Street Life in Cartagena

(Originally published in National Geographic Traveler, Latin America.)

The bar was small and empty, the beer cool and delicious, the night air sweet and sticky with the scent of the tropics, and the Caribbean. The thief’s weapon was modern—not a knife, but a mobile phone. As he entered the bar, he pretended to drop it near our table. I bent to pick it up. He whisked the handbag from my chair and fled. My companion, an opera-singing, Mexican sports journalist called Dante, chased the robber into the street. By then, he was a flash of checked shirt and Nike sole fading into the crowd.

“Dammit!” said Dante, puffing from his heroics.

“Dammit,” I said, thinking of my purse, my credit cards, my own mobile phone, likely soon to become accessory to a similar crime.

We were in lovely Cartagena de Indias, Colombia’s old, walled city, once the most important port in the Americas and storehouse for Incan gold and other stolen treasures en route to Spain. It was also a hunting ground for pirates, mariners and thieves. Like an elegant old lady with smudged lipstick, Cartagena is a city of faded splendour, whose pretty colonial buildings—once left to crumble and wilt under the Caribbean sun—have since been restored and turned into a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Until recently, Colombia’s reputation for civil war, cocaine and kidnapping has kept all but the hardcore backpackers and the bravest vagabonds away. Now, thanks to the Uribe government’s harsher security measures, it’s become safe to travel in Colombia again, (though still not entirely safe. Many governments continue to advise citizens of dangers there, especially within small towns and rural areas), and Cartagena is becoming a fixture among the destination wedding-goers and A-list travel set. It’s also the pride of many Colombians. My hosts in Bogotas’ eyes twinkled as they told me, “You mustn’t leave Colombia without visiting Cartagena. It’s beautiful -- like Havana without the revolution.”

Capitalism may have made inroads in Cartagena, as seen by the swanky boutiques and luxury hotels inside restored monasteries and mansions that have sprung up in the past ten years, but I’d have to discover the town on a Cuban-style budget, rationing the emergency-only cash I’d stored in my luggage, as I waited for a replacement visa card to arrive. I would get to know Cartagena through the life of its streets.

Luckily, I was in the perfect place to do that. For all its historical and architectural beauty, it’s the living, breathing, spilling-into-the-streets Caribbean culture that makes the city so enticing. And of course, the people.

***
I met Gabriel on his turf: the street. That was where he spent his days. He’d been wandering around South America for the past seven years, selling artesanias to finance his travels. His booty included feather earrings from Brazil, woven bracelets from Guatemala, and silver necklaces from Mexico. He wore bands around each wrist, studs in each ear, one beneath his lower lip, a bandana on his head and a black tanguista’s hat, at a tilt. He was as at ease sitting on the pavement as he might have been in his own living room.  I stopped to read my map right in front of his sofa.

“Where are you going?” he asked, in thick Argentine Spanish, using ‘vos’ instead of ‘tu’.

“For ice cream,” I said. The day was hot and getting hotter.

“Well, you’re going the wrong way for that. The best ice cream in Cartagena is that way. I’ll show you, if you like.”

My heart sank when I saw he was leading me to Crepes & Waffles, the Bogota-based restaurant chain. I’d expected something with more of a local flair. But he was right, the ice cream was wonderful. I ordered a large cone of strawberry and lemon, which I ate like a child, with it running down my face and fingers. We were sitting on top of Las Murallas, the old city wall. To the left, the Miami Beach-like towers of Bocagrande cut into the horizon like a row of spiky teeth.

Gabriel, a 30-year-old former physiotherapist from Buenos Aires, whose mother was Colombian, had also been a tour guide in Cartagena, when he’d lived here the first time, two years ago. “This wall contains blood and bones,” he said, “and the sweat of slaves”.

The massive, salt-bleached fortifications were built over a two hundred year period, in the 17th and 18th centuries, to keep pirates out, he explained. Back then, Cartagena was a major slave ports in Spanish South America. Around 160,000 blacks arrived here from Africa to be put to work in the sliver mines of Peru and sugar cane plantations of Panama. Meanwhile, gold and silver from New Granada and Peru were loaded onto galleons bound for Spain via Havana, making the city a natural target for pirates. In the 16th century, the city endured five sieges, including one by Englishman Francis Drake in 1586, who could earn more from the capture of one Spanish ship than the annual income of the British crown.

I looked out over the grey-green Caribbean Sea, imagining fleets of Spanish galleons and black-flagged pirate ships with sword-wielding buccaneers hanging from their masts. In 1741, a one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged Spaniard called Don Blas de Lezo, fought off a massive British attack, in the Battle of Cartagena. The English waged 186 ships and 23,600 men, including machete-wielding Jamaican slaves, against only 6 Spanish ships and 3,600 men. The bay was filled with bodies—men felled by injuries, malaria, cholera, dysentery and scurvy. The British had been so confident of victory they’d had commemorative coins prematurely minted. Yet, in what was later seen as Cartagena’s finest hour, earning it the name ‘La Heroica’, Don Blas’ men prevailed. “Because of him, today we’re speaking Spanish,” Gabriel said.

Around us, lovers walked hand in hand along the ramparts. Others lined up along the wall, squeezed two by two into the garrets and watch holes. Below, the clatter of horse-drawn carts clip-clopped on the cobblestone. As the afternoon wore on, more people climbed the ramparts to watch the sunset. In the town they filled the streets, on their way home but lingering.

***
The old town centre of Cartagena is a triangle-shaped thatch of uneven cobbled streets and winding paths within the elaborate, 11km stone wall and fortifications, which makes it feel cloistered and intimate. The streets splay out at angles (to confuse the pirates during sieges, Gabriel told me) and are lined with beautiful, restored Spanish colonial houses, painted brightly, with potted palms and bougainvillea blossoms hanging over the edges of wooden balconies.

The following day, as I walked beneath the shadow of tangled vines, I could easily imagine why Garcia Gabriel Marquez, the city’s most famous sometime-resident, chose Cartagena as the inspiration for his novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, now a film starring Javier Bardem and filmed on location in Cartagena last year.

“Along the rough cobbled streets that had served so well in surprise attacks and buccaneer landings,” Garcia Marquez wrote, “weeds hung from the balconies and opened cracks in the whitewashed walls of even the best-kept mansions, and the only signs of life at two o’clock in the afternoon were languid piano exercises played in the dim light of siesta.”

Today however, the streets were alive, with clattering mango carts, men with trays of limes ringed with rows of aubergines, women in long frilled skirts selling sweet coconut balls from tubs on their heads. Boys poured hot, sweet, coffee into plastic cups from a thermos. Young men with low-slung satchels hawked miniature Botero sculptures. Others sold calls, charging by the minute on mobile phones strung around their necks (I looked, but didn’t find, mine). From inside stores, the sound of Colombia’s other most famous export, Shakira, filtered into the street.

I bought a mango, expertly peeled and chopped into a plastic bag by Jose Guillermo, a baseball-cap wearing vendor with a “Se Habla Espanol” t-shirt, who wrapped another bag around my hand like a glove so I could eat my mango without getting my hands dirty. I wandered to the Plaza Bolivar, a pretty square with shady trees and old men on benches reading newspapers. Around the Plaza, 400-year-old houses, some converted into hotels, stood beside the imposing House of the Inquisition, with its magnificent Baroque stone gateway, where between 1610 and 1811, hundreds of accused sorcerers, blasphemers and heretics met gruesome fates. I took my place on one of the shady seats, while a group of barefoot Afro-Colombian dancers began an acrobatic performance in the square, leaping and spinning through the air, ribcages, hips and bellies trembling.

Next, I went to the Puerto del Reloj, the mustard-coloured clock tower that opens out onto the Plaza de los Coches, originally a slave market, now surrounded by brightly coloured buildings and raucous bars, from which salsa and vallenato music spilled. Nearby is the Plaza de la Aduana, the town’s oldest and biggest square, once used as a parade ground and now a market selling straw hats, guayaberas, turtle shell combs and salad servers.

As the day got hotter everything slowed almost to a halt. The air seemed to get thicker, steamier. The streets emptied, abandoned in favor of lunch and siesta. I, too, succumbed to the temptation, after a delicious lunch of arepas, cheese-filled corn patty, sold by a man on the street for 1000 pesos.

Each evening, as the heat faded with the light, the streets of Cartagena filled once again with people, music and life. That night, I went with Gabriel to Getsemani, a suburb that was once home to the city’s slaves and artisans. Now a student and backpacker haunt, with the best bars and nightlife, it retains a seedier feel and hasn’t quite shaken its reputation as home to pimps and prostitutes.

On the whole it was more relaxed than the old city centre. People sat outside houses on chairs pulled into the street, doors and windows open, listening to cumbia and enjoying the cool night air, and the view of passersby. We sat in a plaza where tables spilled out of cafes and restaurants for the paying customers, milk crates and stoops for the rest. A group of boys played football around a fountain. We bought a couple of Aguila beers from the corner store and sat on a bench. A continual stream of people came to salute Gabriel, calling him “Che,” slapping his back and pressing the knuckles of their fists against his.

I wanted an early night, because the following day I had a date. I was meeting the then-Colombian foreign minister, Maria Consuelo Araujo, and her Shakira-look-a-like, old school friend, Esther Porto, who I’d met on the flight from Bogota.

***
Sitting next to Esther on the plane a few days before, I’d misjudged her completely, ready to dismiss her as a pampered Colombian beauty-queen. She wore spray-on jeans, high heeled, red polka-dotted sandals and had a fountain of blonde, blow-dried hair that took up almost as much room as her tiny body. A native Cartagenan living in Miami, she was a singer/songwriter waiting for a record deal. She wore sunglasses for the entire journey, called herself “a celebrity-in-waiting,” and was reading an article on corporate philanthropy in The Economist.

Esther told me she was visiting Cartagena to raise money for the poorer neighbourhoods that surround the tourist city. On discovering I was a journalist, she invited me to go with her, and to meet her friend the Foreign Minister, afterwards. I arrived up at her hotel, the former Convento de Santa Teresa now the opulent Hotel Charleston Cartagena, at 9am, with my camera and notebook in hand. She invited me to the rooftop, where I interviewed her by the swimming pool, overlooking the rooftops of the city, while she ate her breakfast.

“The world doesn’t know about what’s going on in Colombia. All they know about is drugs. They don’t know about the realities here, for good or for bad, the beauty of this country, and the poverty. Oh my god you have to try one of these! They’re a local specialty,” she said, holding up a sautéed shrimp in tamarind sauce on the end of her fork.

We hired a taxi and drove 7km north of Cartagena to the small fishing village of La Boquilla. There’s a beach here known as El Paraiso, but living conditions for the majority of people here—subsistence fishermen, mostly—are anything but paradise. There were makeshift houses made from wooden boards without windows or proper roofs, and without electricity or running water. We saw rubbish in the streets and children with stomachs inflated from malnourishment. According to estimates, as many as one in five children in this city of 1 million go hungry, while three in five Cartageneros live on less than $2.00 a day.

“I have seen so many people that have nothing—nothing—in this country,” Esther said, pulling her glossy lips into a pout. “If you go to the little villages all along the Caribbean coast you’ll see how people live. First of all they have to deal with the lack of security. Between the paramilitaries and the guerrillas, they get stuck in the middle. People get killed all the time, often for no reason. They live off whatever they can sell on the side of the road. There’s no education, there’s no medical cover, there’s no government presence in these places. It’s so precarious. Things are getting better, but there still needs to be so much more.”

That night Esther insisted I join her for dinner at La Vitrola, an elegant cavern of a restaurant with slowly spinning ceiling fans, tiled floors, waiters in crisp white uniforms, and a six-piece band playing Cuban son. We were joined by the foreign minister and her brother, the senator Alvaro Araujo, who has since been arrested for alleged ties to paramilitary groups and is under investigation for the crimes of kidnapping and extortion. (His sister, though not personally affected by the charges, nevertheless chose to resign in February 2007.)

The conversation topics included Shakira’s hips (opinion varied from “she moves just like a girl in the street” to “100 percent fake, manufactured”), to Colombia’s problems of poverty and narco-trafficking. The senator was a former soap opera actor turned politician, elected to the Colombian parliament when he was 27. He was short and stocky with a freckled face, shining gold teeth, and a hunch to his shoulders that would probably grow with time. His idea for Colombia was to turn over the country’s narco-infested jungles to migrants. “I think people from other countries would think it nice to come to Colombia and help us fight our drug problem at the same time,” he said. “They might find it terrifying,” was my response.

The opulence of the evening, and its juxtaposition with what we had seen earlier that day, made me feel a little giddy. Maybe it was the mojito, but my head began to spin with the contradictions of a country I found so difficult to understand. Colombia is a place steeped in natural beauty, yet ravaged by a 40-year, three-way conflict between the government, leftwing guerilla groups and illegal paramilitaries, fuelled by the drug trade. Colombia has the second-biggest internally displaced population, outside Darfur in Sudan, with an estimated 3 million people out of a population of 45 million forced to leave their homes as a result of the conflict. Though the violence has diminished in recent years, it’s something that has touched nearly every Colombian, directly or indirectly. And yet Colombians seem incredibly resilient. People I spoke to were keen to shake off the country’s past, and its reputation, and welcome the outside world in, to experience its wonders. The revival of Cartagena—pretty, historic and safe—is playing a key role in doing just that.

During the rest of the week I ventured to other parts of the city, like the Matuna area, with its bustling streets, food stalls, vendors lining the pavement, dust and dirt. I visited the San Diego quarter, site of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ house, and the 16th century University of Cartagena, with its arched corridors and pretty interior garden. I spent time sitting on the street with Gabriel, watching the passers-by, chatting about everything and nothing. When I got bored, I would move to another pretty square, another pretty corner. I found a café where one day the waiter, Salvador, let me sit for hours with my single coffee, waiting for the afternoon rains to clear. He turned out to be a poet, and brought me examples of his work to read. The vulnerability I’d felt at being robbed had somehow allowed me to open up to the city in a way I hadn’t planned. I found the streets of Cartagena to be a magical place, where smiles came freely, random conversations stretched into afternoons and evenings, and people helped me out when I needed it. By the end of my stay, even the local touts were greeting me by name in the street, and I them. My days melded into a happy rhythm, and I enjoyed the gentle pace. I felt like I was doing what you’re supposed to do in the Caribbean: linger.

My replacement visa card finally arrived. I paid my bill at the Hostal Santo Domingo, much to the relief of the accommodating-but-starting-to-look-anxious staff, and packed my bags for Bogota. On the day I left it poured with rain, and my flight was grounded for an hour. As I sat in the airport lounge, sipping a last Aguila beer, I wondered, almost wistfully, whether I might actually get stuck in Cartagena again, and if that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.