Hello from South America!!! Well it took us a while to get back to our travel stories! We had a crazy few months travelling long distances in South America and enjoying its epic landscapes and cultures. Let’s start how it all started in Cartagena, Colombia.
There’s an unavoidable step for any overlander who wants to travel the Panamerican highway and that’s crossing the Darien gap between Panama and Colombia. And it normally involves shipping the car from Panama to Cartagena, Colombia.
For us this shipping started in Guatemala. If you don’t know why we had to ship from Guatemala and skip pretty much most of the Central America, you can read more about it here.
So after having our troopy in a container moving south toward a new continent. We got our flights and landed in Cartagena, Colombia around the same time that our car arrived. We hoped to minimized our stay in Cartagena and hit the road as soon as the car was unloaded and custom cleared.
But like lots of other things in this trip, things didn’t go ahead as we planned. For the first two nights, I booked a nice boutique hotel in the historic part of the Cartagena to do sight seeing and being in pedestrian only part of town while we had the freedom without the car. That was nice and gave us a beautiful polished view of the Cartagena and its touristic neighbourhood. We also visited Ana, our agent who was going to do all the paperwork and release our car from the port and did some paperwork with her to speed up the tasks before the car get unloaded.
But unfortunately, the vessel with our car on board, had to wait for few days close to the port waiting for unloading. That waiting plus few more days for releasing the car gave us almost another week in Cartagena.
We were lucky to be able to move in an small apartment next to the Ana’s office for a good price while we were waiting for the car. It made our living cost down, and gave us the opportunity to see the real life of people outside the beauty of the historic town and touristic hotspots.
We came to Colombia from Guatemala, so technically a lot was similar but yet a lot was so different from central America. Their spanish accent was different and took us a while to understand it. The food was different and more African influenced comparing to the traditional food in Guatemala with Mayan routes. The first few days were so fun and refreshing to witness the new culture, food and climate.
Speaking of the Climate, one of the reasons that we wanted to start our journey south as soon as possible was the season and the heat. Northern Colombia is generally hot and humid comparing to the mountainous area in the central and south Colombia and in higher altitude. In Cartagena, it was already too hot for us especially for living in the car in early February and it was getting hotter everyday so our aim was to get the car and head south as soon as we could.
But we didn’t have much options rather than waiting for the car. While things were out of our hands we were visiting different parts of the Cartagena. From the beautiful historic old town with stunning preserved colonial architecture to the modern sea front tall buildings and modern part of the city.
One of the main attraction of the historic part and iconic symbol of the Cartagena are fruit seller women. While they don’t actually sell fruit, they sell you photo opportunity to stand next to them and hold a bowl of fruit on your head. They are from a small village close to Cartagena and they basically took over the historic center!
The other attraction in the old town is the live dance shows in main plazas and especially in front of the clock tower and the walls of the old town. It’s nice to get out and see some live actions at nights when it is a bit cooler.
What I liked was the beautiful art galleries and local designed and made high quality fashion items. We weren’t there for shopping but it was a great place to shop and make sure that you own a unique piece for a reasonable price.
For the rest of the days, we were walking in other neighbourhoods like Getsemani neighbourhood with its art galleries, beautiful colorful streets, good food and believe it or not, the wild life in the heart of city!
One of the other great local experience was eating at the local restaurant next to our apartment ran by few hardworking women who were feeding the entire neighbourhood and all the moto taxi drivers. It was the most popular spot in our area and we had some great local lunches for a fraction of the price of fancy restaurant in higher end neighbourhoods.
The other fun thing to do in Cartagena is getting lost in narrow alleys and look at the stunning doors and windows and door handles. Apparently when Cartagena was blooming and was the hustling port of the northern part of the continent, this door handles were showing your social status and also show your line of work! It was so fun to walk around and guess who was living in each majestic house. At the end of the day, we had so much time to kill and work on our imaginations in Cartagena, Here are some of the examples!
And finally after more than a week in Cartagena, we got the news!!! We could go and get the car! On these trips, nothing is more exciting than driving the car out of the container, make sure it’s safe and sound and get reunited with your beloved home on wheels. You just realize how much you are dependent on your rig, where you are separated.
We were so thrilled to have him back and be able to start the second leg of this journey in one of the countries that I was so excited to explore in south America, Colombia!
We heard so many good stories about Colombia’s beauty and the generosity of its people and we wanted to witness it ourselves.
The first step was getting out of Cartagena and head south. While there are so many natural beauty in northern coast of Colombia, we decided to leave it for now and chase the cooler climates. Our route was still undecided due to some conflicts in certain regions but we knew our first stop. A nice farm on top of a hill just an hour south of Cartagena. Great place for us to put the car together and get ready for our Colombian adventure and learn more about the safety from the generous owner of the farm. We’ve spent two great days there, did some routine maintenance on the car and planned for our next move. We’ll see where we head from here in the next post. Till then take care and have fun.
