Cartagena is a museum unto itself. The colonial homes, the surrounding walls, the bougainvillea that bathes the facades of old stone churches intermingle, seamlessly, to create the finest art around. The problems start once one seeks out the museums within the museum.

There are, I have noticed, two types of daily activities in Cartagena: staying local and venturing out. Staying local involves exploring any number of beaches, museums, galleries, or landmarks, in reality, there’s enough to do in Cartagena to occupy several weeks. Venturing out involves a little more planning and a little more exploit: the best example being a visit to the Rosario Islands located, as the glossy flyer proclaimed, SMALL MINUTES FROM YOUR CARTAGENA!

ISLAS ROSARIO the flyer went on to read. THE BEST BEASHES AND VACATION RELACKSATIONS IN CARTAGENA DE LAS INDIAS.

The first thing that ran through my mind: why doesn’t anyone spell-check these things? You’d think someone in the printing department might have a cousin in the USA or at least attend some sort of language school. “Wait, let me call Manuel,” an intern might shout. “Let me check with my friend Manuel. He speak the good English.”

The brochure was one Dan and I picked up in a grocery store checkout line where we were purchasing roughly twenty pounds of Colombian hot chocolate. It showed a picture of a beautiful white sand beach, several sprawling women in bikinis, and a small yacht anchored just off the coast. Superimposed was a heaping plate of fish, rice and vegetables, alongside a bottle of perspiring local beer and a banner. TO HAVE THIS ALL TRIP TODAY, FOR YOU? $19!

I liked the salesmanship of it. For me? Only $19. It seemed not unlike the decision I regularly face at Colombian fonda restaurants. They’ll serve giant bowls of bone soup, or at least that’s what it looks like, for less than the cost of a donut. Raw pork marinated in limejuice and onion, tripe sitting in a ketchup-like sauce, small quail eggs in their own syrup: each around twenty five cents. It’s food so cheap that not at least trying it would be anti-cultural and somehow regretful.

We wandered over to the dock beside Cartagena’s Convention Center and were immediately accosted by a handful of vendors selling bottled water. It helps, I’ve realized, when being chased by Colombia’s street vendors, to act as if you’re a celebrity trying to avoid the paparazzi. Because it’s Colombia’s most developed tourism destination, Cartagena has a fully developed fleet of street vendors, all of whom have an uncanny knack for picking out the foreigner in a group and proceeding to irritate him into submission. “Let’s just pay this guy some pesos to get the hell out of here,” Dan suggested.

Just as the brochure promised, tickets to the Rosario Islands were $19 so we boarded a ferry for what amounted to roughly two and a half hours of slow swaying in the open Caribbean Sea (certainly not “small minutes.”) Arriving on the Rosario Islands (which are indeed gorgeous) our boat of fifty tourists were met by what appeared to be a waiting tribe of beach merchants. It was as if the colonials had finally arrived and their gold was up for the taking. Water, soda, beer, ceviche, shrimp, massages: everything you could imagine right there at a salivating local’s fingertips. On paper this has way of sounding pleasant and amenity-filled. But in real life it was about as uncomfortable as beaches get with vendors set up like hawks watching your every move and ready to pounce once you feel the urge for a pukka shell necklace.

By far, the most annoying were the women offering massages. They’d carry around a small bucket of some goopy liquid and look into our eyes longingly as if we’d had candlelight dinner the night before. Upon hearing “no gracias,” these women proceed to give you sample massages, touching your shoulders and thighs, which comes off as sexual-assault-ish. Food was included on our trip, but it was minimal and mediocre: a small fried fish, some plantains, and a lime. We had to walk about a mile down the beach to escape the realm of beach peddlership, but when we did find solace, it was actually quite nice.

To return, there was no way Dan nor I was willing to take that three-hour ferry, so we paid a speedboat taxi forty dollars to let us aboard and herein lies the general gist of our trip to the Rosario Islands: it’s overwhelmingly touristy. Everyone you’ll encounter thinks you’re a mainstream visitor (the type that falls for $19 trip brochures) and accordingly treats you like one and is out for cash. There’s souvenir photo sessions, swim-with-the-dolphin tours, and overpriced pizza: everything we came to Colombia looking to avoid. Granted, this is probably the only place in Colombia where things are so overtly forceful but it’s recommended, if you’d like to visit the Rosario Islands, to charter your own boat and visit one of the less-mainstream islands where clear water, white sand, a proximity to YOUR CARTAGENA make for actually quite a relaxing experience.

Cartagena de las Indias is a city shrouded in the kind of third world mystery that serious travelers die for: an unknown place in an unknown country. It’s a combination of old-world, new life, and an unmistakable veil of the unknown that makes getting acquainted with its cobblestone streets all the more exciting.

As a child I used to have a fascination with trapping non-aviary insects inside Tupperware containers then releasing them into small maze-like courses I’d construct in the garage. I’d use maybe a shoebox and a cookbook, anything that had a flat edge to act as a barrier and prevent escape. There was a pleasure back then, unfortunately one that’s become sadistic with time, in being the master of confusion. It’d be a gecko or a beetle wandering around on the breezy patio and next thing you know, mystified by a labyrinth of manmade buildings several times their size. “What the fuck is this?” I imagined them saying.

At age seven, I imagined it something like being kidnapped, a semi-legitimate fear where we lived in California. Here you were going about your daily routine, when someone covers you in plastic, takes you for a ride (presumably to their torture chamber) and unloads you into a network of dead ends, watching from above and giggling with joy. A famous writer once described hell as nothing but endless hopelessness. This, I imagine, is close to what he was getting at.

My hobby never grew to larger animals like cats or rabbits and I always released my subjects to the wild once thoroughly dizzied. There was just something about peeking into the thought process of a caterpillar, for example, that excited me. He’d go up to a wall, realize it was a wall, test both sides to assure they were also walls, then shrug as if to say “oh well,” and go in another direction. The method was not that different from what I would have done had I been placed in a maze: the caterpillar’s sluggishness though. It just seemed cruelly entertaining.