January 15, 2025–Romancing the Stone: Cartagena

Remember the movie, “Romancing the Stone?”  Kathleen Turner got a message that her sister had been kidnapped in Cartagena, so she went there to rescue her?  When she gets there, she hooks up with Michael Douglas, a brash mercenary, and they have numerous run ins with the bad guy, Danny Devito. Before we visited Cartagena, my knowledge pretty much began and ended with that one movie.  

So on Monday, we went on a tour about the history of Cartagena and the first place we visited was the Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas, which is located just outside of the historic walled city.  When our tour guide, Daily (her real name), pointed out they filmed one of the final action scenes for “Romancing the Stone” there I thought, “I remember that scene!”  Alas, when I looked it up I found that although the movie was set in Cartagena, it was shot in Mexico and Zion National Park in Utah. So the fort in the movie is actually San Juan de Ulúa in Veracruz, Mexico. Daily wasn’t completely honest with us, but I guess it made for a better story.  

We walked around the old town for a bit and the city was really beautiful and quite colorful, but it was so hot and crowded. The year round temperatures hover around 90 degrees, and the humidity is at least 80%.  Another place we visited was the Palace of the Inquisition, an eighteenth-century seat of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The museum displays replicas of torture equipment used on witches and infidels during the Spanish inquisition.   Pretty brutal looking, so no pictures of the torture devices, but some pictures of the old town.

Yesterday, we took another tour to the National Aviary of Colombia, located on the Isla Baru, about an hour outside of Cartagena.  The 17 acre facility is the biggest in the Americas and the 6th biggest in the world, and counts more than 1,800 birds from more than 138 distinct species. Sounds impressive, right?  The problem is that aviaries really creep me out.  The birds are cool, but I don’t want them flying around me, ready to peck at me or crap on my head at a moment’s notice.  Yuck.

To get to the Aviary, we had to take the bus ride from hell from the Port of Cartagena.  The streets and roads are narrow, crowded and have huge potholes.  No one drives on their side of the road.  A lot of stretches aren’t even paved, so dust boils up everywhere.  A million motorcyclists zip in and out of traffic, defying death or a permanent maiming.  The shock absorbers on the bus were gone. It was pretty much like the bus ride Kathleen Turner took in the movie except there were no pigs or chickens.  

On the trip there our poor tour guide, Carlos, had to point out the scenery of a concrete factory, a petroleum processing plant, a huge fuel station where truckers refuel, and a plastics manufacturing plant.  No wonder he seemed dispirited.  But maybe Carlos just didn’t give a rip about anything. When we got to Aviary, he only knew the names of the most common birds, like flamingos.  He said there were too many species to learn the names.  Guess what, Carlos?  Tour guides are supposed to learn stuff.

Trivia question of the day: Do you remember what the stone is in “Romancing the Stone?”