After our day passing through the Panama Canal we awoke the next morning aboard Ruby Princess on the approach to the city of Cartagena, Colombia. This would be the final port of call on this 2023 cruise from California to Florida and it would be the only new country we would be visiting during this cruise after we’d not been allowed to disembark at Panama for general safety reasons.
We would be heading off for a full day’s excursion while in Cartagena but this first post from the cruise ship’s visit to this city will focus on photos of some of the skyline as Ruby Princess came into dock. It’s fairly unusual for us to see a sail-in to any port as we tend to be late night drinkers and occasional dancers, and the ships often are alongside quite early in the mornings. However, on this occasion, because the ship was arriving at a more reasonable hour and we had an excursion booked that we needed to meet in a lounge for, we were up early enough to grab breakfast and step out onto the top deck for a look around at this Colombian port first.
The area with the impressive skyscrapers as you approach Cartagena is called Bocagrande. We would get to admire the views of it as the sun set later in the day too.
We popped back to our room to pick up the essentials for the day: Factor 50 sun lotion and plenty of water because although it was quite cloudy in the morning you could feel the high heat and humidity already and knew without looking at the forecast that the clouds would likely get burned off by the sun in fairly short order. We could see the queue of tour buses all ready to escort us ashore from our balcony.
We headed down to the Explorers Lounge at the time we were due to meet for our excursion. There’s never any point arriving early for a Princess Cruises tour unless you’re a huge fan of sitting in packed, cramped spaces for far longer than ever seems necessary whilst fellow passengers who should know better try to persuade everyone around them that no, they’ve never heard of this “queueing” thing before and that really, since they’re paying then they should be allowed to disregard any instructions that might mean they don’t to get onto the bus first and the prime chairs right at the front where they can hold everyone up as they remember they’re carrying a ton of clothing and bags they absolutely must put above their seats before anyone else boards.
The disembarkation process was running a little behind schedule so we were forced to wait for a while. To entertain everyone during this pause I proceeded to the stage and presented my talk on the eventual heat death of the universe and why nothing anyone does really matters.
Of course that didn’t happen. Are you mental?
In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll head ashore in Cartagena and start with a visit to the seventeenth century fortress of Castillo San Felipe de Barajas.