Nomadic Travel - Cartagena, Colombia Day 1
This week I'll be posting from Colombia where I'll be leading our next Love Nomadic Retreat.
I arrived into Cartegena on Wednesday afternoon on Jet Blue. It's an easy flight from NYC that costs under $600 and less than 5 hours. In fact, I was with cocktail in hand, sitting around a pool by 1pm that same afternoon!
Cartagena is an old colonial city, situated on the western coast of Colombia. It's small, quaint and friendly. For these first few days, before the group arrives, I'm traveling solo as a woman and feel completely safe doing so.
I'm staying at La Hotel Artilleria a small, boutique and relatively new hotel situated on a quieter street in Getsemani - an up and coming hip neighborhood on the fringe of the historic walled city. It's got great nightlife, chic bars and an urban ruggedness to make it feel local, with some fantastic street graffiti.
From what I've seen so far, Cartagena is small and easy to navigate. I'm avoiding the expensive and overrated tourist restaurants and drinking fresh fruit and coconuts from street vendors and eating dinners in small, family run cocina's who have signs that read Casa de Rosa - Rosa's house and are packed with locals The food is clean, simple and the freshest you'll get and, often costs under $5.
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Some scenes so far.
A wallflower on the outskirts of Getsemani
shadows on a wall ; a street scene of a home across from my hotel
A street scene inside the historic walled city where many locals sell wares to tourists. This older lady sits to eat her lunch with a traditional costume (probably sold to tourists) upon her lap. It occasionally rains here in these humid temperatures and she's clearly prepared.
I can rarely stop by a colored wall without taking a picture of it. The form and structure are captivating to me. I think this is just beautiful art and I don't know why we don't color our building walls more often.
Along the famed wall of the historic area are these canon windows. Used to house large cannons during wartime. Now they act as small, seated windows where you often see young lovers at dusk canoodling with each other or, solo wanderers eating their lunch.
South America does have a touch of kitsch that I quite like. Take this flower market, for example, it's an entire alleyway of people selling fake flowers...and patrons rushing to buy them. They even spray the area with perfume! Amazing!
My very simple but delicious breakfast at the Hotel Antilleria.