Cartagena de Indias
I then moved on to Cartagena de Indias, a colonial city which I was thinking of as one of the three main highlights of the trip. The architecture of the city is amazing, with each building in the old town looking like it could have been a national monument. Walking around the old town was like walking in Disneyland, in that everything was perfectly coherent and very beautiful too, except that this was a lived-in city (with a bit of restoration). However, Cartagena is not just the old town- a lot of the city, and particularly Getsemani where I stayed, is poor and filled with excitable drug-addicted hustlers, aged between 6 to 66 years old. As a result it was hard to walk around without being hassled, which did spoil the experience a little. The nightlife is not great either, and things got a lot worse when an american navy ship let its sailors loose on the town for the week-end…