Cartagena

This is somewhat pathetic. All the tours (except some space left on the shopping tour), are sold out. Learning this, I planned to get off the ship and do a little exploring on my own. The Captain was on the PA system at 7:00am this morning to let us all know that we had arrived in South America. I knew this had happened about an hour earlier, as the bow thrusters could be heard quite loudly in my room. So I got up about 7:30am, and went on deck to get breakfast and have a look around.

I was expecting to see a quaint fishing village, but I should have known better. Cartagena is a city of between 600,000 and 1.3 million people (depending on how you measure). The actual city center is across the harbour from our ship, but it's only 1km or so, and you can see across to it easily. Where we're tied up is the "Cruise Ship Facility". This is right beside the "Container Ship Facility". Actually, right beside us is a container ship being unloaded (maybe 20m away). There is nothing obviously close - just acres and acres of containers. Not even the normal gauntlet of local street vendors or tour hawkers. The only thing that was outside the ship this morning was a dozen or more tour buses.

With this observation, I think I'm going to stay on the ship (we only have a brief time here - everyone is supposed to be back at 2:30pm for sailing at 3pm. I may regret this when I hear about the local market just around the corner, but from my my look around, all I can see are men unloading ships.

I won't go so far as to say this is the Americanization of the world (no more exotic ports), but I would venture to say that, if a port has a cruse ship terminal, it's not quaint.