Saturday 17 August 2019
Highlights: Lost or stolen wallet, farewell dinner

Today was one of those days you remember for the wrong reasons. While leaving Medellín sometime between exiting our private bus and checking in my bag for the 9.53 am flight to Cartagena my wallet went missing.

Now this could have been lost, it could have fallen out of my pocket or it could have been stolen. First time I had this problem. I realised as I was putting my passport away. Miguel assisted me in looking around the airport, ringing our bus driver and reporting to airport security. No luck, someone just made a lot of money.

A call back home cancel my credit card. I had two stashes of emergency funds, one in my daypack and one in my backpack which was now check for the flight to Cartagena. After 30+ minutes land-side we had to clear security and I had to go just hoping my checked bag arrived as this had the bulk of the back up funds.

My backpack did show up in Cartagena, one of the last bags off the plane so that kept my focused, and when I opened it I got the emergency stash out. This will just see me though until I get to New York City in eight days as long as I’m careful. It’s recoverable, I have my passport, I have enough money and I have all my bags, clothes and electronics. See full flight review here.

Arriving in Cartagena was like being in another world compared to my first week in Colombia, for starters this is a humid area. Cartagena was founded back in 1533 and is located on the northern coast of Colombia in the Caribbean Region. There is approximately 1 million residents and there is a high percentage of African Americans in this region due to Cartagena being a hub for the slave trade.

As we couldn’t check in until 3 pm Miguel took us on a brief city orientation tour, those remaining on the tour will get a full city tour on Monday. We had a nice lunch (a fellow tour member lend me some money until I could exchange later), then some of us booked an activity tomorrow for tomorrow’s free day (for me going to Rosario Islands) and then most of us headed back to the hotel.

I spend my afternoon exchanging money and doing some shopping in particular to get some flip flops for tomorrows island / beach day.

In the evening we had a farewell dinner for about half the group and a birthday celebration for Gaby (who is also leaving the group). As we have a diverse multi lingual group Gaby got at least 9 different language versions of happy birthday songs.

Tomorrow is another day, hopefully nothing will go significantly wrong from here on and in the evening we will welcome 3 new tour members.