The dyed palm in my hands is not quite doing what I want it to. Two fronds, one blue and one red (my selection), are in knots. At our folding table in a big yellow room, my fellow cruisers are engaged in what I can only describe as dexterous braiding, but they’re also commiserating with me: Their work is as bad as mine; none of us has the hang of it. Our instructor, Jair Palma, a gentle woman in a long skirt, comes around correcting mistakes and then curlicuing the result into a spiraling ring she then slides onto a finger of its maker, as if she were an officiant at some woven wedding.
When she reaches my seat, she inspects my work for a moment before pocketing it and presenting me with its flawless equal, now coiled into a ring that she slips upon my finger. A merciful act. It’s the penultimate day of my cruise on AmaMelodia between Cartagena and Barranquilla along Colombia’s Magdalena River, a new itinerary from AmaWaterways that’s as novel as it is special.
Passenger boats have not passed through these parts since the days of the steamship petered all the way out some 60 years ago. Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera, namely the final chapter (set in the 1930s), depicts not just the sad decline of romantic river travel as Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza take their long-awaited honeymoon but also the communities of Colombians its end left behind.
Our low, bargelike vessel drifts serenely, unhurriedly along
Our low, bargelike vessel drifts serenely, unhurriedly along the brown river. Unlike the traffic you might encounter on a cruise along, say, Europe’s Danube or Rhine, here the only other passenger ship we pass is our vessel’s sister ship, AmaMagdalena. This is an optional excursion to Usiacurí, a town about an hour outside Barranquilla, where skilled weavers of iraca palm work with or without the lucrative presence of international tourists to create handsome objects like bags, baskets, and fans, as well as earrings, necklaces, and more.
Tours are led by river guides—on our ship there’s Eric, Camila, and Mateo, all from Colombia—who liaise and often translate for locals on the ground in the places we’re stopping in, including Palenque and Calamar. Ama’s managing director for Colombia, Beno Atan, who spent the past five years scoping out towns along the river for this itinerary, recalls his first scout as such: “I rented a boat from a local…and I had an ice chest with beer and sandwiches and fruit, and I just went out and started talking to people.”
Those who cannot do, buy, and I buy from the sun-dappled line of stalls outside the workshop.
Here I find quiet craftspeople sitting in the shade who are ambivalent to my approach. What draws me in are the walls lined with goods unmatched in their restrained whimsy: fans for the heat, dangling earrings in orange and navy blue, a box bag with a crimson strap. To work with the iraca palm, artisans submerge its cut and dried fronds in boiling water and slowly add powder pigments of dye until achieving the desired color, at which point they hose them down with cold water and hang them out to dry.
Baskets, for example, require structuring over a wire
Baskets, for example, require structuring over a wire frame. I procure one in the shape of a chicken. Its askew wings double as lids. AmaWaterways is giving travelers easy access to Usiacurí’s weavers and other artisans. In Mompox, a UNESCO-marked town that remains a popular destination among domestic travelers, workshops preserve the Colombian variation of filigree, a process in which threads of silver and gold are twisted into lacelike formations and held in place by the flame of a torch.
At another table, this one beneath the open sky of a hammock-lined courtyard, I weld a heart-shaped charm to much greater success. En route to Mompox we watch fishermen cast enormous nets in sync in a sort of dance down the river. Visiting Mompox required AmaWaterways to build a new docking bridge, but other towns are more difficult to access. Rudi Schreiner, a cofounder of the company, originally hoped to include El Banco but had to cut the town from the itinerary due to the Magdalena’s arduously bendy approach to the riverside village.
But El Banco has a reputation as a capital of cumbia, Colombia’s percussive folk music and dance tradition, and so a squadron of performers bus down and come aboard laden with handcrafted drums—a stout, two-headed bass tambora and its thinner upright sibling, the tambor alegre—for a demonstration. In lieu of El Banco, one stop added is Santa Barbara de Pinto, an unassuming fishing village where another dock had to be built to allow for AmaMelodia’s size.
During his research, Atan came here
During his research, Atan came here for a coffee and stayed for the artisans rolling tobacco and weaving fishing nets. He spent much time here, helping artisans price goods for the cruises that he would eventually bring through. When I show him the hand-rolled cigarettes I’ve just purchased from a stoic vendor, eight for $5, he laughs: “He originally wanted to sell 20 for $5. I told him to keep the price the same but go way down [in quantity].” I feel briefly like a schmuck.
Beside the cigarette vendor, another man is pulling a rainbow fishing net he’s woven from its display on the long branch of a tree and instructs a cruiser to crouch before him. He throws it and engulfs his prey, the psychedelic color rippling briefly before motion stops. Soon it will fade and stain brown like the waters of the river, but the intricate patterns of knots will remain.
AmaWaterways’ seven-day Magic of Colombia sailings start at $3,299 here. This article appeared in the September/October 2026 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
