mahdnc

While patiently waiting for our number to be called, we met the person who fell yesterday during our independent shore excursion. Fractured wrist….

We are docked at Colon under cloudy skies. We arrived around 9am and were cleared at 9:25am. We are at the Celebrity Theatre in Deck 4 waiting for our group number (27) to be called. You are required to bring your passport with you ashore.

I used a DSLR camera (Nikon D780) with a 300 mm telephoto lens. In contrast, the Apple 15 Pro telephoto lens has an equivalent focal length of only 77 mm. I took a lot of photos of this month's total solar eclipse with the same camera (link). We traveled to an area north of my parent's home town of Paducah, KY to watch it.

The vendor pushiness was well above average, but no behavior that went over the line. However there were a lot of them.

We ended up not doing this partly because the weather didn’t look that great and partly because we had a great view from our aft balcony.

I had a small incident of my own at the pier on the way back to board Summit.... While I was walking past the yellow bollard in the above photo, a quick gust of wind blew my Xpedition baseball hat off my head before I could grab it. The hat went airborne and landed in the water in the harbor. My brown hat is visible in the photo below at the lower right hand corner. I received the baseball hat from a fellow passenger during our Xpedition sailing this past November--in appreciation for making their name tags. Looking at it in the water, I figured the hat to be pretty much a loss, but my wife would not give up so easily. She flagged down one of Summit's maintenance workers who was standing on the pier using a very long pole to paint/coat the ship's blue hull. Ten minutes later this employee used the long pole to successfully fish my wayward hat out of the water. I was very grateful. I am happy to report that my Xpedition hat is drying out in our cabin.

I forgot to mention that during Dora's tour, one of the passengers in our tour group (but not on the roll call, I think), slipped and fell. She seemed to have hurt her forearm. This occurred about 2/3 of the way through the tour. They elected to quit the tour to go to a hospital to have an MRI done. Dora accepted their cash payment but returned a portion of it back to them. She also got them a taxi and negotiated the price to their selected destination so they didn't have to.

It is pretty well known that there is an aviary located at the pier which seemed popular with passengers on this cruise:

And some other photos of places we visited:

We also visited the San Diego area of Cartagena

We did see from the outside, Castle San Felipe de Barajas, but we did not have time to tour the fort itself. Just as well, as there was some decent elevation gain to get to it. Why do builders make it so difficult to get to a fort?

Some more photos taken at the Convent (it's possible that there may be a stray photograph that doesn't belong):

The convent is located at the highest point in Cartagena and so the views of the city were impressive. The visibility was pretty good, too, despite the humidity. The panorama photo below looks nicer on a full screen, but it's a little small when posted on this forum. Tap/click on the photo to allow you to enlarge it. Summit is located at the extreme left in the photo.

Our first stop was Convento de la Popa which is located at the top of a hill overlooking the city. The bus takes a few switchbacks to get there with views of the city along the way. When we got off the bus, we were surrounded by a welcoming committee of people selling souvenirs (dressed in yellow in the next photo below). There quite a few of them during the whole tour. They were polite but persistent.