We left Santa Marta around midday on the 18th – after another easy morning and a quest for lunch. We got picked up by minibus and were off for the 230km / 4.5 hours journey to Cartagena – with our arrival in the evening.

On the 19th we kicked it off in a fairly active fashion. Andres was giving us a bike tour of the city. So here we were riding a bike from one attraction to the next, some parts of it along with the normal traffic, some parts in traffic-free areas, like on the city walls. I found the bike ride at a fairly relaxing pace, actually the ideal thing to do on a morning with temperatures around 30°C (with a humidity of 80 to 90%) – the slight breeze / head wind just helped in the process to cool down. The bike ride gave a good overview of the city – and made the planning for the afternoon fairly simple.

After the bike ride some of us continued straight away making it back to the colonial center for more sightseeing, churches and museums – complete with lunch at the Cartagena Hard Rock Cafe. In the afternoon we had enough of walking around in the heat and decided to hop on the hop-on/hop-off tourist bus. We made the full circle, this way getting also a glimpse of the tourist and beach area outside the colonial center.

In the evening, just before dinner, we met up with our new travel companions for the second part of the trip; it was also time to say good-bye to Gordon, who had only booked the first part of the trip. Our small group of four (plus one) had now turned into a group of ten (again plus one). Things, easily done with a party of five, suddenly took an interesting twist (e.g. you can go into a restaurant with a group of five and get a table – that probably won’t work with a group of eleven).