Adventures with Ron

Coconut rice is my new favorite food

Cartagena is a tourist's town, a sort of real-life Disney World where the only way to pay a reasonable price for something is to laugh at the first quote and then offer something less than half, whether it's for a boat ride or a streetside soda.  That said, if you know where to look, you can pay less that $3 USD for a feast of fish soup, coconut rice, salad, patacones (fried savory plantains) and a whole fried fish, which we basically ate two meals a day.

On our third day in Cartagena, Molly, Doyle and I left the city to go to Playa Blanca, an isolated beach on the nearby island of Barú.  When we made it to the marina, at 10:30 in the morning, all of the official boats to the island had already left.  Molly went up to a ticket window and asked if there was any way to get there before the following day.

"Legally?" the ticket woman said.  "No.  But you can go illegally."

So we did.  We found a man waiting for tourists in just such a situation who promised to get us to Playa Blanca in his uncle Eliezer's fishing boat.  First, though, we had to go to the island town of Bocachica to get around paying a port tax.  The man herded us into a water taxi, where we waited for at least a half-hour as it filled up way past any reasonable capacity with locals returning home with shopping bags full of groceries, ice creams, and in one case, a desktop computer. 

Cartagena's colonial Old Town

The taxi took us past where the brown water surrounding Cartagena turned cotton-candy blue, past shantytowns where pigs picked through garbage-strewn yards, past stone-wall fortifications left over from when the Carribbean was a pirate-infested battleground.  At the last stop, Eliezer greeted us at the dock and took the money we'd refused to hand over on the mainland, and then led us to the second boat, a rickety little motorboat captained by a mute fisherman who turned over his cutting board to make a seat for Molly and Doyle. 

The ride from Bocachica to Playa Blanca sorely tested the integrity of the little boat's hull, but blessedly we never quite lost sight of land.  Finally, we turned a corner and the Playa appeared.

The beach is narrow, as evidenced in the picture, and lined with various thatch-roof restaurants and campgrounds where you can rent a not-particularly-comfortable hammock for 7,000 COP per night.  We found some friends from our hostel in Cartagena, rented hammocks where they were staying, and jumped in the water, which was salty and warm and perfect for swimming.

This paradise is the reason all of my pictures are stock photos

The next two days were filled with a lot of doing nothing.  Drinking the bottle of ron we brought from the mainland, mixed with warm Coke or fresh tropical juices; snorkeling; haggling for more meals of fish and rice than I care to remember; eating the best mangoes in the world, sold to us by a toothless local who earned the name Mango Mama and who underestimated our Spanish enough that she bragged to a friend how much money she had made off of us while we sat there and listened.  I let myself get lulled into the carefree island mindset and got my camera stolen, the nice one with all my pictures on it, so I'm now dependent on my companions for all photos and my dear readers are stuck with pictures I've stolen from elsewhere on the internet for a little bit longer.

My sunburn is fading into an itchy tan, the last of the sand is gone from my ears, and I'm glad to be back in Bogotá, this rainy mountain city that feels like it's someone's home.  For all of Cartagena's beauty, natural and architectural, it lacks a sense that real people live there.