked at me like I was crazy, but the driver heard me and opened the door.  I popped out and snapped a few pictures, but nobody else did, perhaps because they were too jammed in their seats to get out.  

  It was straight back to the ship on the pier from Boca Grande, zipping right past the little zoo, which Angelina said “You can see some animals in there”, but without getting out of the bus, you could only see the peacocks.  It sure was a good thing we knew about that cute little zoo from our second visit to Cartagena.  When we show other passengers pictures we took of the macaws and monkeys, they could hardly believe them.    Our ship pulled away from the pier as we had lunch in the buffet.  The gelato is certainly a nice upgrade on this ship to the soft serve you find on most other cruise ships for free.  Janet discovered some donuts this morning in the buffet as well.  Not Krispy Creme, but still a fresh made donut.  The fitness center and thermal spa are convenient to our stateroom which is very close to the forward elevators and stairs, so we have made it a habit to get our activity rings closed.   We have also learned to skip the many live lectures because we can watch them at our convenience with the on demand video system.  There have been a long series of lectures about the Panama canal from historical, sociological, anthropological and even zoological aspects.  There were numerous comparisons with the Suez Canal.  Dinner in the Restaurant included several dishes containing lobster including seafood soup with lobster, lobster soufflé, and lobster risotto. Even though they decided not to serve lobster last night because of the number of passengers ashore during dinner, they had prepared a fair number of lobsters, which were then reprocessed into tonight’s lobster dishes. Funny that they would admit that they were serving leftover lobster.  The cruise director’s staff all joined together to put on a Viking Vocalist Variety show featuring show tunes sung by not only the 4 vocalists, but also the cruise director and assistant cruise director.  They put on an entertaining and enjoyable show, but we miss the live band, backup singers, dancers and stage effects that Princess has available to put on their production shows.  So to compare Princess cruise entertainment to Viking ocean cruise entertainment, we’d have to give the advantage to Princess, unless you hate stage production shows, and love academic lectures.   We learned that we will be arriving at the Panama Canal at 7AM in the morning.  We’ll have to set our alarm clocks to get us up so we don’t miss the show.   We are scheduled to pass through into the Pacific Ocean around 4PM, so we will be spending most of the day in the canal.  The ship will anchor near Panama City at 6PM.