Eddie White Jr. arrived in Cartagena in 2020 with a small suitcase and a four-day plan: see a film festival, catch up with friends, head home to Australia. Then the festival was cancelled, Colombia went into lockdown, and the city emptied out. Months later, he was still there — and the accidental stay changed the direction of his life.
White wasn't new to creative work. Growing up in Adelaide, he was drawing by age four, and at 13 he co-founded a studio called The People's Republic of Animation with two school friends. The company ran for 14 years, and its short film The Cat Piano, co-directed with Ari Gibson and narrated by Nick Cave, made the Academy Awards shortlist in 2010. But a shot at Hollywood didn't pan out, and he closed the studio in 2014.
Colombia first entered the picture in 2017, when he met Colombian filmmaker Andrés Barrientos at a festival in Croatia and later visited. So when he returned in 2020 searching for a new direction, the invitation from a friend in Bogotá to spend a few days in Cartagena felt like a natural stop. Lockdown turned those days into an extended stay — and turned his sketchbook into a lifeline.
With the streets quiet, White began drawing the details that stood out to an outsider: food, colours, everyday expressions, the character of a city without crowds. He posted the illustrations online and found an audience almost immediately, including Colombians who enjoyed seeing familiar things through foreign eyes. An illustrated alphabet project let him work through the country's food, music and cultural symbols one letter at a time.
Not everything landed smoothly. His drawings of women from different Colombian regions drew criticism from people who felt the images leaned on stereotypes. White took the feedback seriously — his approach now mixes observation with listening, and he's careful to frame his work as personal notes on a country rather than definitive statements about its culture.
That openness shows in his book, Caldo de ojo: 100 dichos y palabras colombianas, which pairs his illustrations with Colombian sayings and words explained in both Spanish and English. A single phrase, he suggests, can tell you how people tease, warn each other or shrug off a bad day — the kind of texture you only pick up by spending real time somewhere. He has since travelled much of Colombia alone, adding each region to the visual map that started in Cartagena.
He's also circling back to film. Neotropico, a live-action feature with a fantastical twist, is in development and he hopes to shoot it in Colombia — tying his animation roots to the country that gave him an unplanned second act.
For travellers, the story is a nice reminder of what slow, curious travel can produce. Cartagena's old city, with its colour-saturated streets and street food culture, rewards exactly the kind of attention White paid it — and his book makes an unusual souvenir or pre-trip read for anyone heading to Colombia.
