Saturday, October 10, 2015

Cartagena Tourists Again

We spent a lovely day being tourists in Centro with the crew of Seahorse V. We walked, snacked on arepas, visited the Gold Museum, walked on the ancient walls, bought souvenirs, enjoyed the art, ate lunch, found more door knockers, got some fruit from the famous fruit ladies, and finally found our back to the boats, tired and full.

And once again the natives surprised and delighted us. We were admiring a door knocker and the man of the house started chatting with us asking where we were from, suggesting things to see and do in Colombia, and then he wished us a pleasant stay in his city. Even the emerald, hat, sunglasses, shirt, purse, jewelry, and arepa sellers are polite and don't hassle you after you say "No Gracias".

The fruit sellers dress in the colors of the Colombian flag.

This lizard knocker was 2' tall.

The Zenú culture made fabulous gold items. Thousands of years ago they made an extensive system of canals to irrigate their crops and moderate flooding from the rivers. Some of these ancient canals are still visible on Google Earth. Link to Zenú info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen%C3%BA


A statue of Cervantes, author of "don Quixote of La Mancha". Cervantes was Spanish, not Colombian, so I don't know why this statue is here; gotta research that.

Las Bovedas, or the old barracks, now souvenir shops.
Las Palenqueras, or the Fruit Ladies.

1 comment:

James Tyler said...

Nice Post!! Yes, it’s a beautiful place for tourist. We had gone last year and also planning for this year to go to Cartagena and also contacted some good travel advisers. And from them we are going to choose “(hicartagena.com)”. And hope this trip also going good and we will be enjoying lot like before.