Before I explain how I only just made my flight I should probably say why I chose Cartagena as my starting point. Two reasons. Both very shallow. One is that I just like saying the name. Cartagena. The other is because of the 1984 film Romancing the Stone with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner. Sorry. These pictures below popped up and I just had to include them. In 1984 I was a 24 year old newbie and I had just started hitch hiking from Johannesburg, South Africa to Windhoek in Namibia. It was the start of my hitch hiking life through Africa. After a short, failed start to the morning where I was removed from the highway by the police, I took a train to the outskirts of Joburg and stepped out on to the road in front of the train station and stuck out my thumb. The first car to pass pulled up and as luck would have it, he happened to be going from that train station all the 1650km to Windhoek. How lucky was that. I was too happy about my change in luck to consider it may have been dodgy. Turns out it sort of wasn’t. He happened to be a reborn christian hoping to become a Pastor, and had prayed for someone like me to accompany him on his long journey. So. Win win, I got a lift to Windhoek, and he had his beliefs justified. I also learned a lot about Jesus. Jesus. So what does this all have to do with Cartagena? Turns out that he was the Cinema Manager in town, and he was on his way back to start showing the new blockbuster movie Romancing the Stone. Movies at the cinema were still a big thing way back then. I watched the film at least half a dozen times (for free). It was an adventure film set in Cartagena and I was sure if I went there I would have an adventure and meet Kathleen Turner. She was hot. Well that’s the connection. I’ll be keeping my eye out for her. Yikes.

When you are a traveller (as opposed to being on holidays) you have to have some sort of faith. Not particularly the sort of faith my Namibian Pastor tried to teach me but one that says things will work out. And when they don’t you just have to believe there was a reason and just keep moving on. Booking my 3 connecting flights to Cartagena was a lot of work. I thought I’d done a good job until a few weeks before departure they rescheduled my first flight which only left me one hour to transfer from the domestic terminal to the international terminal in another part of the airport in Mexico City. I rang the help desk and the woman from Sweden, yes Sweden, said I should be fine. I have no idea why a Mexican Airline outsourced its helpdesk to Sweden. Had she even been to Mexico. Strangely enough she didn’t ask how fast I can run.  

So I thought, have faith, I’ll deal with it as I go. I was very happy to be dropped off by my mate at the Puerto Vallarta Airport and find I was the only passenger in the check in terminal besides the six staff. This was also fortunate because I had failed to fill out an online thing to enter Colombia. A young lady who spoke great english helped me enter all the stuff on my phone and access the code/number she needed to complete my check in. She also told me I was the only one with that Colombian connection and that she would move me to the front of the plane so I could get off quicker.  The plane was pretty full in the end, and we left the gate only a few minutes late. And then we sat on the tarmac for more than half an hour. I have no idea why. There were no other planes that time of night. I eventually gave up hope and stopped looking at my watch as my one hour connection time dwindled down to 15 mins. That faith thing again

We eventually took off and made good time. As suggested, the seat change helped a lot. I was off the plane quickly and the first person I spoke to had good English and pointed me in the right direction. I had to run with my two carry on luggage pieces (and thankfully no helmet). Almost 20kgs worth. It was a 15 min run/walk to my departure gate, number 68, and as I approached there were still a line of 6 passengers waiting to board. I don’t know why I had worried. I was on. But I did have concerns about my checked luggage with all my motorbike gear which had been checked through to Bogotá.

That flight left slightly early and made good time which didn’t really matter as I had a 5 hour layover. The trip was about six hours but I didn’t manage to get any sleep. We arrived in Bogotá around 6:00am local time. As I stood in the immigration line I had time to count the 270 passengers ahead of me and calculate that a few minutes each person that I was going to be in the line for a while. But I was also thankful that I wasn’t at the back of the 270 people behind me. It took about two hours and I got the grumpy immigration official. I just smiled. Tried to lip read as he looked down at my passport behind the glass screen. I just kept handing him stuff until he got what he needed or just stamped me in to get rid of me. Either way I was in. Welcome to Colombia.

My next concern was finding my checked luggage. I had to manually collect it and take it to a different, local airline for my connecting flight to Cartagena. Firstly, I had to hope it made the flight and secondly, hope that no-one had stolen it after it had spent a couple of hours clocking up kilometres on the carousel. I found the correct carousel but no bag. It wasn’t looking good. I found someone with poor English to match my Spanish and she said to go to the service desk and report it missing. While I was looking for the desk I spotted another woman in a uniform who didn’t speak english but was a whizz on google translate. I told her what had happened and she asked me for my luggage receipt. She then told me through Google translate that she saw my bag doing laps and had picked it up and taken it to the other airline for me and gestured with a smile that it was quite heavy. Some people are so lovely.

So I found my new departure gate and started to nod off just as boarding commenced. It was only about an hour and a half over to Cartagena. I arrived at 1:30pm and stepped off the plane and thought I was in Broome in December. Turns out Broome and Cartagena have similar climates. Just at different times of the year. Who would have known that. Probably someone who’d done some research and prior planning and not just picked a location because it sounded nice. And I hadn’t slept for 42 hours.

My accommodation was only a 10 minute walk from the airport. Despite declining a hundred taxis I walked off in the direction of the Airbnb with my hundred kilos of luggage in a hundred degree heat with a hundred percent humidity. Some nice man on a bicycle stopped, we chatted, in spanish, and then he put my big bag across his seat and handle bars and walked me down to where I was staying.

I’d booked two months accommodation in Cartagena nine months ago when I was in Antarctica. The plan being that I do some Spanish schooling and buy a motorbike and set it all up and then start doing trips with Cartagena as my base. Back then when I booked, I had lots of options and good prices ($850 for the first month and $450 for the second) I had booked two places for a month each. Both in a share arrangement with the Spanish owner. Despite saying on the website that the owner speaks some English. She doesn’t. But that’s fine. It will force me to speak Spanish. It’s a two bedroom apartment overlooking the beach. And just looks like the picture on the website. She basically lives in her room except for cooking and I have the run of everywhere else. I didn’t realise it was a 45 minute walk into town but I now like that. One third on a bike track through a park. One third along the beach. And the last third in city streets.

Cartagena and Colombia are basically in the top left-hand corner of South America if you picture a map. It’s just under a million people which includes the surrounding areas. It has a beautiful old walled city but I’ll write more about that as it unfolds. Sadly though, I’m learning that Cartagena isn’t the best place to learn Spanish. Or buy a motorbike.

And one last thing. Nothing has changed with the credit card.