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One attraction that Cartagena visitors should not miss is its Museo de Oro, or Gold Museum. Currently celebrating its 20th anniversary, it is situated right in the heart of the city, in a colonial-era building facing Plaza Bolivar. The incredible contents of the museum include valuable pre-Columbian gold artifacts, some of the oldest ceramics in the Americas, an explanation of the Zenú Nation's amazing hydraulic engineering achievements and a mountain of information about the way the native people lived.
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 Cartagena sorely lacks a zoo. But just a few minutes' drive outside Cartagena, near Club Campestre on the road to Turbaco, is the farm of Juan Carlos Lopez. It is no ordinary farm. If you look around, you will see caimans, boa constrictors, parrots, monkeys, falcons, turtles, sloths, and iguanas, along with specially selected native flora such the Totumo and Teca trees. Señor Lopez runs Villa Babilla, 'Caiman Village', whose popularity is growing with every new animal addition.
During our informal tour we were accompanied by Pancho, a small black monkey, and Lorenzo, a tame tropical bird. Their handler, and our guide for the day was the aptly named Juan Pájaro (in Spanish this translates as John Parrot).Señor Lopez started the farm after being disillusioned with conventional farming. Luring eco-tourists to Cartagena was a gamble, but a gamble that appears to be paying off. Cruise ship passengers and school excursions are increasing in number. He says Villa Babilla fulfills three needs: eco-tourism, education and recreation. He tries to give the animals as much space and freedom as possible, though obviously in the case of dangerous animals like the caiman there has to some kind of barrier between the humans and the animals.
At the farmhouse there are a couple of dogs, a mule, and some pens containing fluorescent-green baby iguanas. One of the buildings serves as a an incubation room for the caiman eggs, collected from nests on-site. The survival rate in the incubators is about double that of nests in the wild. Señor Pajaro showed us a small animal that looked to be a cross between a large rat and a small pig, and let us hold a tame sloth. Seeing such animals close up is fascinating; the sloth has ferocious-looking talons and a strange type of hair that camouflages it perfectly when he is put back in his tree. You can get your photo taken with the sloth or one of the two very large resident boa constrictors draped round your shoulders.
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The date was Friday 15th of February 2002. I had just finished writing an article about how Rigoberta Menchú had been walking around Santo Domingo the day before when my friend Ashley Rhodes raced into the internet cafe and asked me if I had my camera with me, because President Pastrana was in the Plaza Santo Domingo. We saw him walk into a historic house just off the Plaza and waited for him to come out. He emerged from the building a few minutes later with a casually dressed blonde woman and walked out to the Plaza again, surrounded by photographers and soldiers.Pastrana was in Cartagena attending the same international environmental conference that Rigoberta had. After I took a photo with my $15 camera President Pastrana smiled at me, and, seeing a pen and paper in my hand, made a gesture to suggest that he would be happy to sign an autograph.
I asked my friend Ashley to take a photo of the signing, and he tried, but handed the camera back saying it had run out of film. Damn! Oh well, at least I had his autograph. If I had known, I would have asked the blonde woman with the blacktop and sunglasses if she would mind signing for me as well. It wasn't until I read the next day's newspapers did I realize she was Queen Noor of Jordan, King Hussein's widow.
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 Ted Simon, the man who rode a motorcycle around the world in the 1970's, dropped in to CaribeNet recently. He was visiting Cartagena as part of his re-enactment of his original journey, which also passed through Cartagena. Ted's book about the original journey, Jupiter's Travels, sold over 400,000 copies and was translated into 6 languages. He is writing a second book about this trip and with the view to showing how much the world has changed (or stayed the same) in the ensuing years. Ted, now 70 years old, was held up in Medellin by an accident that wrecked his BMW motorbike and broke his collarbone. But that didn't stop Ted, only delayed him.
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 Cartagena has some strange monuments. There is a statue of a giant crab on Avenida Santander. Then there is the statue of a flock of pelicans in front of the Hotel Santa Clara, and the giant bronze casting of a pair of old boots behind the Fort of San Felipe. In front of this same fort stands the statue of Admiral Don Blas de Lezo with his one eye, one arm and wooden leg, above oversize facsimiles of British coins depicting his defeat - a defeat which never took place. But perhaps the oddest memorial is a concrete slab you pass when walking along the sea-front between Cartagena's central district and Bocagrande. It commemorates a small disaster which, quite literally, changed the course of Colombian history.
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I knew something surreptitious, illegal or evil was going on. The men had a shifty look in their eyes, and disappeared along with their contraband as soon as a motorcycle policeman approached, stuffing the small packets into their shirts and walking off in different directions. The items they were selling appeared to be little white bags of something about an inch long, tied in a line six to a string. The men were touting their product on a busy street-corner in Cartagena's Centro district in broad daylight. By staking out the street corners, they had options of escape as well as unimpeded views of approaching police, since all streets in Centro are one-way. They called out with a muffled cry of what my imperfect grasp of the sellers' costeño accent originally interpreted as "...algo marijuana.. algo marijuana..." But it wasn't marijuana. It wasn't even a drug. It was something much more cruel...
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En el cibercafé de CaribeNet trabajamos desde 1999, año en el cual fué su inauguración, exclusivamente bajo Linux. Los scanner causaron mucho dolor de cabeza ya que fue muy dificil encontrar modelos soportados por Linux, más dificil aún configurarlo. Hoy no más...
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The group consisted of the usual backpacker nationalities, some Brits, Canadians, Australians, and two Dutch girls. The agent seemed surprised at our number, thirteen in all, but was confident that we could all fit in to his four-wheel-drive vehicle. In any number of other countries another jeep would have been summoned, but we were in the Caribbean coast of Colombia, where squeezing the tourist for every last peso is an art form. We did manage to get in, but myself and the other Aussie had to stand at the rear clinging onto the frame of the jeep's covering tarpaulin, the wind whistling through our ears.
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Desde el punto de vista técnico, Linux es un sistema operativo UNIXTM multiusuario y multitarea, disponible como "freeware" (software gratuito) para muchas plataformas diferentes. La plataforma de hardware más común son equipos de tipo PC con procesadores x86 (Intel, AMD y Cyrix) a partir del 386..
Linux cumple en gran medida el estándar POSIX. Linux funciona perfectamente en combinación con los sistemas operativos convencionales de Microsoft, NovellTM y Apple, abriendo al mismo tiempo las puertas al mundo de Internet.
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This time of year is the craziest time of year in Cartagena. The build-up to the Concurso Nacional de Belleza, or National Beauty Contest, is taken so seriously that schools in the Cartagena region are given ten days of holidays. For months the papers have been covering the elimination rounds of the contest, which began at the local suburban level months ago, and gather momentum like a snowball until their climax at Cartagena's Centro de Convencíones. Last year Miss Cartagena came first, and Miss Bolívar second, pleasing the local crowd immensely. But this year there was even a bigger roar when the winner was announced, because history had been made.
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Cartagena
