Cartagena, Colombia

I go to the Promenade Deck around 7:30am or so to take a look at things. I can see land on the port side of the ship and an island off starboard. Its foggy/misty outside. I take a few photos but most of them are cloudy and no use. By the time I get back to the cabin Kerry is ready to eat breakfast. We head up to the Lido Deck and I get my usual breakfast of cottage cheese, fruit, donut, and apple juice. As usual the restaurant is packed and we join a couple at a table. We head back to the Promenade Deck as the cruise ship sails past Cartagena and watch it come into dock just after 8:30am.
We see a black pirate’s ship in the harbor used for tour excursions.
We’re supposed to meet in the Explorers Lounge on Deck 7 for our tour at 9am and we head there fifteen minutes early. The place is packed, but most of them are going on the city tour of Cartagena. The staff check our tickets and then give us stickers for our shirts with the tour number on them. Around 9am we’re led down two flights of stairs to disembark from Deck 5 and our group is split into 2 buses.

Our tour guide is Bernardo and the driver is Santos. We take a brief tour of Cartagena before heading out of town to the mud volcano at Totumo. Cartagena is very much like towns in Spain with lots of people walking around and shops and sidewalk or outside cafés. There is a mix of run down housing and neat and tidy houses and apartments. We are slowed down at one point by a man riding his donkey directly in front of the bus. Finally the driver turns down another street. As we get to the outskirts of the city we see small communities of shacks built from whatever material can be scrounged and plenty of garbage.

The drive on the highway is nice and we have the Caribbean Ocean in our sight for most of the trip. Fishermen are casting their nets from shore and people are swimming. The scenery is lush and green. There are cattle, donkeys, and some horses. We see some vultures in the trees but the bus is moving too fast to take photos of them.

See my blog about the Totumo Mud Bath Volcano.

Back in Cartagena we had a small city tour that included a ten minute stop at some shops. These were former dungeons. There were a lot of vendors who were quite aggressive. We snapped some photos and returned to the bus. One vendor stood outside my window trying to get me to come back outside and buy a necklace, in particular a pink necklace, I suppose it was because I was wearing a pink shirt. The price kept dropping, finally down to four dollars before the bus pulled away.

The next stop was at the fort where we got off for a few minutes to take photos.

Again besieged by vendors mostly trying to sell us hats, never mind the fact that we were already wearing hats on our head.

Also trying to sell us Columbian beer even though we don’t drink and told them no. One vendor ended up at my window again trying for that $2 sale.

We arrived back at the Island Princess at 1:30pm, plenty of time for the 2:30 all aboard, and the ship was supposed to sail at 3pm, but pulled out of the dock about 15 minutes ahead of schedule.

The rest of the day was pretty quiet. Obviously we both had showers and shampooed our hair to get out and traces of stubborn mud. We played trivia in the Wheelhouse Lounge at 4:15. We checked out the dinner menu in the main dining room but nothing appealed to me. Frog legs were on tonight’s menu. YUCK!

We decided to do laundry and that turned into a fiasco. The washing machine was on the fritz and took a long time to finish. The timer was off by about 15 minutes or so. My clothes were very wet when we removed them and put them in the dryer for an hour. They were still damp when I took them out but I decided to hang them in my closet and let them dry. I didn’t come on the cruise to spend so much time doing laundry.

Back to the Wheelhouse at 10pm for more trivia, movie trivia this time.

Tomorrow is Panama Canal Day. Trip of a lifetime.