Cartagena: a case study of capitalism

Jack getting sexy on the Old Town Wall...

Walking the Old Town of Cartagena conjures up visions of Grandma and Grandpa going down to Cuba for a long weekend before you had to go to Canada to get to Cuba; thick heat, a labyrinth of colorful colonial architecture surrounding you, night clubs (some even Cuban themed), and rampant capitalism. The difference is that, in Cartagena, in a country where 500 bucks can allegedly sustain a family of four for a month, a night of salsa dancing, casual drinking, and a creative and tasty dinner runs you about 150 bucks. This price tag would be so worth it if we had 401Ks, but unfortunately none of us did, so we had to make due with set meals, bottles of rum, and hanging out in front of clubs with the smokers and folks waiting in line. Luckily, guys hang out outside the clubs with coolers of beer for sale. The old town is romantically situated on the Caribbean ocean and surrounded by a wall 3 to 20 feet wide and 10 to 20 feet tall. Beyond the wall you can see the top of the main fortress, an unconquerable Spanish war castle of gargantuan proportions. We stayed in the neighborhood of Getsemini, which was the area right before the old town, at Hotel Marlin, where air conditioning was available from 9pm to 9am (AC was quite the commodity in town; we even had a night or two where fellow backpackers came over for a slumber party with no sexual connotation whatsoever).

An allegedly impenetrable fortress, even Sir Francis Drake
couldn't get in!

The 5 minute walk from our hotel to the clock tower, the grand entranceway through the old town’s wall, was a testament to the rampant capitalism of Cartagena, and the gears of this rampant capitalism machine were none other than the crackheads. I don’t know much about crack other than what I have seen in movies and on tv, but to my understanding it is really cheap in the States, where cocaine is extremely expensive. In Colombia, cocaine is cheaper than water, in that staying properly hydrated—especially in the sticky heat of Cartagena—costs you more than it would to stay jacked on marching powder all day. So, logically speaking, crack must be just about free in Colombia. This means that although crackheads are seemingly everywhere in Getsemani, they don’t have the soaring ambitions of their fellow crackhead counterparts in the states—no tv or car stereo stealing is necessary to fund their habits. They get by (read stay high) being the economic impetus of the area; hailing taxis, suggesting hotels, helping you find a juice bar; I even had one stand out in the street and stop traffic at rush hour so I could cross, for the equivalent of a few pennies; thanks senor crusty lips!

These aren’t the only folks offering services to you, no sir. The next up in line are the only slightly crack-addled coke dealers hanging out in front of every other store or so. They typically go with a modified broken record technique—first they establish eye contact, then friendship (hey friend! amigo!), then they build a rapport (where you from? welcome to Colombia!), and then go for the kill (I got anything you need. Want some coke? Need yayo? I got Colombia’s finest! Free sample! Oh, no coke… how about some weed? And so on and so forth). This goes on from about 10 am to 4 am, every day; Fatimah found it annoying, I thought it was rather endearing.

A view from the fortress, Old Cartagena is to the right on the
further island.

Then there are the whores, who offer everything from ‘massages’ to unspeakable sexual acts at 2 in the afternoon. I don’t feel too bad mentioning this, because they didn’t seem too beautiful on the inside either, but in a country with some of the most conventionally beautiful people in the world, these whores were some of the most heinous, atrociously hideous, and despicable whores in all God’s creation.

There's the clock tower, behind that Pegasus!

Then comes the legal side of the touts; cheese stuffed fried cornbread, sausages with a maize accompaniment, fruits of all shapes and colors, amazing limeade, slightly used kitchen appliances, heavily used sink strainers, remote controls, DVDs (this one’s not so legal I guess), watch repair, and so on and so forth. A notable part of this walk of free market action is the shrimp cocktail row, which consists of about 20 to 30 stalls, all directly adjacent to one another, that all sell the exact same thing: Shrimp mixed up with some ketchup, horseradish, lime, and red onion. They all seem to get their ingredients from the same source, so it comes down to whether you like the tart of the lime juice or the burn of the horseradish better in selecting and establishing your favorite shrimp cocktail stall; mine was the eighth one down called ‘Fruit of the Sea.’

Bocagrande, Cartagena's upscale South-Beachesque district.

My suggestion would be to go to Cartagena and buy a ticket out when you arrive. This will pressure you to do all the fun touristy things in a timely manner and get the hell out while the getting’s good. The heat, the beauty, the intrigue, and for some, the drugs might just well suck you in, wear you down, and leave you wondering where 10, 20, or even 100 percent of your trip went.

Sandra and Our Police Escort Service

We had been in Bogota (and South America, for that matter) just long enough to set our things down in our room when I bumped into Sandra, a petit Colombian, 22 years of age, staying in the same room as us. She was jumpy, fidgety, and quickly apologized rapid fire in every language she could think of (I think I even caught Swahili). She was shy at first but once I asked her where she was from, she started shooting out rapid streams of consciousness in Spanish, how she was from Bogota, liked the cold, wanted to party tonight, and hoped I could join her at a house party. I expressed an affirmative interest and then she told me she worked tonight at the hostel, and that she would take us out at 12 (It was 9 or so).

Sandra’s job at the hostel is difficult to specify. It didn’t seem to be as much ‘work’ as ‘requirement of presence.’ She sometimes tended the bar, which was more along the lines of choosing songs off the bar laptop and occasionally handing a beer to someone; while the bar did serve mixed drinks, the backpacking gringo crowd were not exactly big spenders and most opted to hang out in the bar with their own bottle of aguardiente (a licorice flavored, 30% ABV liquor, usually ingested in shots—think watered down Sambuca), purchased at the store for the price of one or two cocktails at the bar. Furthermore, during her ‘working hours’ she would frequently leave the bar un(wo)manned to go and prepare herself for partying after work… make-up, trying on of multiple outfits, and so on and so forth.

We passed the time playing foosball and drinking and mingling with the Scots and the Irish and the Germans and the Aussies and the Brits and the Americans that had been trouncing about Latin America for varying durations of time. It sometimes seems not as important what you do but where you go with the gringo crowd. They would comment on their inability to do activities because of financial reasons while drinking, smoking, and snorting 4 to 6 nights a week (hmmm).

When the clock struck 12, Sandra’s requirement of presence was no longer present, and she came up to us frantic. In rapid fire Spanish she spout off something along the lines of a house party conflicting with a drum and bass party, and now everyone there is totally wasted and she doesn’t know shit about what’s going on and who’s doing it and where it’s at and that she needed to make more phone calls and to wait where we were. From across the room, people would probably think that Sandra was speaking of life or death matters, or starring in an action movie, but really it was a choice of which party to go to. After pacing and calling and swearing for a few more minutes, she seemed to have given up and walked over to us.

“Smoweed?”

Huh? We all asked.

“Smo-weed?”

Puzzled looks.

“Smo-weed, you know, SMOKE… WEED?”

Oh yeah, sure we all said in our own form or fashion.

She hurried us into the bathroom, despite the fact that there was no hurry. The shared bathroom in the 10 bed dorm that Sandra slept in was, for all intents and purposes, Sandra’s bathroom. Hairsprays, q tips, brushes, and other beauty and hygienic products lined the sink, so that there wasn’t even enough bathroom real estate to set your toothbrush down. We used her Postobon© plastic bottle bong and she nervously packed more and more pot into the bowl piece and insisted we continued smoking. Despite the crispy, dark green and brown appearance, this stuff was the real deal, as evidenced by the giggling fit that ensued. Sandra’s laugh was like saying ‘head’, but without the ‘d’, and in a very shrill voice, usually in bursts of 3 (try it now if you can, it’s fun; be sure to add some nasal in it). This laugh would incite my baritone ‘huh huh’ laugh, which would incite Jack’s tenor chuckles and Fatimah’s soprano cackles. A symphony of laughter.

It seemed the night was going well, but Sandra still wanted to go to the drum and bass party or a party of some sort. She would call someone and this would make her seemingly more nervous, and she would smoke more, and this went on for an hour or so. We tapped out after the first or second round, but she endured the ankle-lock Mary Jane had on her brain and kept coming for more. Before we knew it, it was 2 and we all had intense munchies. She took us about 10 blocks away to get us some tasty street meat treats: well-seasoned shredded pork with a glob of mayonnaise wrapped in thin corn dough and deep fried. Upon having street meat treats, I’m always shocked people aren’t dropping off of heart attacks at 19 in Latin America. We stopped at a bar or two to give the food some alcohol to soak up, and then decided to head back to the hostel.

We were walking and joking when we hear BAM BAM BAM. Okay, it was all good I told myself. BAM BAM, at this point Sandra started running and whimpering, and motioned for us to follow her. BAM BAM BAM BAM. The sounds were clearly a gun fight, going on one block over from us. Shit. The first hostel that Sandra banged on the door of didn’t answer. Shit. We were going to have to go down the road to another hostel, en route we would have to pass a cross street where the gunners could possibly see us. Shit. The second hostel had someone (wo)manning the desk—a plump older Colombian woman with playful curly dyed hair. Sandra, as frantic as ever, described our plight. The woman laughed and invited us in. It was at this time that I realized this was really going on and looked to Fatimah for her thoughts. She was speechless and, for lack of better words, freaked the fuck out. Heavy breathing, constricted pupils, shocked look, the whole 9 yards. Another staff member or two came into the common area and the story was retold to them. They laughed and got us tea. Fatimah was still, for the most part, out of it. She was frantically saying ‘I want to stay here, I will pay, I don’t care, call the police’ in rapid succession. Jack, Sandra, and I were a little shook up—don’t get me wrong—but Fatimah was out of it. The hostel called the police and they showed up a few minutes later. After acting calmly and not treating a gunfight like a big deal we ended up getting a ride home from them in their riot proof cop-van (saving at least 2000 pesos on a cab, or roughly a buck).

While I have been in a few sketchy situations abroad, a gunfight down the road was not on my list of experiences. Furthermore, this was Jack and Fatimah’s first night abroad… A pretty action packed ‘Welcome to the developing world my friends!’ I would say.

Planes, Trains, and Hurricanes

The cool, calming female voice on the other line did not reflect the gravity and/or urgency of the situation, at least as I saw it. ‘Due to the threat of weather, all trains to Florida will be cancelled until September.’ Fuck. With two cell phones up to my head, Fatimah on one line and the Amtrak sales agent on the other, we tried to figure out something.

Fatimah, also double fisting cell phones, was telling me train 97 had seats, my sales agent was refuting this; my sales agent was telling me train 91 was my best bet, no one even told Fatimah this one existed. All the while Jack was beeping in but, in fear of losing the connection with the Amtrak people that I had waited 20 minutes to talk to, I ignored it. After 3 different sales reps we finally had tickets, on separate trains, at different times, with an added caveat: we had to make it 100 miles South to Columbia (with a ‘u’), in the next few hours.

We scrambled to pack our bags and took a ride with Jack’s parents down to Columbia (with a ‘u’). They dropped us off at 10 pm for a 1:30am train. Fuck. But then, like a bald, black, shining angel from the sky, James walked in, and with infectious enthusiasm asked the station attendant where he could grab a cold beer. ‘I wouldn’t know sir, maybe those gentlemen could help you’ as she pointed to me and Jack, who had just entered the station. We dropped our bags off behind the desk and set off to wet our whistles, so to speak.

I’m not sure whether James was bigger or friendlier. He was about 6 and a half feet tall, with broad shoulders that peeked out of his cutoff tee. He was from Kentucky and had a bit of Southern drawl, but no African American twang. He wore thin rimmed glasses and he either shaved his entire body on a bi-daily basis or had Alopecia. He was a military engineer and helped design fighter planes. After a victorious battle with colon cancer, James went into early retirement and bought up foreclosed homes in North Carolina and Florida, and turned them into his retirement palaces.

We found Thirsty Fellow, a bar down the road from the train station, and stopped in, it had a classy ambiance, with high drink prices to go along with it, but pints were on special for 3 bucks, so we had a few high gravity brews.

Within about 10 minutes I had a completely sloshed young lady tugging on my shirt to start up a conversation. She was quite upfront and pretty interested in me, or Jack, or both of us. She invited us to her apartment to ‘watch tv or something’ about 4 minutes after our first words were exchanged—and this has never happened to me before, for the record. A few minutes later she flagged down the barkeep and began ordering tequila shots like they were going out of style, my most conservative estimate would be in the realm of 60 over the course of two hours for her, her friend, our trio, and people that happened to be walking by during her ordering sprees.

2 hours later, it was time to leave. We exchanged good byes, thanked her for the BAC fortification and stumbled back to the train station. The 3 of us were clearly too rowdy for the sleepy, cranky crowd in the station so we went out to the platform. The train was a similar experience; we were quickly asked to go to the lounge car. The night slowly faded into waking up the next morning atop each other, thanks to the bottle of fine whiskey we brought along to supplement the buzz of the high gravity beers and free shots from earlier.

We met up with Fatimah in Orlando and decided it was best to not stay at the airport for 36 hours. Somehow we also came to the conclusion that we should walk the 11 miles to the airport hotel, in Florida, in August. About 2 hours into this Suburban hike, we decided to call a cab.

We waited for an hour on a corner in the hot Florida sun, and finally, not a yellow cab, but a Lincoln Town Car (read expensive ass cab) pulled up. 25 dollars for about 5 miles seemed expensive, so we offered him 15 and he drove off, flinging an upset arm out in our direction. Oh well.

We saw a girl walking her dog and asked her where the closest gas station was, she said just down the street. We walked on opposite sides of the street about 3 blocks before she reared her head up and asked “where are you guys going?”

“The airport, but the taxi was charging 25 bucks so we are just gonna walk.” I said to her from across the street.

“Well I can take you over there for some gas money!” Sweet, and come to find out she was a traveler of sorts herself, and while she was spreading the gospel and we were spreading US dollars, at least we had a common topic of interest to talk about in the 10 minute ride to the airport hotel.