So far so good, and we have managed to enjoy ourselves so far, an 11th anniversary, a second honeymoon, however you want to look at it - life is better when you look on the bright side.
We climbed the historic 16th century stone walles, built in the first half of the 1500s to repel the nasty british naval invasions, Cartegena has been a prize since it has existed. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia's Nobel Laureate in literature remarked that he felt reborn walking these walls at 6pm, which is the time of the sunset.
So this we did, but not until after spending the day driving around the city. We made a new friend, a tour guide who showed us some of the main sites.
From modern to historic, from the legendary to the surreal; Cartegena has a lot to see.
I'm not even sure what to say about the Zapatos Viejos, seems like an inside joke that got made into a monument, but the locals swear its really good luck and that anyone who gets inside the shoe will lose 2 kilograms of weight.
We decided just in case that I would get in the shoe for the picture.
Some of the fruits are different too, we really liked the tamarind fruit, and went looking for different tamarind candies and items. By some stoke of luck, in one park we found a tamarind tree and even got some seeds to take back home to the farm. According to the internet, it grows up to 600 meters above sea level, so we think we should be able to grow it down in Padilla.
After a while we started wanting to understand how everything fit together, Cartegena seemed like a complicated city to navigate so we went up to the Cerro de la Popa, to get the layout.
From here, "Lookout Hill", they could see ships coming from many miles off, and get word to the fort if anything was about to happen.
Imagine some menacing english galleons lurking out there off the coast!
Boom! There are really cool old things inside the walled city, we just kept walking around and taking pictures as sunset slowly approached, but I am getting ahead of myself again.
After coming down from the 'popa', we were getting hungry, and we had heard really good things about a particular dish, the Pargo Rojo. Now I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but the legend was that this fish lived in the deep sea and ate only shrimp, which is why it is red.
Well, we tried it out, with some Tamarind Juice :)
Red Snapper! That I had heard of before, although I don't think I've ever tried it until Cartegena.
It was around this point, if I'm remembering correctly, that @ecoinstante said to me -
"Happy Anniversary"
So its official now, not because of the "vacation", but we have been married now 11 years, since about 1 week ago. As a rural hermit, I normally would not do something like this, but I look at how happy my wife looks in these pictures (and me too), I think that whatever the price, its probably worth it.
And that's the story of how we ended up enjoying a seaside sunset atop a 500 year old stone fortress. I wonder what we'll get up to tomorrow?
