Top Travel Leads

With help from the hotel, we booked a half day tour of the city. Our tour guide was Nico Medez. Previously, he had worked with Sarah Woods, the author of the Bradt tour book on Colombia, and she had listed his name in her Acknowledgements. Receiving an imprimatur from Michael Palin, this book has been recommended over the Lonely Planet version. To date, there are not many tour books on Colombia and purchased through Amazon, it was the only tour book we had brought with us. Excited about touring with an experienced guide, I was surprised when my first request, a tour of the Basurto market, received a resounding no. He described the market as a horror, a dirty place filled with pick pockets and thieves and not suitable for tourists. Of course, he did not realize his description would not have the intended result of scaring us off but would only increase our desire to go. How bad could the place be if Anthony Bourdain had filmed a segment of his program there? After laying out our bona fides, a list of the Asian markets we had visited and survived, and promising to be careful with our belongings, he said he would take us.

BASURTO MARKET
Located outside the historic city, close to the water in an industrialized area, the Basurto market is Cartagena’s main market. It is the kind of place where you can find most everything you need just not in the form by which you know it. Crawling out of the van, we found ourselves standing in front of a business selling bags of charcoal and used tires, the debris of both scattered over the yard. When I looked up, we had caught the attention of an overly large woman stuffed into a white plastic chair, sitting next to a stack of old tires. She did not return my smile and as she continued to stare, I felt she was pinning us, as butterflies, against a cardboard background. Apparently, she was not part of the welcoming committee but more the mistress of her domain. Then tiring of us, she began to yell at a small boy, covered in charcoal dust, struggling to fill a large plastic bag with small pieces of charcoal. This tableau included a large man, whose formerly white shirt was covered in black stains. He was sitting in an adjacent plastic chair, hard to determine his role, as he seemed concerned with nothing more than the morning bottle of beer he was cradling in his outsized hands. As for us, we were only passing through and could only process this scene as just part of the local color and the future of the young boy we recognized as details unfortunately beyond our immediate grasp or present sensibilities.

Fish stalls, whose tattered ancient tarps provided scant protection from the sun or rain, lined the entrance to the market. Soon we heard vendors calling out to Nico, who had apparently been here many times before. We stopped to watch one of his friends in the process of cleaning a large red snapper. Armed with something that looked like a small machete, scales were flying everywhere, attaching to any available surface and falling onto the ground, glistening for the moment before being ground into the dark soil by footsteps from passing customers. In Asian markets, the fish are kept alive because many will not buy a fish unless they first see it swimming. Here the fish for sale were dead but had never been frozen and their firm flesh and clear eyes testified that they had been swimming in the sea not too many hours before they ended up on a fish monger’s wooden table. Nico knew about fish, pointing them out and calling them by name and amazing us with the wide variety available in the waters around Cartagena.

Before stepping inside the market, we heard music coming from an unseen boom box. Enjoying the sounds, even though we could not discern a salsa from a cumbia from a vallenato, we immediately knew this place was humming with the rhythms of an Afro-Caribbean beat. On the produce side of the market, vegetables and fruits were piled up in huge mounds. It was not the quantity that amazed us but the variety. In Bogota, we had learned from Ettica that Colombia grew many different kinds of fruit and here were learned that potatoes, peppers, onions and root vegetables are available in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors, many that we have never seen before. Nico spoke to a wizened old man selling herbal medicines and after listening to him through Nico’s translation, we wondered why we would ever need to visit a drug store again. Having become used to Asian market women, we noticed here that men were the dominant sellers, especially in the fresh meat section. If you cannot afford the traditional cuts of meat sold in the super markets, you come here to buy the parts of the animal that are left over. The butchers’ tables were piled high with bones, hearts, livers, lungs, stomachs, hoofs, eyeballs and lengths of intestines.

Passing the clothing stalls specializing in tennis shoes, jeans and baseball caps, we headed toward the cooked food area where Anthony Bourdain had eaten “shark, seafood, rice with octopus and icotea turtle eggs”. It was close to lunch time and in an open air space, we found women dressed in colorful clothing stirring large pots of bubbling stews and soups containing either fish or meat. The pots were fired up by charcoal, the air was thick with aromas, and once again, from an unknown source, the sounds of Caribbean music punctuated the air. Here the women were in charge and the men lined up, waiting for lunch to begin. You could sense a festive atmosphere, people, music, food and beer collaborating to make a good time for all. Women offered us places at their tables and never removing our smiles, we shook our heads no. We left thinking, more power to Anthony and his staff. Our next stop was the La Popa Monastery.