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  • Day 126

    Cartagena by night

    February 2, 2018 in Colombia ⋅ 🌙 26 °C

    We reached Cartagena early in the evening. We didn't have any booking for stay here so we decided to walk out of the airport and look around. We had looked at the prices in booking.com and had an idea on what to look for. The area around the airport was a residential one and reminded me amd Hristo about my hometown Chandigarh in India. Actually, the houses were quite like our house in Chandigarh. Simple 1 floor houses with a porch in front and lots of greenery around.
    Within a km of the airport, there were 5-6 hotels and hostels so we walked around and then finally decided to stay at Chill House Hostel about 800 mts from the airport. We negotiated the price for a 3 bed room with a shared bathroom for 105000 COP.
    The old town of Cartagena was 5 kms away from the hostel. At the hostel, we learnt an interesting fact about the local transportation. One could take a shared taxi (all yellow colored cars) from anywhere near the airport to the old town or anywhere along the way for a fixed price of 2000 COP per person. This was a very convenient arrangement, so we decided to go and check out the old town in the evening itself.
    After a long long time, we were saw small roadside kiosks selling cheap local food items. This is what we had been missing all the time in Chile and Argentina. We had loved to explore the local food in Bolivia and Peru bit had never found anything similar in the "much more developed" Chile or Argentina.
    Colombia was a dream come true food wise amd atmosphere wise. We gorged on the local food items like the roasted goat cheese, raw cheese, corn etc. It was nice and pleasant and people were out enjoying the weather and the food. We didn't really feel threatened or intimidated as is normally associated with the whole Colombia. After a gap of 2 months, it was time to enjoy the food and that too at a cheap price.
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