14 day Panama Canal Cruise....part 2....Cartagena, Columbia

Good morning.
After we left Miami, it was 2 days at sea before we reached Cartagena, Columbia. There were no stops along the way, since we were going all the way through the canal and up to LA.
A lot of cruises I looked at do round trips from Florida, which means they go through the first locks to the lake, turn around, and go back out. And because it's a shorter time, they can also stop at some of the Caribbean Islands. I'm glad we did the entire canal, because there were many interesting sights as we weaved our way through the canal to the Pacific Ocean.
Also, even though they also do the cruise from LA to Miami, we decided to fly to Miami and start there so we'd do the long 4 1/2 hour flight first. LA to Vegas is only about an hour.
Plus, that gave us 2 days at sea to start so we had a lot of time to explore the ship.
Below are some pics of Cartagena.....

It is a very large city! You can see that in the skyline. And we got some great views from the ship as we arrived.  Below is the Castillo San Felipe de Barajas. An old fort in Cartagena. Built in 1536 and expanded in 1657. That's pretty old!

Above on the left is our Chiva Party Bus that we took for our city tour. Below are all the tour buses waiting for all the people from our ship that booked tours. There were around 10-15 different tours they had available. So if enough people booked a specific tour, they just added more buses. One tour we took in Acapulco, had 6 buses. Above you can see they had 3 party buses for our tour. These pics were taken from our balcony on deck 8. We almost always disembarked on deck 4.

Our tour guide was informative and entertaining!

Here's a pic of 5 out of 6 that came from Vegas for the cruise. The lady next to me is Gloria. She lives around the corner from us. The other 2 ladies are longtime friends of Gloria. Gloria's husband, Dave took this pic. That's the fort behind us.

Besides the fort, the 'old city' of Cartagena also had a wall to help protect it from attacks.

The area of the city in the distance is called Little Miami.
That's because that's where the nice beaches are.

It was a good tour. Got to stop and do some shopping. Although, about the only thing we buy are t-shirts. And we are only in each port for the day. We arrive in the early morning, and usually set sail late afternoon. From Cartagena, we headed for the Panama Canal.