Tatler, Won't You Take Me to Funky Town?
30 Aug 2008
There aren't many cities in the world that are so inherently charming that they can make monkeys out of anyone. Rome, certainly; Buenos Aires, for sure; New York most definitely, whether you pretend you're over it or not. But Cartagena? well, Cartagena is pure chemical romance. You couldn't resist its pheromone-coated coolness even if you tried. It's like Elvis dancing - all in the hips.
But is it true love when a city reminds you of a million other places, or when it is absolutely totally itself? Because Cartagena is a little bit like Marrakesh, with its maze of streets, its gorgeous houses, its rooftop pools and palms and secrets. And it's very much like Havana, with its salsa and its sex and its Caribbean breezes. And it really is like New York, because every city on the cusp of being something fabulous can't help but remind you of New York.
Ah yes, Cartagena, the former Spanish port on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, is most certainly having a moment. Love in the Time of Cholera was filmed here recently (director Mike Newell was going to shoot the film in Brazil because of Colombia's reputation for violence but then he came to Cartagena and - ping! - it made a monkey out of him) and, of course, Gabo, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez is called locally, has a house in the city (though he now spends most of his time in Mexico). In recent years it's become the outpost of the Hay Festival - writers like DBC Pierre and David Starkey storm the place, reading, feasting and missing their flights home (that monkey thing again). As the director of Hay, Peter Florence, says: 'Until three years ago I'd never been here. Now I come back every three months. I fell in love - like everyone else. But what outsiders don't understand is that, for Latin Americans, Cartagena is their Venice, their Paris - their City of Dreams.' House prices are soaring.
Old Cartagena, the part founded in 1533, the part that became a storehouse for the country's plundered gold and emeralds, the part that Francis Drake kept trying to get his sticky fingers on, is like a beautiful bug preserved in amber. But it's Zorro with a Caribbean twist. The Spanish colonial buildings (the best preserved in South America) may be the colour of apricots and pistachios, with bougainvillea spilling from the wooden balconies like Rapunzel's hair, but there are also fruity ladies wandering the streets with mangos on their heads, swaying their hips like loaded hammocks. Colombians speak Colombian-Spanish but in Cartagena - with everyone lolling in doorways, watching, gossiping and eating ariquipe, cups of toffee that the girls dip into with wooden spoons - the consonants slide off the words.
The old city peels. And pocks. And throbs to a cumbia beat. An iguana doorknocker spits out its rigid tongue. But between the shoe-shiners and the pavement games of dominoes, next to the lovely green cobbled squares with the tinkling fountains, in all this torpid heat, there is a scene emerging - a city of pirates and voodoo dancers that's adopting its own kind of downtown groove.
I find cheesecloth dresses for little girls with yellow chickens handsewn along the hem. I find big, thick, shiny, ivory-coloured rings that are as cool as anything you find in Pebble (and cost £2). At Mila's zinc tables I drink frappes and eat thick chocolate cake with toffee nipples. And at 8 - 18, a hip, white space with lime-green chairs, I tuck into octopus ceviche and Oreo cheesecake.
In Cartagena, a huge amount of time, a vast pontoon of time, is spent eating. (A lot of eating and a lot of kissing.) Alligator eggs, tiny chorizo sausages, cheese balls lightly fried. And as Jose, my local guide, says: 'Every month here it's a different fruit. One month it's mango, the next month it's guava. By the end of the month you've eaten so much you get sick of that crazy fruit.' This month it's all about watermelon. As we wander down the Portal de los Dulces, a street of sweets, no less - with coconut swirls and angels made of caramel, tied up with ribbons or in lovely glass jars - the watermelon pips spit and fly like dark confetti.
We enter the Cathedral of San Pedro Claver. Outside, the noise is unbelievable: the throaty purring of the pigeons; the palms clattering in the wind; horses clinking over the cobbles; a honk-honk of a car; the heehawing strain of an ass or two (bring earplugs if you want to sleep - at night, the whole place whizzes and bangs and there is always someone, somewhere, attacking a guitar). Inside all is quiet. Jose and I are looking at San Pedro's head. 'Is this actually Pedro's head?' I ask. Apparently it is. It is not what I expected. Pedro, a Spanish priest and now a rather shadowy skeleton wearing terrific layers of lace, is revered all over the city for championing the cause of the African slaves, 8,000 of whom built Cartagena's city walls on behalf of their colonial rulers.
Afterwards, we sit in a quiet, pretty square. Lovely little flycatchers with lemon-yellow breasts are perching in the low branches of the rubber trees; Cartegenan lovers watch them, their arms wilting round each other's necks like warm siesta sighs. I grab the tinto guy, the guy who perfectly represents how deeply civilised Cartagena is. Give him 200 pesos (5p) and he'll give you a fingerful of coffee and a cigarette. Colombians like their coffee in a variety of ways - short, long, weak or strong, but always hot-hot-hot! (As for their other export, the infamous white lady... well, at £4 a gram it's cheaper than dried milk and as strong as a mule's kick - but no, no, no, chicos, that stuff is just for backpackers.)
Nearby (everything is nearby in El Centro) is the small, fabulous gold museum. Not as fabulous as the one in Bogota, they say, but fabulous enough. It is mesmerising. There are tiny gold figures made in the second century BC that you want to put on a necklace now: a bird with a hand as its beak; shocked monkeys holding their tails; a cat with knitted brows and paddles as paws.
The next day, instead of going to the islands (half an hour away by boat - simple, restful and good for snorkelling), I wallow in a volcano. It's a mudhole on a mud mountain surrounded by mud. I don't want to climb the muddy steps in a bikini by myself in front of 30 guys and then lower myself into the muddy pit. But once you're in... cooee! It's freaky. It's gorgeous. 'It's weirdly relaxing,' I say, 'really super-relaxing'. I say this over and over, about 17 times. Afterwards I waddle down to a river where some girls wash me with water poured from plastic tubs. A snake pops his head out of the water. I freak out. The girls freak out. We all freak out. Then we drink beer, even though we've just had breakfast.
That night we eat at La Vitrola, the coolest restaurant in Cartagena. It's like Rick's Cafe in Casablanca meets the diner in Back to the Future - timelessly, out-of-seasonally fabulous. After plates of dreamy coconut cake we trawl the bars but, by the time we reach Cafe del Mar on top of the city's battlements (with the DJ ensconced in a stone turret), I'm tired, leaden-legged and foggy. But there are live bands playing at Havana, a bar in Getsemani, a rough area on the outskirts - it's supposed to be one of the best nights in town. I don't know if I have the strength or the guts but I go, past the binbags, the whores and 'the Thinker', a homeless guy asleep in a doorway. In the distance 'Havana' is spelt out in blistered lights. We speed towards it in the dark, knocking broken chairs and empty cans. The light from the door spills smoky-bright into the street.
It's packed. Huge wooden fans are whirling overhead and the walls are covered with black-and-white photos of horn players, jazz heroes in pork-pie hats and Forties singers with spritzed hairdos. I make my way through the smokers and dancers to the bar. A Malcolm X-lookalike slides up a shot of rum and pokes in the lime. On stage a man bumps up so close to the microphone his lips are almost wrapped round the metal mesh. When he sings his voice sounds like a rasher of bacon in a pan, a hot wet rainstick or some kind of mythical bird with a harp in his throat.
I take the shot and settle in. The room is pulsing. My heart goes boom-boom-boom.
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