Call them “sophistonauts” — those wide-roaming urban nomads, often third-culture kids, expats or grown-up diplo-brats who tend to live outside their countries (plural!) of citizenship and bounce around a social web connecting them to equally geographically flexible, curious confreres. The sophistonauts have not been visiting Colombia because they are braver than you and me. Nor have they been going for Cartagena’s balmy climate or the city’s peculiar colonial architecture or its rowdy history of pirates and plunder. The sophistonauts are flocking to Cartagena because they’ve been invited, in this case by proud Colombian friends eager to show off their favorite national beauty spot in full flower after decades of abandonment.
Jade Duhamel, a waifish half-French, half-Mexican 22-year-old who currently resides in Buenos Aires, came to Cartagena for a long weekend this past spring. It was her first visit, and one morning at 3 a.m., she was dancing energetically at Quiebra Canto, a dimly lit salsa club in Cartagena’s old city. “I heard of Cartagena from friends in Paris, but I imagined it different, like a Spanish-speaking Jamaica or something,” she said. “You know, big spleefs and cold coconuts. I never thought it would be so. . . .” She searched for the right adjective and then offered two: “civilized but wild.”
She came as the guest of a pal, a young Colombian woman who was expertly hip shaking nearby. The two were waving cuba libres at the juking-and-jiving crowd getting down to a song extolling the restorative virtues of eating salchicha con huevos (sausage with eggs) at dawn after a long night of fun. “We call this rumbeando,” the Colombian friend said. “Partying, dancing all night, getting drunk, waking up early to go to the beach, then doing it again.”
“Imposing but intimate” are two adjectives that also work to describe Cartagena’s old city. It is circumscribed by massive fortifications — high, salt-bleached stone walls built in the 17th and 18th centuries to thwart pirates during the long stretch when Cartagena was the New World’s collection point for loot en route to Spain. If buccaneers took R & R on the island Tortuga, they earned their keep marauding ships coming and going from Cartagena. As a result, the old city has retained an air of cloistered coziness. You can walk from one end of it to the other in half an hour, although it’s still easy to get turned around in the labyrinth of narrow cobblestone streets and find yourself stepping out into a plaza different from the one you intended to reach.
“Cartagena’s old city is like . . . well, let’s see — can I use more than two adjectives?” asked Gian Luca Brignone, an Italian new media producer who lives in Manhattan and was visiting Cartagena to attend the wedding of a Colombian friend. “It’s like Istanbul, but in the Caribbean. All those massive walls, but instead of the calls to prayer, it’s salsa music everywhere and at all hours of the day. You peel a banana or open your glove compartment, and music comes out.”
A few decades ago, Cartagena wasn’t attracting many high-end voyagers. Wealthy locals had fled to modern neighborhoods outside the walls of the old city, transforming the colonial center into a dilapidated ghost town of abandoned mansions and flophouse youth hostels. The only foreigners visiting back then were the young and fearless truffle pigs of world travel — British geezers on their gap year, Israeli backpackers just finished with their military service, American college students channeling Kerouac — who are always sussing out the interesting places before they are quite safe enough for the rest of us. Even the truffle pigs were scared away in the ’80s, a period when Colombia was earning its well-deserved reputation for frenzied violence as drug capos attempted to transform the country into one giant, streamlined cocaine factory.
While car bombs and kidnappings terrorized Bogota, Cartagena was virtually untouched, mostly because after decades of decline it was the center of exactly nothing and so the target of exactly no one. Wealthy Colombians from the interior of the country recognized the unique beauty of historic Cartagena and started buying crumbling piles (at bargain-bin prices) and restoring them for vacation homes.
“We make fun of Cartageneros for throwing away this jewel,” said Patricia Mejfa Fernandez, a Colombian-born interior designer who has restored a dozen houses here over the past 15 years. “But it’s understandable. We have an expression — la confianza da asco, familiarity breeds contempt. Outsiders were needed to see the value of Cartagena. Locals only saw a rotting antique.”
Not all outsidersare so sanguine about Cartagena or Colombia in general. The State Department issued its most recent travel warning about Colombia in January 2006. The warning list is a Judas kiss for countries seeking to attract American tourists, and it’s easy to see why — Colombia shares company in this rogue’s gallery with Cote d’Ivoire (raging civil war with mobs targeting foreigners) and Indonesia (jihadi suicide bombers). Narco-terrorism and kidnapping are the principal perils that the State Department thinks you should know about, although the travel warning nods toward improvement, stating that “violence in recent years has decreased markedly in most urban areas, including Bogota, Medellin, Barranquilla and Cartagena.” Locals complain that the travel warning does not fairly represent Colombia’s improving stability, but the general negative impression held by foreigners isn’t ameliorated by recent stories about leftist guerrillas attempting to assassinate the mayor of Neiva, a small city in the interior, and government officials being linked to paramilitary groups.
“When has the Bush government been right about anything?” scoffed Amaury Muñoz, the press attaché for the city’s mayor, expressing a frequently encountered Colombian disdain for United States foreign policy. “It’s been 10 years since violence in the cities, and it never really touched Cartagena. Let them all kill each other in the jungles and the mountains, who cares! First you gringos give us these narco-problems because you love our cocaine. Then because of the problems you gave us, your government tells all of you not to visit Colombia. It’s the worst gringo hypocrisy!”
Hypocrisy or not, Colombia’s negative reputation can pose a formidable obstacle for locals attempting to lure American friends to visit. When Dan Gertsacov, an American film executive who lives in New York, and his wife, Andrea, who hails from a large Bogota family, were planning their wedding last year, many of their guests expressed strong concerns about traveling to Colombia. “About a third of the Americans accepted immediately. Another third sent their regrets a bit later — they asked around and decided it was too dangerous,” Gertsacov explained. “Another third were on the fence.” So the couple set up a wedding Web site with links to recent newspaper articles that talked about the improved security. Gertsacov said: “That did it. The fence-sitters just needed something to balance out all the old Pablo Escobar headlines.”
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