An American Abroad

Cartagena 2008: Inside/Outside

Concepts like inside and outside tend to blur in Cartagena — indeed, in many tropical countries. Houses and other buildings in the old city are built around courtyards. Whether the courtyard counts as inside or outside is an issue I don’t really want to address. Same with rooftops.

The Hotel Agua had both a courtyard and a rooftop garden and pool. The views of the old city were striking, affording glimpses of both the beautiful facades of the city and the less beautiful inner and upper aspects of nearby residences.

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Other much larger hotels had grand courtyards with enormous verandas, perfect for hanging out for a drink with friends. Those places were decorated in contemporary Colombian style, a look that combines Scandinavian elegance with South American colors and heat.

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I preferred the smaller bars and cafés. The one below was my favorite. “Gabby comes here,” the barkeep told me, referring proudly to Cartagena’s native son, Gabriel García Márquez. I wondered how many bars in the US would so proudly announce their patronage by a then-living writer?

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The cathedral was, of course, designed to over-awe and connect the congregation to the eternal. It was more restrained in its decoration than many South- and Central American churches I’ve seen, and to good effect.

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Numerous alleyways were cut into the city’s buildings, resembling the medinas of Arabic nations. These further conflated the concepts of inside and outside.

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This painting in a local gallery or museum caught my eye. I saw in it an ambiguous combination of gaiety and menace.

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Perhaps that was similar to the ambiguity of place I felt in Cartagena. Inside or outside? Public display or walled-off secrets? Devils or angels?

Note: some of the photos above may have been taken by Susan Doktor.

Cartagena 2008: The Dancers in Parque de Bolívar

It was a hot night. I heard music — Wild Afro-Caribbean beats. I followed the sound to Parque de Bolívar, in the center of the old city. There was rhythm, sweat, dancing, music, costumes, and a monkey. I turned my camera flash off and started shooting. The photos that resulted were more true to the actual sensation of being there than sharp, well-lit images would have been.

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Note: some of the photos above may have been taken by Susan Doktor.

Cartagena 2008: At Night

As much as I seek to dispel stereotypes by traveling, there are some that are hard not to fall prey to. In Cartagena, I was all in on the notion that the city was every bit the magical, romantic place that its native son, Gabriel García Márquez, immortalized in Love in the Time of Cholera
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As Anand Giridharadas wrote in the New York Times a few years ago,

Truth can be stranger than fiction in Cartagena, the Colombian city whose real-life blend of seediness and charm has been an important inspiration for one of the most imaginative writers of the modern era, Gabriel García Márquez. It is a city so pregnant with the near magical that, when Mr. García Márquez took a visiting Spaniard on a tour one day that included a Creole lunch and a stroll through the old city, it lowered his opinion of Mr. García Márquez’s talents. The Spaniard told Mr. García Márquez, as he would later record in an essay, “You’re just a notary without imagination.”

I’d never dismiss García Márquez as a mere note-taker. At night there I saw deep shadows, beautiful women, desolate wallscapes, and ancient archways all lit by soft yellow streetlamps. If you don’t feel something romantic in that, there’s no emotional Cialis that’ll help you.

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Note: some of the photos above may have been taken by Susan Doktor.

Cartagena 2008: Street Scenes 3

These are more daytime photos of Cartagena, Colombia, which I visited in 2008. As Lonely Planet puts it,

Cartagena de Indias is the undisputed queen of the Caribbean coast, a fairy-tale city of romance, legends and superbly preserved beauty lying within an impressive 13km of centuries-old colonial stone walls. Cartagena’s old town is a Unesco World Heritage site – a maze of cobbled alleys, balconies covered in bougainvillea, and massive churches that cast their shadows across plazas.

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Note: some of the photos above were taken by Susan Doktor.

Cartagena 2008: Street Scenes 2

Unlike the uniform blue and white of Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia or the monochromatic blues of Chefchaouen, Morocco, the colors of Cartagena vary, reflecting the many ethnic and cultural influences on the city.

This is a place where whose residents vary in hue from Afro-Caribbean black to northern Italian white and every shade in between. It has long been seen as standing somewhat apart from the rest of Colombia. Even during the height of the drug wars twenty years ago, Cartagena remained a relatively peaceful place. Even the country’s drug lords were reluctant to bring to Cartagena the violence and terror that ravaged Medellín and Cali. When I was there, the tourist authorities were deliberately playing up the city’s relative safety with a tag line that read “The only danger is that you’ll want to stay.”

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Note: some of the photos above may have been taken by Susan Doktor.

Cartagena 2008: Street Scenes 1

In the fall of 2008, I traveled to Cartagena, Colombia. I found a city that was a delightful mix of Caribbean, Spanish colonial, and South American architecture. There was a riot of vivid colors in the old city, which has been wisely protected from modern development by the establishment of a modern city, Boca Grande, several miles out of town.

I recently dug out the photos I took on that trip; I hope Cartagena still looks like it did seven years ago.

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I was here:

Note: some of the photos above may have been taken by Susan Doktor.