Days have gone by in a flash here in Cartagena. We have continued our exploration of town - museums, sights and the nightlife. We have also been working on the boat, well today we hired a carpenter ($40US/day) to work on a few projects on board and we also hired a man ($30US/day) to come for a few days to buff out the hull, clean and wax the deck and polish all the stainless. Hiatus should look like a new boat again when they are done! Feeling a bit guilty by hiring out the work, Kent and I started to re bed the chain plates that had leaked during our last passage and are trying to motivate each other to get a few coats of varnish on the toe rails.

Cartagena is hot hot hot during the daytime hours. I would say if you want to accomplish anything outside you have to do it before 10am or after 4pm. I am out jogging at 6:30am otherwise they would find me passed out on some street corner from heat exhaustion. Just walking short distances to get errands done during the mid day is way to hot so we take a taxi ($2.50US per ride just about anywhere in the city). The early morning hours and evenings are absolutely wonderful though and the perfect temperature to walk the town or hang out in the cockpit.

We have found Cartagena very safe and the locals we have met have been helpful and friendly. Fresh produce vendors here roam the city streets and can be heard yelling "papaya, limon, pina, mango" all day long. Other vendors walk the town selling cafecitos from thermoses, which is a stout shot of coffee and goes for 10 cents or so US. Locals hang out with their families each evening enjoying the cool temps and pathways around town - the area where Club Nautico is has a community feel to it. Police are very apparent wandering the Old Town area and other populated/tourist areas, keeping the areas in line. City workers pick up trash and debris that somehow missed a trash can and the town stays pretty clean for the size that it is (or maybe we are softening our standards after visiting so many other countries). All in all, Cartagena has certainly met the high standards we had envisioned from other's cruisers positive comments and we are glad we stopped here.

Being here brought back memories of the 80's adventure movie 'Romancing the Stone' which is set around Columbia and Cartagena so we enjoyed watching that DVD one evening in the cockpit as a full moon was rising over the city.