Cartagena, Colombia

Cartagena is a beautiful city! Old town Cartagena (inside the fort wall)is very walkable and full of colorful colonial buildings from two hundreds years ago, I can imagine this being an architectural geek´s dream vacation spot. Playa Blanca is a white-sand beach, with crystal blue water, and coral reefs for snorkelings.

Walkable town, colorful buildings with lots of history, goregous beach, crystal blue water for swimming and snorkeling, what more can a vacationer ask for? And these are also the reasons that lead to us planned majority of our Colombia vacation in Cartagena.

In many ways, Cartagena would have been my ideal vacation spot. Alas, that was not the case. What could have been a perfect vacation spot was ruined by the constantly harassment from locals. Since there are no Asians here, the locals know we are tourists. The street vendors are annoyingly agressive. They would not go away even after we repeatly told them no. And when we did buy something, they jacked up the price. For example, we know a bun cost 25 US cents (because we bought it for that price before at another bakery) but most places want to charge us $1-$2 USD. We felt we are being constantly rip off. Furthermore, many local men whisper perverted phrases (in Spanish) as we walked by.

Originally, we were going to go diving here and diving requires us to not fly till 48 hours later; which is another reason why we choose to spend 4 days here. However, we decided not to go diving because from our snorkeling shows there are not that many interesting things here to see (squids were the only cool thing we saw) and it was more expensive than we thought (they are asking for $100 USD). At the end, we ended up spent majority of time walking around town and being slightly bored. I even did research online again on what to do, which leads me regretting not doing thorough research ahead of time. Most people recommended only stay here for couple days and I thoroughly agreed with them. Also, there seem to be quite a bit of prostitution in this town. At Hardrock Cafe, we saw several old men with very young women. Sad!

Anyway, with the constant harassment, the heat, and the mosquitoes, I can´t wait to get back to Bogota (the Colombians there are respectful and no one harass us).