Bougainvillea fringed wooden balconies overhang narrow cobbled streets lined with brightly painted houses. Horse drawn carts clatter across the stones as laconic, dark skinned men sit on the dusty pavements swigging beer from the bottle and playing dominoes. Music wafts into the night air on the warm ocean breezes, and the most beautiful girls in the world gently sway their hips in doorways, while their grandparents rock rhymthically in their chairs.
As I've already written, the Lonely Planet guidebook describes Cartagena as "a fairy tale city of romance, legends, and sheer beauty" and "the most spectacular colonial city on the continent". I can't vouch for the second claim, as my experience of South America is thus far limited to Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia, but I can certainly confirm that Cartagena is indeed a very special place. An hour and a half flying time from Bogota, and Cartagena feels every bit of it. The palm trees lining the runway, the blast of hot air when the door opens, the pools of rainwater in the streets from the customary afternoon storm, even the noticeably darker inhabitants; make no mistake about it, this is the Caribbean.
Yet the difference between Cartagena and Bogota is more than just geographic - there's a distinct time shift between the Andes and the coast. Everything is much slower here, on island time as it were. There's another, more subtle, time difference though; in many respects Cartagena lies in a different century from the capital. While it has the same accoutrements of modern life as any big city in Latin America - internet cafes, cash machines, mobile phones - wandering the old town here could quite easily convince you you'd stepped into a timewarp. Put it this way, Cartagena is the only place I've ever been where the horse drawn carts seem plausibly authentic rather than tacky and artificial.
There is certainly a fairytale quality to all this: the gingerbread houses, the horsedrawn carriages, the walls defending the city from pirates, and Cartagena's history rivals any yarn from a children's storybook. Founded in 1533 on the site of an old Carib Indian settlement, Cartagena quickly grew into the most important port in Spanish America. Almost all the incalcuable treasure - gold, silver, emeralds and the like - extracted from South America's soil was shipped through Cartagena back to Spain. To put the quantities into some kind of perspective, the mines of a single Bolivian town, San Luis Potosi, reputedly yielded sufficient riches to build a solid silver bridge, 6 feet wide, all the way back to Madrid. Cartagena's spectacular architecture was one result of all this commerce; the constant scourge of piracy was another. The most famous of these buccaneers (you may wish to look away now if your version of history was taught in a British school), Sir Francis Drake, held the whole city to ransom in a long and bloody siege in 1586, graciously agreeing not to raze it to the ground upon receipt of ten million pesos. In response to this and numerous other assaults by seamen flying the skull and crossbones, the Spanish colonialiasts ringed Cartagena first with a series of forts, and later with the city walls which still stand today. Standing on the ramparts watching the sun sink slowly into the Caribbean, it's not at all difficult to imagine a pirate galleon sneaking over the horizon...
In addition to its ancient myths and legends, Cartagena was more recently the setting for Gabriel Garcia Marquez´s 1985 novel "Love In The Time Of Cholera", a fantastical fairytale loosely based on his own parents' courtship along Colombia's Caribbean coast. The book, published after his Nobel Prize for Literature yet arguably his best, will soon receive a great deal more publicity when the Hollywood adaptation hits screens across the globe later this year. Directed by Mike Newell, of "Four Weddings and a Funeral" fame, with a screenplay by 'Gabo' himself, and starring Javier Bardem, Benjamin Bratt, and Catalina Sandino Moreno, the movie promises to put Cartagena even more firmly on the tourist map as it was filmed on location in the city.
The story gets its name from the fearsome cholera epidemic which forms the backdrop to a hilariously absurd love story. In an amusingly (though not for me) apt parallel to the novel, my own whirlwind romance with Cartagena was also painted with a similar backdrop on the canvas as I battled a mysterious stomach ailment. While it obviously wasn't cholera, after some careful reading of the Health section of the Lonely planet (I strongly recommend you never try this), I am however sure that it was one (or all) of Typhoid, Amoebic Dysentry, or Hepatitis A. Still, luckily for me, Colombia, as you all well know, is renowned as the "drug capital of the world", and as a result the regulations regarding prescpriptions are somewhat lax. It seems that in place of the highly secure system in place in Britain (where any totally illegible scribble on something vaguely approximating a green piece of paper with a doctor's name will suffice), merely going up to the counter and saying "Amoxycillin, por favor" will produce favourable results. Whether such leniency extends higher up the drug potency chain is unclear. "Methadone por favor"? Hmmm... Anyway, as a result of my battle with a species of bacteria hitherto unknown to medical science, I ate two meals between last Wednesday and yesterday (Monday), subsisting almost entirely on a diet of gatorade and immodium. Personally I think it could be the new Atkins. Fortunately my initial tentative foray into the field of experimental pharmacology seems to have had some success, and I'm now back eating again. I may limit my intake of the ubiquitos Colombian "frijoles" (beans) for a while, however.
I conclude with an update on the "Usnavy" anecdote from my previous update. It seems another popular name in the Choco is taken from the currency. As the locals astutely inferred, any man important enough to have his picture on a dollar bill must be worth naming your offspring after. Unfortunately, however, that was the full extent of the intelligence on display in Choco province, hence a large number of children now run around the streets known as "Onedollar". To be fair, I'm not sure "George Washington" would be much better, but...
On that note, I'm off to conclude my homework - a 20 minute presentation (in Spanish of course) on "the history of guerillas in Colombia". I'll write again after the weekend, when I should be able to report on Cali, the self-styled salsa capital of the world, and also the Coffee Region. Pictures of Cartagena are below.
"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition." Except perhaps here, at the Palacio de la Inquisicion. 
This being Colombia, dancing in the streets is mandatory.
Like Freddie Mercury, Fernando Botero likes Fat Bottomed Girls.
"¡Dios mio! It's the damned English again!" 
