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| Breakfast juice |
As mid-day rolled around (and it did quickly thanks to my need to switch hotels) we caught a cab out to La Boquilla. La Boquilla is a small fishing village north east of the city past the airport. The inhabitants are descendants of slaves originally brought over from Africa to build the city's forts and walls. Their main source of income nowadays is from fishing and tourists from nearby Cartagena.
When our cab driver pulled into the neighborhood a young man began running next to the car. It was clear that we has trying to get the cab driver to pull over. As his damp blue soccer shirt flopped in the breeze and his short dreadlocks bounced, he tried to direct us to a restaurant. We were quite sure that once we chose one the young man would tell the restaurant owner that he'd brought the clientele there in hopes of earning a commission. The guy ran next the to cab for at least a mile before Eric chose a spot and had the driver pull over. All of the restaurants looked the same; one large hut on the beach after the other. This area was extremely poor, that was clear. It was a week day, so the place was deserted as well (Sunday is beach day and it's on Sunday that La Boquilla is flooded with locals and more tourists).
We sat down at a plastic table and asked for a menu as the legs of our plastic chairs sank into the sand. When the menu came, it was brought by our young runner (he did earn himself a job!). Our menu had no words - it was a tray of fish to choose from. We negotiated our fish and shrimp and how we wanted it cooked (fried fish and garlic shrimp) and after making our order, we left the table to go for a walk. It was a simultaneously sad and interesting place to see. Children in school uniforms walked with purpose along the beach, stray dogs meandered and played, tumbling over each other, and a few locals relaxed in the huts, occasionally lifting themselves from their perches to ask us if we wanted a massage or if I wanted my hair braided. Fishing boats sat on the beach and hammocks were tied wherever there was a place for one.
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| Our cab driver takes a nap. |
Before we got out of the cab, our driver asked how we would get back. Eric told him we would catch another cab or take the bus. The driver offered to stay while we ate and drive us back for the same price it cost to get us there. We agreed that this would be fine, and so, our cab driver fell fast asleep in one of the hammocks while we ate our delicious meal, which was likely made in the restaurant owner's home by his wife.
After a really tasty meal (I learned how to eat a fish that isn't in fillets!) we woke our cabbie and headed back to our hotel just as the afternoon rain started. At the hotel, I took a long nap before we got ready to go out for the evening.
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| Lunch! |
By evening, the rain had stopped and we went to a very nice, shi-shi bar in the Hotel Santa Clara. Such a grand building with it's huge doors, archways and open halls! After enjoying the ambiance there and the people watching (are they on a date or are they business colleagues?) we took a cab to a restaurant which Eric had heard good things about. Standing in the door of the restaurant was a policeman, "Do you have a reservation?" he asked in spanish. We told him that we did not. "We are full!" he told us, proudly. We glanced over his shoulder into the empty restaurant, shrugged at one another, and walked on to find someplace else to eat.
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| Our stop for drinks. |
"Quebracho", which means "broken", was a wonderful Argentinian restaurant. The first thing you notice about the dark and moody place is the years of built-up dripping candle wax collecting in massive mounds and running down from a few spots in the walls and from candelabras in the lobby. The next thing you notice is the strange art and the almost almost tacky collections of photographs of famous people too. The strange art continued, according to Eric, in the bathroom, except it graduated into naked lady pictures and one pornographic cartoon (I think Mickey and Minnie were participating in unmentionable acts). But the food was excellent and the service was friendly - helping me figure out that I wanted a Coke Lite, not a Diet Coke (handy for the rest of my trip), and magically appearing with a massive steak knife when Eric started to struggle with the abnormally small knife he was initially given (envision a grown man using a knife from Barbie's kitchen and you'll get a sense of it. It was not steak-friendly!).
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| Oozing candles! |
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When dinner was done we wandered the streets some more.
Music comes out of everything in Cartagena; It's coming out of the windows, it's seems to come out of the food, the walls, the cobblestone streets and even your drinks!
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