Well today was a cleaning day, whoopee!!!

Before Roger left he asked Andrew, our neighbour, if he would arrange for his workman to clean our boat once he had finished Andrews. So I decided to spend the day cleaning the interior of the boat, which needed it after 7 days at sea. The sea water gets everywhere as does the salt, in addition to which the combination of damp and humidity does a cracking job on the mildew.

As I was down on my knees, scrubbing the floor which was aided by the buckets I was sweating ( I know ladies…… and all that, but ladies obviously don’t scrub floors!!!!) a  thought occurred to me, Roger forgot to mention that the chap who was cleaning the boat would need paying. Yes, you guessed it, 50,000 pesos a day. So the money Roger left for me will go mostly on paying him!!!! So that’s his game huh? Well in that case I earned 50,000 pesos today too!

After cleaning the boat I went to deposit the trash in the trash cans. For the record it is both the first and the last time I will be doing it, as a huge rat jumped out of the can next to me!!!!!!

As Werlings is due back tomorrow I will be stuck on board another day, so I guess I’ll be earning another 50,000 pesos too!! I can’t relax when there is someone on the boat working, I feel so guilty. I guess I was never cut out to have servants. I remember last year when I was staying at Gabrielas in Mexico, I was never quite at ease having servants waiting on me.

Well Beaujolais is shining like a new pin, thanks to Werlings, or to give him his full name Werlings Otero Jarava.

He is only a young man, about 19 years old, but if you come to Cartagena and need any work done on your boat he’s your man.

He works hard and is always pleasant          (which is not always the case on both counts). He arrives promptly at 08.00hrs      ( unless the day before was a holiday and then he is likely to be late as he will have been home, which is on an island and has to get the ferry back) takes an hour for lunch and leaves at 16.00hrs and all for 50000 pesos (about $25) a day. His cell number is 73212 940 and his telephone number is 311 6846429. He is on our list of highly recommended trades-people, together with Thelma and Denis in Guatemala.

As the boat was clean I decided to take a trip to Bocagrande. This is the ‘other’ face of Cartegena, all high rise and concrete, like a poor Miami. I had my reservations before I set out, but decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. The taxi dropped me on Avenida St Martin, which runs parallel to the sea front. I turned down Calle 12 and headed towards the beaches.

It is very windy over in Boca, a fact you can’t escape as you have to plough through all of the sand on the pavements (sidewalks for my American readers) and the beaches are rather unappealing. The sand is a dirty grey colour and everyone sits under these little ‘tents’. And the sea looks a little too wild for my liking.

There is no rest there as you are constantly hassled by hawkers trying to sell you anything and everything, in fact it was surprisingly worse here than in the ‘Centro’. After about 5 mins I’d had enough and headed back to Avenida St Martin.

Barb (another American lady at the marina) suggested I lunch at a little place called the Dulceria on the corner of Calle 6 and Avenida St Martin, so I did just that. It serves wonderful salads in edible bowls and has a fabulous selection of cakes and pastries (hence the name).

I found it surprising to see several young school girls, obviously from a private school, come in and lunch. Talk about 15 going on 40!! But they must be fairly affluent to lunch there on a school day.

I continued down the avenida looking for the Hotel Caribe Mar, which Barb had also suggested I take a look at. She told me they had beautiful gardens and animals, such as sloths and deer etc roaming around.

The hotel is very impressive, even though it is not one of the best hotels, in the grand old style. So I walked in as if I owned the place and walked straight through to the gardens. I always reckon if you act like you should be there people don’t generally hassle you.

The gardens were lovely, though I didn’t manage to spot any of the sloths (they are notoriously hard to spot apparently)

I did see the cutest little monkey in a cage. I don’t know what breed he was but he reminded me of Gizmo (or was is Mogwai that was the cute one?) from Gremlins.

Sorry but the only photo I managed to capture looked nothing like an animal!!!

The garden provided a very welcome and much needed respite from the heat of the day (only 31˚ but relentless)

And apparently it is not only humans who suffer from the heat as I watched a Jay soaking its feet in the pond.

For me, the hotel was the best part of Bocagrande and I wouldn’t recommend anyone to go there. It is where the cruise ship docks, I find it strange that cruise ships dock in some very unpleasant places, as was the case in Roatan with Coxen Hole.

Oh by the way, just to bring you up to date with my darling husbands’ latest scheme to stop me spending.

As I said earlier I had to pay Werlings, what I didn’t know is that on Wednesdays you have to pay your bill for the week. That includes your berthing fees, water/electricity, bar bill, internet and any laundry. So it was that I had to pay out 250000 pesos!!! So that added to the other 100000 pesos didn’t leave me with much spending money!!!! Good job I have my plastico eh???