Cartagena´s old walled city is a delightful place with curving balcony lined streets, leafy parks, and history preserved in stone. The city´s buildings are painted colors of creamy yellow plaster to terra cotta to sea blue. They are fronts which hide courtyards behind huge doors with brass lions, french doors opening on upper balconies, dressed in wrought iron and bouganvilla. Painting these buildings in watercolor becomes an obsession for me. I paint until I can´t stand the heat, usually as soon as 11:00 am, and then retreat to shop, study Spanish or find an air conditioned place--internet cafe, restaurant, museum. The museum of gold, housed behind the doors of a huge vault within a bank is one of the best museums in Cartagena. Gold artifacts from ancient Colombian groups are described in detail--how they were made and used by the people. A highlight in the museum is a room where a video (three language choices) details how these ancient people changed the land by making water channels that controlled flooding in the interior flat areas where huge rivers come down from the Andes. These earthen channels which are like a woven pattern are still visible from the air, and if modern peoples were to take care of the annual soil deposited within them, moving it up to the tops of the levees, then the system would still work for flood control.

From the 1500´s until the 1700´s Cartagena was a city protected by fortifications and was sacked more than once by various pirates and foreign countries. This facinating naval history is described in the Naval museum, and, nicely in James A. Michener´s Caribbean, a historical novel that Mike is re-reading. The walls of the old city hold in the heat, but walking along the tops, once can see the wind-swept sea beyond and soak in the breezes. At night, street performers dance to drums beside the huge Botero statue in front of the Santo Domingo Church and park. Last night we enjoyed dinner looking down on the scene from the balcony restaurant over that park. We shared fish and pasta with our friends Paul and Liz, English cruisers from the boat, Aphrodite. They return to England by June or July, stopping in Grand Cayman, Cuba, Florida, Intercoastal Waterway of the U.S., the Azores and England.

Cartagena is like a celebration, day or night. You turn a corner and a vendor walks down a narrow street pushing a cart full of red peppers, each fitting tight next to the other in a brilliant gleaming blast of color. The next one may be arromatic mangoes, or huge vibrant green avocados. Colombia and Cartagena is a place where you will still see carriages pulled by horses, horses and carts-- working, vendors using carts and bicycles. That is definitely because the roads are narrow and cars are a nuisance in the streets where people prefer to walk and sidewalks are crowded with vendors. If you slow down and rest in the Parque Bolivar, you can drink lime juice, the best thirst quencher ever, or munch on dripping chunks of red-pink watermelon. A thousand pesos, a pit more than $.50, and you are quenched and ready to explore further.