Nadia Hit By A Guitar, Chiva Bus, We Hold A Sloth
Trip Start
Sep 29, 2007
1
119
221
Trip End
Ongoing
Cartagena,
Colombia
Monday, June 23, 2008
The bus fare of 20000 pesos was a bit steep considering i had to sit on a giant fan and Nadia sat on a small boy who had been kicked out of his seat when us gringos bought a paid fare. Children ride free when they sit on the mother´s laps so they jam all four or five of their children onto one mother´s lap
maraca madness
. The bus company was called Rapido Ocho which means ´fast´ but it was anything but because it left 45 minutes late and crawled like a snail so it could pick up as many people as it could cram into the sardine can. Colombians are on holidays so that explains it. The coast line was not very pretty and we past some very poor looking towns where some houses were built directly onto swampland and seemed to be flooded. Children played in the heavily polluted waters out front. We were glad to be driving out of a beastly looking storm though and were ready for the next leg which is to head south back down into Ecuador then Peru.Once in Cartagena we stayed in the old part of town because the new part is a fashionable seaside resort and has nothing of interest for us. Cartagena is Colombia´s largest port and the old parts are a living museum of 16th and 17th century Spanish architecture with narrow winding streets, palaces, churches, monastaries, plazas and large mansions with balconies. We stayed at Getsamani which is supposed to be dangerous after dark but we wandered around without incident there. The old town is surrounded by some old walls called Las Murallas built in the 16th century to keep pirates out of the city. Always love a town that pirates are trying to get into. Arhhh!!! We walked around on top of the walls and had fun doing a photo shoot where we tried to copy the other tourist´s cheesey poses with bland backgrounds like in front of the fort, sitting on a cannon or a gun or on the boring sea wall
tacky chiva bus souvenir
. We watched a guy smash up a television. We were walking through Plaza de Centenario when we spotted a giant rainbow coloured land iguana chilling out in the city park, mini alligator size. At first we thought someone owned it and would charge us for a photograph but then we realised we could snap away if we were game to get close enough to it. Nadine didn´t believe it was real and thought some kid had a remote control on it so i was able to trick her into getting into a shot with it.
We checked out the giant Pegasus statues and had a blended fruit juice of banana, mango, maracuya and pina fruit. We bought some dulces (typical homemade sweets) from some of the stalls on the Plaza de los Coches. Our luck with the museums continued because they were all closed. At one point i turned my back for a second to buy one of the little coloured chiva bus souvenirs and when i turned back around Nadine was sitting on a chair surrounded by a t-shirt seller, a cigar seller and an emerald guy weighing out emeralds on scales in the hope that she would buy something. Trade must have been slow and Nadine needs a couple of cans of harden up when it comes to vendors. ¨No Gracias Senor¨. We took in the atmosphere of the busy streets and i sat up on the statue of the naked indigenous woman who stands staring up at the sky in the middle of the city and watched a busy intersection of buses, cars, taxis, horse and carts, vendors and everything else with wheels collide and somehow make it through without the use of traffic lights
Bus Waiting
. Whilst trying to find Govinda´s Hare Krishna restaurant, a guy walked past Nadine with a guitar then deliberately turned around and tried to hit her with it for no reason. Hilarious! I Love it. Govindas is no longer there. The Liars Planet guide book is wrong again. We checked out the public art, ate snow cones made with vintage ice grinding machines, watched girls rollerskating races in a specially made rink in the park and ate home made potato chips. An annoying hungry clown follwed me down the street copying all my moves as i walked, i had no small change to give him so i waited until we were in view of lots of people then broke out in to a highland fling that he couldn´t copy and then walked off. Hurrah! We went to a place that had dogs on the menu, hot dogs we think. There were some cool doorknockers around to satisfy my doorknocker fetish for awhile.Whilst at an internet cafe which i might add was so scant on space it had a toilet in a cupboard, two young Colombian girls asked me my name and when i looked over i realised they had drawn an animated computer avatar that resembled me, classic. Our staple food here has been the Arepas which are very simple and are basically patties made from maize flour and cooked then topped with guacamole, yoghurt, chilli and mayonaise.
We weren´t overly impressed with the city but maybe we have seen too many South American colonial cities and our view is slighty obscured, the city was good for a couple of days and we were itching for a ride on one of the traditional Colombian, rainbow coloured, chiva buses that do tours of the city at night
Newpaper front page
. Apparently people rearrange the letters of ´Colombia´ to make it appear as ´Locombia´ which means the mad country, the night time ride on a traditional chiva bus that we took confirms this statement to be true. Basically we had a couple of Aguila beers then rocked up at a hotel before being ushered onto a large, coloured bus with party lights strung up as decorations inside. When we saw the bus we fell to the ground in laughter, a tourist extravaganza. Maraca vendors chase you with gusto waving noisy rattles made from coconut shells and filled with stones in your face and hissing until you finally give in to the bus mood and buy a set. These guys had them in our van before we had parked. Now there is a loud, live band onboard who play a large cheese grater instrument, a guitar and some drums. We were seated directly behind them and not allowed to move. The maracas we were throwing around out of time to the music seemed to annoy them so we played them even louder. A bottle of Colombian rum, a coke bottle and ice bucket are placed in a tray in front of you and it is all you can drink. The band even got themselves fairly well lit. With a fully stocked bar, no doors on the bus and dancing, it was clear that the workplace health and safety officer had not been in attendance for awhile. Now you would think it would be a tacky experience but it was actually alot of fun once you got into it. This was because everyone on board (mainly Latin Americans on holidays) went from being regular tourists to party animals as soon as the bus was on the road
Colombian Avocado
. Even the locals on the streets of Cartagena would wave and shout as we went by, everyone was genuinely into it. The band seemed to be playing the same songs over and over. The main song was one where the only lyrics were Arriba, arriba, arriba!!! which means stand on your feet and shake your arse. The highlight of the party came when the bus stopped and everyone filed out onto the top of one of the walls overlooking the ocean whilst tourist police kept watch. We were given a bonafide soggy, Colombian empanada. What seemed like hundreds of vendors selling crap pounced on us. An instant party erupted into full flight when all the other chiva bus operators drove their buses to the same location and quadrupled the crowd. I had my photo taken with a deadly snake by a guy with a vintage polaroid camera and then someone told us a guy had a sloth on his back.... a sloth!!! we could hardly believe it, in the city. Not knowing the Espanol word for sloth we asked around for the guy carrying a monkey instead. The sloth guy was being harassed by the police and so he should because really, who brings a sloth to the city? Anyway, eventually the sloth / monkey guy sneaks the sloth over to us and tells us it is the mono (monkey) we had been looking for. It was in fact a baby sized sloth and cuddled us like a human child would. Who says we needa sperm donor? We fell in love with it and now have it stashed in our backpacks dragging it around to see more cities. We gave the guy alot of ¨money for the sloth / monkey´s fruit¨ even though fruit is going at the rate of 30cents for 20 apples. True. A fantastic Carribbean dance group performed before the buses took us to a terrible nightclub the Toucan Disco that had mannequins lying in hammocks and lighting made up of one of those energy lightning spheres from the 80´s and annoying red lazers that pointed at your face. We quickly escaped into the night back to the Holiday Inn. We are flying to Cali tomorrow to make up some time. 
