3 days later...

Changed living places three times in three days this week, plus both of us got sick. Some fun. However, we´re sick but happy. Are at least temporarily living in luxury, by Cartagena standards. For one week, with get this, air con, flat screen tv, toilets that flush - with paper! - and amazingly, hot water. Will worry bout paying, later. Besides moving out from our family, we spent the last two nights at Cafe Havana, which seems more Cuban than Havana.

Great bar, with great live salsa music. Good drinks, too. Nice living a block away. Finally saw some vallenato music on the chiva party bus. Chiva buses are local open air buses and some run as party buses. For 12 bucks (US) you get as much Tres Esquinas rum you can drink along with Pepsi and ice, while careening down quaint city streets with a busful of drunk, screaming Brazilians, Swiss, Canadians and Swedes. Actually, one Swede. The vallenato band sounds like Caribbean scratch music, which makes sense as we are on the Caribbean. Learned the name of one new instrument, the guarachaca, a rhythm instrument that sounds and looks from a distance like a rubboard or frotoir, the kind they use in Louisiana.

One more excursion was to a mud volcano in Totumo, outside Cartagena. It´s a little teeny volcano maybe 150 feet tall. You climb the steps and the crater is filled with nice, oozy, gray mud, hundreds of feet deep. You plop in and the locals up there in the ooze start giving you a massage, resulting in you being totally covered in the stuff. Actually it feels pretty good, plus I got rid of my never ending poison ivy. After that, you clamber out, they scoop the excess mud off and you waddle down to the polluted but scenic lagoon where for a fitting surrealistic finale, the local women strip you down and wash the mud off you. They´ll even take pictures of you for tips. Really.

Found another vallenato bar, too.