A statue of Maria Magdalena is solely protecting the harbor entrance of Cartagena. A massive wall surrounds the old part of the city, containing colonial buildings in every color of the rainbow. Cartagena is definately a different experience than all the other towns. It is inviting and seems happy - even if the dark forces are present.

For the first time in South America, I have witnessed effectiveness and punctuality. Leaving Santa Marta was almost joyful, as the journey was without any waiting at all. The taxi we ordered from the hotel, arrived on time and drove us to the bus terminal. Stepping out of the taxi, we got hazzled by the regular and overly-eager "some sit in my bus and/or taxi" guy. I don’t understand the mentality down here and it does not seem that "no" actually means "no". Just by walking on the street, taxis stops, honk their horn and tries to get us into their cabs even if we are standing outside a restaurant looking at a menu. When carrying heavy backpacks, the eagerness of selling us a seat in a bus exceeds common sense, and the methods for attracting our attention, sometimes gets almost violent. Before we managed to pull our backpacks out of the cab, this un-uniformed, pushy, semi-agressive latino "bus-seat sales person" almost jumped us, and tried to get us interested in a seat on his bus. We firmly said "no" repeatedly, but he did not take a no for an answer. He almost got more and more persistent for every "no" he got and at the end I had to tell him to calm down. Luckily, another "bus seat sales person" was witnessing the whole thing and his way of selling was much more pleasant. He invited us to take a look at the bus, an air-conditioned mini-bus, which would departure in 3 minutes. We were not hard to convince that this was our new vehicle of transportation and we happily jumped inside the cool conditions. We would spend the next 5 hours on this bus, during daytime, so we were able to see some of the alledged beauty of the Colombian nature.

Taking a trip on a bus in South America, is a very different experience than elsewhere. You never need to bring food or drink on the bus, because you will eventually get the opportunity to buy it on board. Like any other underdeveloped country, streetvendors are literally flooding the streets. I haven’t really yet figured out how they actually make money, cause streetvendors will allways sell the same thing as the guy next to him. If a streetvendor sells meat-on-stick, you can be very sure to find the exact same type of meal just a few meters away from him. If the streetvendor sells flip-flops or "Roleks" watches, you can bet a days worth of food on finding the same flip-flops and the same "Roleks" watches (or maybe "Kolex", if you are lucky) right next to him. For some reason, the streetvendors are everywhere and I never see many people buying things from them - thats why I really don’t know how they can make money, but some streetvendors have taken the step out of the city and using the cross country highways as their working ground. They have their speciality, either drink (like fruit juice, water, beer and sodas), snacks (chips, chocolate, nuts, cookies and other Colombian specialties) or food (sandwiches, arrepas, empanadas or different kinds of fruits).

Everywhere on the roads in Colombia, they have thousand and thousands of speedbumps. For some reason, unknown to me, they have build speedbumps in the middle of nowhere, some speedbumps are build to slow down traffic nears schools, some speedbumps are build near military positions and some speedbumps are just real stupid. They all have one thing in common - they are all massively annoying and I know my view on speedbumps have changed since I came here. I almost miss the Scandinavian ones. The good thing about these speedbumps, is that the traffic slows down and when the traffic slows down it is easy for people to get onboard busses, trailers and other big vehicles. Some streetvendors take advantage of this and have build small stands around these "slow spots" with the result of a presumably thriving business. They apparently have a stretch of road that they operate on, and they jump onto busses, with their speciality - sometimes several vendors board the bus on the same time. They walk down the isle of the bus and sell their goods and they are let of the bus after 5-10 minutes where they catch the next bus back to their base. If you didn’t get exactly what you wanted, you don’t have to wait for long until the next streetvendor enters the bus. On the relatively short trip from Santa Marta to Cartagena, I counted 7 or 8 streetvendors - that means one every 37,5 minute. That is pretty convinient, if you ask me. Is the food good? Yes. Is the food healthy? No - but no food I have encountered to this day, has been healthy anyway.

Arriving in Cartagena, we found another mini-bus that would take us to the town center and to our surprise, it was air-conditioned and actually had a band on board. Two young guys playing guitar gave us a piece of Colombia on the way through the darkening streets of Cartagena. It was pretty aparent that we were tourists, as we carried our massive backpacks and our best gringo faces, but a nice young woman wanted to help us out. She let us know where we should get off the bus and she helped us throught the streets to find our hotel. We arrived safely at a very quiet hotel in a kind of dodgy area not far from the old part of town.

Hungry from the trip, we decided to roam the streets in the old part of town to search for food. At this point I had no idea of what sights were waiting for me ahead, but after turning a streetcorner I was baffeled. Nice lighting, colorful, well preserved buildings and majestic colonial architecture was the last thing I expected and the surprise was nothing than positive. I kind of felt a bit home, I felt I was back in Europe because this was just too nice and too organized. Unfortunately the feeling didn’t last for very long. Even though the city is majestic in its architecture and glow from the lights, poverty is still a major part of the city scenery. You can’t walk very far without being approached by several beggars - some trying to sell home made crap souvenirs and some just begs for money or cigarets. It makes me sad to see all this and it is a part of the trip I really would like to be without. The reason for this, is that I know that I can’t help them. There are too many poor people and I know, that I only put myself in a bad situation if I suddenly start giving money to one of them. If I give money away, while other beggars witness the transaction, they can and will approach you and be very persistent in their hunt for money. For some reason the mentality is somewhat like this: if someone gives money away to one beggar, he should give money away to more beggars. I won’t accept that and I will not put myself in that position, cause I know I could spend whole evenings just by giving money away. When they approaching you, following you around, letting you know that they have no family, no home, no money, no nothing, you can’t feel other than sad about it. The only thing I can do is to ignore them, knowing far to good that this is the only response that they get from other people - people pretend that they do not exist and that they can’t see or hear them. Imagine living a life where people just ignores you and don’t talk or look at you. It is heartbreaking but unfortunately a big part of the scenery in Cartagena.

I have noticed that I have come to a big city, where skyscrapers makes up the horisont and where the difference between poor and rich are far greater than I have witnessed earlier. The prices in restaurants are also tripled from what I am used to, even if the food is really not that good. Meals that I know from home does not taste like meals that I know from home. The regular pizza down here is, for some reason, very sweet in some places, and regular pasta dishes are either without taste or just prepared wrong and/or unbelievably different than world known versions. I refuse to pay €10 for Pasta Carbonara that has the wrong texture, wrong ingredients and wrong color. €10 doesn’t sound like much for a meal, but when you know you can get the same dish elsewhere for more than 1/3 of the price, you just don’t do it. After turning down several so-called fancy restaurants in the old part of Cartagena, we managed to find a local bar and restaurant, that served more or less local food for 1/3 of the price of the so-called Pasta Carbonara. On our way throught the nice streets, we were approached by a guy, who was definately not a beggar. He spoke english and dressed kind of nice. He apparently knew the town and let us know that he was a tourist facilitator. I wanted to test him a bit and asked if he could set me up with a trip to a cocain factory. I want to see the backbone of Colombia, even if I know that it is risky and not very easy, but hey - if you don’t ask, you won’t get the trip. He laughed a bit, but said that if you pay, it is possible. I didn’t ask more about it, cause he turned the conversation into a conversation about selling and buying drugs and wanted to know if I was interested in buying either cocain or marihuana. Even if you don’t show interest, they will spend a lot of time trying to convince you to buy. Even if I was interested, I wouldn’t buy anything from a random guy in the streets, but unfortunately I have mentioned the "C" word and that was his clue to cling on to me. I have learned a lesson but at least he managed to show us this local restaurant. He sat down with us, helped us order the food and went away after a few minutes.

Finishing off our meals, we had one more drink before we should return to our hotel. Suddenly, the tourist facilitator/drugdealer returned, and this time he had backup. An even more persistent latino guy, allready relatively drunk and presumably high on different kinds of chemical stimuli, sat down by our table and started to ask us about what kind of drugs we were interested in. The one thing that beggars and drug dealers have in common, is that the do not really take "no" for an answer and after telling them a couple of times more, that we were not interested in buying anything, the semi-drunk guy started his monologue.

"Let me tell you something, listen to me. This is my neighborhood and people know me around here. My friend here is a good guy and we want to help you out. We have everything you need - heroin, cocain, weed, creepy, ectasy - everything". At this point they started to show us small blue pills and some sort of pre-rolled joint. "Let me tell you something, listen to me. I have the good shit and you are my friends. You can try some of my stuff and let us know if you like it". "But we are not interested - we are not going to buy anything" we said. "Let me tell you something, listen to me. I control this neighborhood - just go around and ask. I control the police and look at all the bodyguards outside". I must admit that it was a serious number of police outside, but that could just be very coincidental. "Let me tell you something, listen to me. People here respect me and I am in charge. Listen to me - did you hear of Pablo Escobar?". Nodding our heads and letting them know we had heard of him, he continued "I am his son. Let me tell you something, listen to me. The police here are my friends and they are here to protect me. As long as you are my friends, they will also look after you. I you get any problems with the police, you just come to me, and I will sort it out. Let me tell you something, listen to me. I invite you to try our dope and you can come back tomorrow and we can make a deal". Who would imagine that I would sit and have a conversation with the son of the cocain boss himself - in a small bar in Cartagena. "But I am not interested to buy, so no thank you". "Let me tell you something, listen to me. Here in Colombia it is not good to be unfriendly. Here in Colombia we are friendly and it is rude to be unfriendly". "Do you think I am unfriendly?". "No - you are allright. Let me tell you something, listen to me. Here in Colombia you just say what you want and never play games. If you say what you want, you will allways get it. Let me tell you something, listen to me. We have the best drugs in town". "But I allready told you, that I …". "Let me finish!! Let me tell you something, listen to me. We invite you to try, you don’t have to buy, cause we give it to you and we speak tomorrow. This is my place, I own this place and Josef here is my man and he is allways around.".

Just before we entered the restaurant, I had a strike of luck. As I understood that the tourist facilitator/drug dealer would be very persistent in his attempts on selling us drugs, as he allready had started trying to sell us some, I looked down on the ground and to my surprise, I noticed a small bag that could only contain marihuana. I picked it up and said to the tourist facilitator/drug dealer "hey - pot is literally floating around in the streets". He took it from me, confirmed that it was marihuana and I took it back, cause I now knew that I had a perfect excuse not to buy anything. As Pablo Escobars son continued his monologue, I now replied "I have everything I need, right here in my pocket. I appreciate the offer, but I am not interested". This seemed to work, as Pablos Escobars son bought me a beer, shook my hand and left the table.

The tourist facilitator/drug dealer confirmed that the guy actually was Pablo Escobars stepson and told us that we would allways find them in this place. Who would have known, that Pablo Escobars stepson would own a very dodgy restaurant in Cartagena and personally have conversations with the guests. Who would have known, that one of the most well known drug lords, through the drug history of time, would permit this kind of sloppyness of own security. Who would have known that Pablo Escobars stepson actually walked around and did business in an intoxicated state of mind and who would have known that he actually was dealing drugs to tourists. But the strangest thing of all - who would have known that we accidentally walked into his restaurant on our first night in Cartagena and that he actually approached our table himself. Maybe I was closer to the cocain factory than I would imagine and maybe I should have asked him for a trip out to his plantages. Maybe he would have showed me his friendlyness and that I actually could trust his words - but most likely, I would have been disappointed.

I’ll call Pablo and ask if this really is true.