Cartagena Part Two

A welcome gift of sparkling wine and bottled water.  Later that night they delivered us chocolate covered strawberries!!

Dan taking photos off the balcony 

Covered dining area off the back. 

Lovely corridors

Wine tasting outside La Cucina

Here is where you view photos they have taken of you and then you choose to print them and purchase. 

Oh yea!!

Don’t you love these chairs!!

A water color painting class offered for free!

Approaching Cartagena and the fort 

Our dock 

The docks here can hold four cruise ships st once

The menu for the main dining rooms.  We haven’t tried it yet. 

They have these all over the ship to keep you informed.  They also offer for free a Norwegian internet connection that you can use to book tours or see what’s happening 


The theater 

Beautiful long ornate corridors to the theater

If you choose the Casino!

Last year they had around 230 cruise ships come to Cartagena.   Miss Universe is from Cartagena along with Shakira!!  Spanish is the main language here.  1819 It became free of Spain through Simon Bolivar.  He was a famous horse rider. They compare him to George Washington.   He died in in 1830 of tuberculosis.  Cartagena is the only port city for Columbia.  The seaweed here is dying because the water temperature is too warm at 76 degrees.  This usually only happens November and December.  You can smell it when you walk the beaches.  All of this information comes from our local tour guide as we drive toward the location where we will board our small canoes for a meander through the mangroves. 

This is common to see local food vendors with carts. 

This is a clean little food stop 

Outside the fort 




They charge you to take photos with the donkey so you need to be careful if you take the photo and don’t pay the man a $1.   It’s the same for women dressed in colorful traditional costumes with luscious beautiful fruit baskets in their heads.  Our English speaking guide on our tour says these women are descendants of the black people who were brought to Columbia to work as slaves from the Congo.  They are a proud hard working people.  

After about a 30 minute drive through the crowded bustling city we stop at a five star hotel where there are bathrooms for us to use before we load into the canoes.  There is also a local graduation which our guide says is typical in December for students in the public and private schools.  The students looked to be more middle school age to me not high school but they wore the typical black gowns and caps that we would wear for our high school graduation and their parents were dressed as proud excited parents.  A large celebration with friends and family was to follow.  Many of these celebrations took place at the well appointed hotels that could handle the parking and large gatherings.  

We then walked through a nice garden setting with fountains and some flora that bore lovely colorful flowering plants.  There were boxed off areas for fat turtles and other local small animals that you could snap photos of.  Each of us was required to wear a life jacket which took awhile to get them from somewhere and then get a lot of “ old people” tucked in!  Ha ha. We had local native canoe guides who didn’t speak any English. It was disappointing because our guide did have a portable speaker that allowed him to have amplification but he was never in a canoe close to us so we had no narration thru the mangroves and no one to ask questions to.  Dan knee more than most and identified huge termite mounds for us all along the way but inside the mangroves we never saw a bird or any wildlife.  There was a local fisherman that gave a quick display of fishing with a net.  He tossed three times but never caught anything.  He did come around with a crab cage to show us what they can catch in the shallow lake enclosed by the mangroves.  We boarded the bus rather quickly as the heat and humidity were killers.  Back to the ship we went as all aboard was 1:30.   We tried to get internet but it was basically non existent so we used half of our free 30 minutes to quickly send our kids a note saying all is well and where we were.  We received no urgent emails from them so assume all is good too.