Cartagena, Columbia today. Have to admit, if you’d asked me a couple years ago whether I’d ever visit Columbia, I probably couldn’t have imagined that I ever would. Took quite a while to get into the harbour here, and I think for a while we were just kinda sitting there not going anywhere. We were actually somewhat late tying up, and personally I wonder whether we almost skipped the port. Turns out there were two other ships in port that day, an RCL ship and the Regent Seven Seas Voyager, both of which were ahead of us. Our guide said the Regent ship hadn’t been scheduled to be in that day. I wonder if our captain almost refused to dock at the pier that they assigned us, because I have to admit, I thought it looked marginal myself for a ship of our size. (I think the pier itself was about 600 feet, and while
I’ve seen ships this size dock at piers like that, most of those piers have things they call dolphins further out that are also used to tie up at. The other pier where the other two ships were tied up had the dolphins, while ours didn’t.)
Our tour today was the Best of Cartagena and Fortress tour. Looked like it was the most common tour on the ship that day. 
First thing we did was head up to an old Monestary at the top of the largest hill there in town, largely just so we could get a view of the city. The road going up there was so steep the bus had to turn off the A/C to drive up it. It really was an excellent view of the city from up there. You could see the fortress, the old city, the new city, and the docks.
From there, the next stop was the fortress. Long steep incline to walk up the fortress, and man, it was getting brutally hot out (and of course, no shade). 
I really felt we were kinda rushed here, and by the time we got to the top and looked around a little, they were already hussling us off to the next stop.
Next stop was the dungeons. Basically, the dungeons are a shopping area, supposedly with local handicrafts available for sale. You’re talking about 20 little tiny shops, where your guide “encourages” you to shop at one particular one. Of course, once you’ve been in one of them, you’ve seen them all. Talk about a useless collection of junk. We spent far too long at this stop, which really could have been skipped. I didn’t run into too many people that seemed overly impressed with the place either.
From there we hopped back on the bus to head to the old city of Cartagena. The old city is your typical old Spanish colonial architecture, narrow streets, colorful balconies on the buildings. 
Pretty nice to walk around actually. We wandered through the one square, then visited the Catholic church. Some really nice stained glass in the church. Finally, we stopped at a place for a chance to relax and have a drink, and watch some traditional dance.
Then it was off to our final stop, in the new city area, for your chance to do emerald shopping. Basically you’re talking about a strip mall type area, but all the shops in this particular strip mall are emerald shops. I have no idea really how decent the prices were here, since I’ve never really emerald shopped before, although I don’t think they were too bad. Cathy especially was looking forward for the chance to buy some emerald earrings (emeralds are her birthstone). I’m also firmly convinced both the ship and the guides are getting a kickback on these sales. Cathy ended up buying her earrings at a shop called Greenfire, and I have to admit, they people there were extroadinarily patient with her, and really weren’t pressuring at all. I consider that pretty good, especially since quite frankly she wasn’t really looking for anything all that expensive. (Although she really did like the one set of $1600 earrings she saw, but that was well out of our budget. Besides, we don’t do anything that you’d wear earrings that expensive to). She ended up with some stud earrings that were a little smaller than she preferred, but the one that were a little bigger she didn’t like the color as much on, and the next step up from there was out of our price range.
Finally it was back to the ship. This was another excursion that I kinda had mixed feelings about. It really felt that we were pretty rushed all the way through the day. Part of that probably wasn’t helped that we were late getting in, but even then, I think they try to fit too much in too little time. They seemed more concerned with making sure you had time at the shopping places than having time at the sights.
Had a couple of people that were late getting back to the ship at this port. You could see the ships crew getting a little agitated as they were waiting for the last couple of people to show up. I’m not overly convinced that they weren’t lucky that the Regent ship was leaving at the same time we were, and since they backed up first, we had to wait for them to clear out before we’d be able to go anywhere. They did finally come tearing up in a van and were hustled on board, after which the gangplank was immediately pulled on board and we were under way.