The animals scavenging in the park for food here are not the same as in the states.

There are monkeys…

… beautiful red squirrels…

… and bloody great black vultures.

Parque del Centenario also has sloths and iguanas, but we didn’t see any of those. We’ll have to take another trip there.

This was a good day for birding. As well as the black vulture we also saw the blue and white swallow…

… the yellow-headed caracara (love the eye makeup)…

… a great kiskadee fishing…

… a tricolored heron…

… and a southern lapwing, all species new to us.

Most of these were in a short walk along the waterfront. There were also huge numbers of snowy egrets…

… and a shrine to Our Lady of the Fire Hydrant.

A trip to the local supermarket this morning filled the fruit bowl with passion fruits the size of oranges, lulo, tree tomatoes, and a couple of other fruits I don’t know.

We visited the naval museum. They don’t have many historical artifacts, but they do have lots of nice ship models, and reconstructions of naval battles, of which Cartagena has seen more than its fair share.

I did mention they don’t like Sir Francis Drake in this town.

Our guide complains bitterly of the four tons of gold that Drake extracted, mostly from the Catholic Church, without considering the moral question of how the Catholic Church had obtained the gold from the indigenous population.

They have the Freedom Bells, that were rung at 11am on the 11th of November 1811, when Colombia declared independence from Spain.

It took ten messy and murderous years before the divorce was finalized. Like I said, Drake was not the worse thing that happened to Cartagena. Our guide reached in with his cane and rang the bells for us. They still work, unlike the one in Philadelphia. There’s a moral there somewhere.

They are big on chocolate, coffee, and emeralds here. We were recommended to a store called Mister Emerald, where the manager turned out to have lived in San Francisco in the 1960s, so we traded San Francisco stories. There was also a mutual connection in the Bahamas – the guy who originally renovated our apartment there for his own use was a competitor in the emerald business. Paula came away with a lovely pair of emerald earrings that match the ring that she wears.

This is Paula before she got the earrings.

The churches here are gloppy.

India Catalina is the local version of Sacagawea.

Like Sacagawea she was an indigenous woman who was a teenage sex slave and later a translator. In this monument from 1974 she’s depicted wearing nothing but a few feathers, though after she was kidnapped and enslaved at the age of fourteen she was forced to adopt the Catholic faith and Spanish manners, so she would not have been going around nearly naked. There are copies of the monument in all the gift shops, but in most of them she seems to have much bigger boobs. There are so many things wrong with this picture I can’t even begin to rant about them, so I’m going to bed.