We didn't plan to spend as long as the rally suggested in Cartagena and so only spent 6 days there.  A Group of us went on a city tour with a great local guide who spoke perfect English and made the tour fun, first we visited Castillo de Filipe De Berajas – a fortress on the hill overlooking approaches to the city by land and sea. Basically the fortress is a series of walls and tunnels built around and through a hill!

 

        

View of Club de Pesca and you can just see a couple of rally boats in the anchorage

After the fort we visited Convento de la Popa – which is in fact a monastery not a convent on the top of Mount Popa the highest hill in Cartagena and has some great views over the whole city, today it is a museum.

    

  

Next was a walk through the walled city where we learned about how social status was defined – not by the size of the property but by a property having a balcony between levels as in the first picture! Houses also used to have door knockers which depicted the profession of the house owner – fish sea merchant community and a lizard is meant to depict royalty!

  

Out and about in Cartagena

  

On an evening out in town with a couple of other boats we hoped to see some salsa dancing in the streets but the only dancing we saw was a Michael Jackson copycat so we headed for a bar called Cafe Havana, recommended on a blog site as the place to go.

 

When we got there we found there was an entrance fee, the band didn’t start till eleven and the drinks were going to be expensive, so we went to the bar above the club till 11 ( drinks 1/3 of the club prices), it turned into a late night for us!

 

 

The highlight of the stay for me was our Sloth and monkey hunt in the Parque del Centrenario, we had walked thorough the park before but decided it was the wrong place as it was small and didn’t look like the sort of park that sloths would live in so didn't look very hard – having looked very hard, having spoken to people who had seen them we found it was the right place and went back for another look, we were told to look out for people looking up at the trees and soon saw some people looking at monkeys, these were quite hard to photograph as the bright sky just made them look black!

 

  

next we found some people looking at a big Iguana in a tree:

 

After this we looked around for sloths or people looking up and found nothing, we were about to give up when Steve noticed one only a couple of meters above head level – it seemed to be changing trees, I started to take pictures and soon there was a crowd of people all watching it, as it descended and turned we spotted a baby hanging on to its tummy –Sooooo cute and

      

Now I was content to leave and continue on our journey, hopefully we will meet more lovely sloths on our travels in Panama .