Roger finally got back very late on Sunday night, with all of his bags, less one oil filter and his sunglasses, which are unaccounted for.

Apparently when he went to check in for his outbound flight he encountered an unusual situation. As his flight was a 06.15, he’d left the boat at 03.30, so he would be in time to check in. When he got there the place was deserted except for a security guard who asked him what he wanted. So Roger said he wanted to check in, he was then informed that the airport was closed until 05.30 and he would have to wait outside!!!

The taxi had gone and there were no seats, so Roger had to sit on the ground for an hour and a half until the airport opened. So anyone planning on flying from Cartagena, you have been warned!

We decided to have a rest day on the Monday, as Roger’s travelling had been quite arduous. Plus I now had my replacement camera so I had to try it out.

So we went into the Centro Historique, found a little tapas bar called Vinlico, ordered a bottle of Castillio del Diable a Chilean Sauvignon Blanc, and had lunch.

After lunch we headed for the Palacio de la Inquisition. Well as the wine hadn’t loosened his tongue I had to resort to more direct methods of finding out what he gets up to on his ‘business trips’!!!!

The building that houses the museum is a magnificent building in the Parque de Bolivar (where we had seen the dancers on our first visit to the old town)

It was extremely well designed to take advantage of natural ventilation and light (even the dungeons) using the cross ventilation method that I had seen used to great effect in Ernest Hemmingway’s house in Key West. It also has very high ceilings, which helps to keep the whole building cool, naturally.

The museum costs 11,000 pesos ($5.50) each to get in. For an extra 30,000 (US$15) you can have a guide which if you can’t read Spanish, would be useful. We decided to practice our Spanish (we did quite well too).

The exhibits were quite gruesome as you would expect.

On each description about the particular method of torture there was always a little sentence saying that these methods were not used in Cartagena, yeah right!

It was actually quite fascinating, as morbid things tend to be sometimes. For example the Garotte ( pictured right) doesn’t strangle you, as I always thought, instead a screw is screwed into the back of your head……. nice!!!!

There was the macabre but also the downright ridiculous, I mean, did you know that anyone who was suspected of being a witch, or warlock, had 25 questions to answer?

Some of which were quite silly really, like “How do you fly fast?”

I guess it was a case of try and become invisible so that no one pointed the finger at you in the first place, because if they did you were screwed, literally!!!!

I found it amusing that the Inquisitions were not about torture and suffering, no, they were to give Heretics the opportunity to repent and do penance (or maybe my Spanish isn’t quite as good as I thought???)

Out in the courtyard were the Guillotine and Gallows.

It seemed quite it hypocritical that the Guillotine was over-shadowed by the church representing the very religion on whose behalf the torturing was being carried out!!

For all you DIY enthusiasts out there, they even provided technical drawings of how to make them, so knock yourself out!