Cartagena: Pros and Cons of Expat life in this Tourism Based city
you've been thinking Colombia you've decided that the andies mountains are too cold for you instead you're looking to relocate to a warm and coastal city what if I told you that Carta is much more than a tourist destination it is actually a possible xat [Music] Hotpot today I give you reasons why and why not caha could be your ideal expat location hey it's from generic expats and welcome to season 2 South America we give you boots on the ground real life videos and perspectives on living in and moving to Latin America focusing on safety cost of living healthc care weather and telling the story of expat currently living in both xat hubs and undiscovered gems here in the region as I slowly drive through and live in each country in L after driving for nearly 2 years from Minnesota down through Mexico and Central [Music] America I literally have been preparing to do this solo project for the past 15 years and I hope you enjoy all the content coming at you right now hey guys it's Eric here from generic expats welcome to pla B today I'm going to be walking you around the historic beautiful downtown of [Music] ctha I'm going to be giving you a summary of what I've experienced this past week Natalie and I did a lot of research a lot of things in order to bring to you our knowledge and experiences and information about not only being a tourist but also living here and we met a lot of cool people so we're going to talk about that today we're going to be walking past the pla leave out here and I'm going to be starting off with the [Music] history the history of this city is one of the most rich and it's one of the oldest cities in all of Colombia therefore coming to this city is definitely something you want to do if you want to learn about things that brought Colombia to be what they are today right the history of the Spanish coming over and how that brought a huge diversity of people from around the world um there's a lot of the African diversity here and that is something you won't see in all of Colombia therefore coming here is necessary to be able to have the full spectrum of the type of people that have been living here for so long so it's a kind of an important Place historically as well as culturally it is also a UNESCO heritage site and actually had a little bit of difficulty with a couple construction projects that they were starting to do in the downtown area which almost got them disqualified from being a UNESCO heritage site therefore it is a thing that the city is still hanging on to at the moment however it has battled a little bit with this in terms of some newer construction projects that would have disqualified them in the [Music] end it might not be obvious if you're watching me with this long sleeve shirt but I'm wearing a bandana now because of the extreme heat that you can feel here in cartha it's definitely one of the hottest cities I've ever been in people all around are just sweating buckets I mean there is non-stop intense humidity and heat and it is just a place where if you do not like the intense heat it's going to be kind of a difficult place to not only visit but definitely to live in if you are a bit sensitive to this type of weather the average Fahrenheit humidity and weather that you'll experience here at least in August when I was here the entire week was I think 93 fahit which is about 35 cels real feel and then it reaches up to the mid 100 so 105 or so every single day depending on how much sun there is and how much sun there isn't so that's going to be a big factor however it this goes without saying when you're in the sea level areas of the tropical countries this is going to be the weather you're dealing with and it's not easy if you're not used to it or if you're not expecting it so definitely have your expectations set for it it is the standard Tropics of of the coconut trees and insane heat that you would expect not every place has it in the tropics but this place [Music] does we're now entering into what is the square of the Customs or custom Square Plaza de Alana and I want to be talking now a bit about the safety Cara is regarded to be this super unsafe Place very dangerous compared to the rest of Colombia and Columbia in general is not considered to be the most safest place either I mean as of right now 2024 some of the most safest countries would be El Salvador that recently became super safe and other places that used to be safe like Ecuador supposedly has become a lot less safe this city actually in the past week that I've been here it hasn't really seem to be a very dangerous place at all I haven't had any issues with people that are trying to take advantage or Rob or petty crime that type of thing didn't happen I mean one week is not enough time to really give a good conclusion however it didn't have the actual feeling the atmosphere didn't feel I mean that's not a great way to describe it of course your feelings doesn't usually mean that much but yeah based on Intuition or based on feelings it didn't have the super extra dangerous feel that I was expecting and a lot of people talk about when coming here I think perhaps a big reason for that is that I didn't go out with at super late times of the night we are pretty much always doing stuff by day early morning late afternoon and going home at 8 so perhaps some of the dangerous things that people do and the danger and the crime that does happen it happens due to going out at maybe the Late Night 10 and beyond for the night life maybe the night life scene is a bit more dangerous however if you're coming here for just a daytime fun if you're planning to go to to see some natural beauty go to the beaches if you want to come out check out the historic downtown like here you're going to have a pretty good time I mean this is something that we found out from being here is that the nature is fantastic but perhaps the even better part is the actual historical downtown its history its beautiful architecture and its atmosphere here you can tell this is absolutely swamp full of tourists I mean in the shade right now cuz it's so hot it's about 103 degrees or so I actually tried taking in Uber Moto which is one of my favorite ways to get around in Latin America especially with these historic districts always have very very narrow streets it's hard to pass by and I'd like to take the bikes well the bikes aren't even allowed in here but in general if you can get a motorbike Uber Moto whatever you call it that's going to be the fastest way around I tried to get one my first night here and I did get a couple options and then they ended up cancelling on me and I was like what and they said oh you I can't pick you up cuz you're a man I'm like I'm a man like what I can't take motorcycles cuz I'm a man like I didn't understand at all and then the third Taxi actually picked me up but said I can't bring you to where you want to go I'll drop you off nearby and I said well why he said it's called Paro Paro so it's actually having a passenger on your motorcycle and Paro being masculine you can't have a male passenger on your bike and there's certain streets where you see the sign and says noo like you know with a no sign I'm like okay so it's is it just they don't like the men especially men on motorcycles they're like well supposedly it's to help combat the crime and a lot of crime or maybe a high percentage of that crime does happen with men two men on a motor motorcycle and it has been for probably years actually when I chatted with some expats about this they said that it's been in effect this policy for quite a some time quite a few years so this is something I believe more than six years old in the city PTO something I haven't seen before in any parts of the world to be honest this is the first time I've ever seen it Paro to keep the city safe Perhaps it is doing its job I don't know I just arrived here for the first time but it was a bit of a shock to me that I had to plan around going to places on motorbik taxis or the Uber Moto based on this [Music] policy if you're coming here on vacation it can be a bit difficult to know what to do and where to go and if you really just researched in the prices that's going to be your best option for not getting taken advantage of getting the right prices and not having to negotiate with a person without knowing the the standard price of most tours and most things you're going to be paying also if you don't have cash an extra 5% on credit cards it's just not part of the culture here to use credit cards therefore whenever you want to pay with it if it's even an option which is not always an option they're going to charge you that extra 5% and if you get you know for example me with Charles Schwab I don't have any charge at all from taking out cash so there's no extra charge for me I'm much rather paying cash now in terms of the tourist pricing and having researched what you want to do beforehand I mean there's a lot of informal sales go out here people will come up to you and be like where do you want to go what do you want to do and if you don't know more or less what it costs people we're going to say well come here come there and this is what you want to do and they're going to give you the highest possible price talking to people like K Perham so so give you some options and you'll you'll say okay well I want to do this that this or that and if you didn't look online at least do a quick go Google search it might be a little bit difficult to know if you're getting the double the price because you can be kind of surprised when basically the example we have is we went to apply a Blanca and we were a bit surprised at what the price we paid included so that's something to keep in mind in order to not at least be taken advantage of while being a tourist also living here is just a really good type of tip in order to get the best out of what you're trying to do here in terms of price and value now going back to the example I mentioned about paa Blanca Natalie and I wanted to go to the most popular Beach which is called the white Beach and it of course was a fantastic experience it was really really beautiful it was a little complicated to be honest about it because we went on a holiday now if you're coming on a Colombian holiday on Sunday specifically on a three-day weekend it's going to be very very busy and that's exactly our experience it it was super busy and it was a bit too busy to enjoy it so in terms of research I mean besides researching the price I mean knowing what days to avoid especially if you're a tourist on holidays it's good to maybe make your decisions based upon what isn't the current local holiday in order to be swamped with people we we were on the beach in Playa Blanca and the main Playa Blanca Beach was pretty horrendous way too busy way too many people had to walk over them and there's probably 5,000 I don't think it's even a joke 5,000 people were there everywhere and we had to walk past them we went to play tanila in the end and that was great but we ended up finding out that the 70,000 Paces which is about $18 only really covered the transport and the lunch the lunch was nothing special I mean it was fine um and we were worried about okay well this is a super touristy Beach it's super expensive cartha is one of the most expensive tourist zones in the country okay well it's good to have the the lunch you know already pre-sold or guaranteed and then transport options we did a bunch of research and it was just almost impossible literally impossible to get out there easily without taking like three different types of transport from where we were staying in like kind of the local area of CA we discovered it was 20,000 there and back if he wanted just the transportation however that included their extra fees of basically trying to charge the highest possible amount in order to get big commissions so that's going to be another thing to keep in mind of how much the actual standard rate is and if you can just separate the different Services yourself in order to not get super taken advantage of we felt a bit cheated but then again I mean we we were able to go to the place we wanted to go to and we got food and we you know we were given everything more or less that we wanted they said that we have we would have chairs on the beach which we did not so something to keep in mind if you're trying to go to a specific place play aanka it's a bit oversaturated especially on holiday definitely avoid it on holidays that was our [Music] experience next topic I'm going to bring up is the cost of living and their prices not only for tourists but for locals so I met a couple expats and they gave me some ideas of what to expect for paying somewhat more local prices for accommodation and what tourist prices are for around here in the downtown historic district it's beautiful place to stay However you're talking $100 to $200 per night if you want a nice apartment or a nice hotel room and if you want to live in like a bit more local area then you can find stuff for as low as from one of the xats I chatted with uh he mentioned almost around $200 per month so you have a massive variation of tourist prices per day which are similar to the local prices per month $200 per day if that's your budget that should be okay for you I got the hand is a good spot for you to go stay in the nicest spots of the city and to enjoy the nicest parts of it but if you're trying to go on a budget the downtown area definitely isn't good for you Natalie and I we stayed in the area called Las Gaviotas Las Gaviotas is a very local place it was actually quite convenient uh in the location that we were able to take the local transport because I don't have my motorcycle right now I left it in N so being that we wanted to have decent transport options without having to depend on a bit more expensive Ubers because it's so far out it's a 30- minute drive from the city center we decided okay well it's good to be near public transport and that's what we did now these are the different options for accommodation if you want to either live here or be a tourist in G of course there's going to be hostiles there's going to be lower cost options but in general if you're looking to come here and you want the nicer experiences it's it's going to be a bit more difficult to find that there's so many international airports so many people coming in with so much money that the prices are just naturally more elevated based upon those types of people that are coming for those nicer locations and nicer experiences another interesting part of kaha is the culture of course I mentioned in the beginning that the types of people that are here the diversity that here is very different from other parts of Colombia therefore it's always good to be able to learn about the history and the people and who they are and why they are here based on what happened in the past and with Spanish colonialism and their slave trade of course that's going to be a big part of how the diversity came to be here I actually just passed a a restaurant here that actually seems pretty good price for the historic district whereas in general you're not going to find super low prices you can find a 177,000 to 20,000 lunch year uh in this spot right here which is uh I don't know the name of this placei uh in general you're going to be finding around 30 to 40,000 in a lot of places we're actually walking towards what is called the uh District of hamani which is the Art District and it's a bit more of the artistic cheaper um Bohemian side of the city which is always awesome to go go to I went there a few times and really enjoyed my experience and you're going to find much lower prices there you're going to find some really good options I went there for a 14,000 pce of Lun which is just over $3 and you're going to be able to find lower price drinks however you're going to spend a little bit more just based on the cool atmosphere of the area speaking of the local culture Hall it's quite a bit different from other parts of Columbia and the world they have quite a bit of a afro Caribbean type of a Vibe which is great and the food definitely reflects that the food has nice co that type of rice there's a lot of fried fish everywhere it definitely has the kind of Caribbean Coastal type of Cuisine with plantains sweet and the regular plantains and a mixture of um that with beans sometimes lentils I mean that's what we had pretty much every day so that was kind of a cool experience eating the local food here you can find it on other parts of Columbia but it's of course it's going to be a bit more authentic here this is where it's from and besides the food in the culture you have the music now the type of music here is very very good with salsa Champa is another local type of regional type of music and machata M all of those things are going to be very easier to find one of the expats I ended up interviewing Kevin he said that he loves the music he has a passion for music he's a very passionate guy about this particular thing and he said this is kind of his paradise because of that this is a very good place to dance to go to bars and have type of local people enjoy a fun time of enjoying the local type of culture when it comes to a bit of local beers poia beers along with some salsa dancing throughout the [Music] night an interesting difference from caha to the other parts of Colombia is that it might not be all of caran it might not be all of other parts of Colombia however it is actually pretty common to see kind of issues with trash and issues with a bit more of a dirty atmosphere seems like the overe exploitation this city has still not been totally controlled to the point where it's it's a bit nicer and cleaner I mean of course in the streets right now it's quite nice and I believe the city center is quite nicely uh taken care of in the daytime at least and it does become kind of dirty throughout the night of course they can only clean so much but in terms of the rest of kahena and the areas we went to for example Playa Blanca Playa Blanca was actually quite dirty it was pretty intense it could have been because we went on a holiday however it just seems like the type of culture of taking care of Nature and making sure that the roads are slightly clean or that people like bring stuff with them that is not quite so much a priority in other cities for example in medine I mean you're going to be seeing dirt dirty places you're going to be seeing garbage in some places but the levels that you'll see are far lore it seems like the city's taken care of a lot better in that regards and that's kind of an interesting difference between kaha and other cities like medine or santand for example when I spent my month in bukar manga it did have some areas where there people you know ditching their trash or they're sorting to trash to try and get some you know to try and do some recycling for cans or whatever it is and those were left a little dirty but in the end they're actually quite a bit cleaner than here in many parts I mean of course like I said we're in the historic downtown that's probably not going to be quite so common but outside of the downtown tourism zone is actually quite interesting taking the bus back where we were staying in Gaviotas I mean we passed through some some pretty dirty places so that type of the culture was definitely a different it was definitely quite interesting to see just within Columbia how those differences can be how drastic from medine bu manga to here to [Music] cart welcome to the plaza Fernandez de Madrid this is another little stop as we're walking through this beautiful historic part of caha by far the best part of the city I believe here in the historic downtown there's been a lot of remodeling done and it looks fantastic it's so cool it's so beautiful and it's it is what it is based upon all those efforts and that's great however not everything has really good infrastructure the place we went to in the example I gave before many times is play Blanca play Blanca to go there you need to take a bus it's pretty much mandatory if I would have had my motorcycle of course none of this would have happened but I left it in medine for now in terms of going to the beach there is just really bad sand beaches with huge massive holes and the buses go super slow and there were so so so many buses and the parking area was just not adequate the infrastructure there was just not the correct way to go about things to make sure that you know maybe the one of the most visited places top visited places in the cahana area for one of the most touristic cities of the entire country they don't even have a parking lot and it took us 2 hours to just leave the parking lot on this bus that was literally mandatory that was a bit disappointing because we wanted to be able to you know go back and check out other parts we haven't seen the castle yet and we weren't able to go to be honest because it just there was enough time and that didn't fit into our schedule so we missed out on a couple things based upon kind of inefficiencies but this is just part of the infrastructure of the area so that was kind of a sad part of going there although like I said if I had my motorcycle wouldn't have been an issue so I I guess one of the things you can do to avoid it is have your own transport or just not taking the bus and then the bus is basically the best way to go because we looked into other ways it was super expensive or it was just super difficult so that was our little lesson on the infrastructure at least outside the city inside the city it seems to be pretty decent in terms of transc eBay which is the bus system that takes you around it's 3,000 pesos per ride and that infrastructure is quite decent and you know walking around here it's mostly I mean it's partly walking street so that's kind of nice but then there's also still quite a bit of traffic so that's going to be another issue that I hope at some point the city actually becomes a bit more Walker friendly because that's that's kind of what a lot of people want right A lot of people want to come here walk around enjoy the streets without getting hit by a car don't fly through the streets but still it's [Music] not all right to wrap this entire little discussion about Cara haa up I'm going to be talking about the expat community that is always a a big thing for people if you don't speak any Spanish it's going to be very helpful if you speak some Spanish it's still nice to see people from your own country possibly from your own state or whatever you're from the United States or from Canada nearby similar cultures you can chat about you know different types of the the culture that you know you find interesting or different or challenging or fun and that's always going to be good since I've been here I was able to sit down and chat with two different foreigners staying in the caha area and one has been here super longterm Christie and then one is in the process of getting a digital Nomad Visa stay tuned for those videos and guys uh this community really surprised me I wasn't expecting to see such a big group of foreigners living here because it's such a tourist place I thought okay well I've lived in tourist cities before I think I've mentioned in many videos Cancun Ando are the biggest ones the best examples I mean Mexico City is massive as well but it's also you know the capital and the biggest city so it's a little bit different they have their kind of expad or or foreign bubbles however I've lived in like Cancun which is just tourism and that's it uh Rio is kind of a mix that's kind of an interesting City because it has you know the industries and the outskirts but then the tourism in the beach areas kaban Panama all that stuff so so I I personally like Rio but it's a bit intense to live there and canu and I wasn't too big of a fan just too much aggressive tourism and that's just something that happens here people are accustomed to it if you come as a tourist I mean if you go anywhere you're going to have a bit more aggressive type of sellers vendors in the streets trying to promote their stuff and that's their job I mean that's what they do but you have to respect them and just say you know Gass is in Spanish and just keep walking and they'll leave you alone generally so I didn't find that to be a big problem however you know after living here I was expecting a lot less because this being surrounded by the atmosphere can be a bit difficult but Christie lived in an area or she lives in an area where she's feeling uh comfortable with living in the you know biggest tourism city of the entire country and then there's another zone right next to the airport called ceso uh that's where the other expad is living and he mentioned that this is a Hidden Gem because it's a residential area right next to the airport super convenient but it doesn't look nice from the road the main road and from the airport so it's quite a it's quite a shocking area to be in thinking that it's not going to be that nice so in terms of the xack community the first thing I did the second night I came there was to go to an xat Meetup and I met all these great people and they're super friendly they a nice community of people helping each other and when you go to some Facebook groups and you go to some uh types of events or mostly the Facebook groups I refer to uh the people are about aggressive they're a bit unhelpful and they just kind of instead of being super friendly and super uh respect ful about maybe you being a first time or you don't know much about the place or the culture or whatever they just you know they kind of rip into you I don't I don't like that I I don't at all participate in those groups that have those type of people however the US xat Community was it's much smaller but is full of much nicer people so this is kind of a really cool part of that of this city Cara has people that are super friendly foreigners that are willing to help and they're willing to be there to meet up with you I mean I I was only here for a week and I met up with too it was super fast other cities I didn't have that same luck and yeah I want to say thanks to all those all those that did meet up with me and share their story and to talk about what they're doing I mean meeting up with other expats other people living abroad it's always so great and having them on my Channel having them give good useful tips is great and I mean these are my tips for you guys this this is my summary of living in Carta of staying in Carta for one week as this was all the time I could put into being here I wanted to come here for a month but things didn't work out the way that I was planning in the beginning and that's totally fine I came here for a week and that's good enough I mean I'm absolutely dying of the heat that's just typical of the coastal areas some aren't as nearly as hot as others for example Santa Marta is a little little less humid from what I experienced when I was living there in 2020 however yeah that is going to be the final topic is xat community great people that surround you here if you're looking for a nice crowd that will kind of belittle you you can actually jump into those Facebook groups and they are very helpful so guys if you're enjoying all the content I'm producing if you like following me around all these Latin American places talking about my experiences giving you pointers and information about all of these different topics that I find important as an expat as a as a foreign person in Latin America as a global citizen as some people say hit that like subscribe that notification Bell if you want to support all of the work that I'm doing all the extra uh flights and all the extra videos and all the I spent anything guys you can hit that buy me a coffee definitely you can energize me up and get me to talk a little bit faster than I already am I'm I'm stealing this one from you Scott and guys I'll see you in the next one laim [Music]
2024-10-07 19:59