Rebecca Romijn doesn't consider herself much of a Colombian scholar. "All I knew about Cartagena was that it's where Kathleen Turner was trying to get to in Romancing the Stone," she says of the balmy South American setting for ELLE's cover shoot. Once she arrived she ignored rumors about kidnapped tourists, ditched her escort, and fearlessly embarked on a sightseeing expedition of the mysterious old city. This is, after all, a woman who in her previous incarnation as a globe-traveling supermodel stared down a hippopotamus in Kenya and narrowly escaped hurricanes in the Bahamas.