Day 1: Old City Cartagena

Last night we took the redeye from Denver to NYC and then this morning we went from NYC to Cartagena. We arrived at Cartagena around 1:00 and took a taxi to our cute little apartment in Plaza Fernandez de Madrid within the walled city. We didn’t have any plans for today since we weren’t sure what to expect or how tired we would be from the traveling.  We felt surprisingly good though so we asked the guy at reception we should do and he recommended a sightseeing tour of the city. We were a little apprehensive because typically we don’t like to do touristy things, but we decided to try it out and it ended up being great! First there was a 90 min walking tour around the old walled city. Old city Cartagena is beautiful!  The wall was built around the city in the late 1600’s to protect the city from intruders.  All of the buildings are old Spanish colonial style painted with different bright colors with vine and flower covered balconies.  The houses have huge wooded doors with intricate door knockers. All of the door knockers were different interesting shapes, colors and sizes. There are a ton of huge beautiful cathedrals, plazas and parks and cute little cafes. We really liked our guide and we met another young couple from Holland and another backpacker from Nepal, which was fun. We noticed there are a lot of tourist in Cartagena, but not many American which we kind of like.

After the walking tour, we picked up a double decker bus that did a loop around the rest of Cartagena.  It was a beautiful evening—warm with a cool breeze off the ocean so it was nice to ride around. New city Cartagena is built on a peninsula, so you can see the ocean from all sides of the city. It’s not a big city, but it’s very dense with lots of tall, white high rises. The city scape reminds me a lot of Miami.

After the bus tour we found a really cool Argentinian restaurant for dinner. There were bottle caps covering all the walls, crazy signs and pictures everywhere, and hanging lanterns. The food was really good as well. After we were finishing up are dinner and getting ready to walk back, we had a perfect view for an impressive fireworks show. We found out later it was because it is a holiday weekend. I’d say it was a pretty perfect start to our trip