I promise not to start every blogpost with a Bible quote, but this one was too good to pass up. And it is not entirely gratuitous. There is definitely something mystical about the Colombian Caribbean. Maybe it is the color of the water, the mindbending heat, the profusion of plants and animals, or the unearthly colors of the sunsets. Maybe something still lingers in the air from the religious swirl of indigenous cultures and voodoo brought by slaves before being crushed by the Inquisition. Or maybe after almost a year away, getting ready to sail to North America, all the memories of what we have seen in this long continent, are filling our heads with visions and dreams.
We came from Mompós to Cartagena, probably the most visited place in all of Colombia. It has a beautiful colonial old town on a sort of peninsula surrounded by stone walls to keep Sir Francis Drake out. It has wonderful statuary scattered throughout the old town, elaborate doorknockers on giant wooden doors, a park near our hostel (the wonderful Casa Viena) with iguanas and monkeys and reportedly sloths in the trees, and a huge stone fort with long underground passageways to wander around in.
We spent only one day here our first time, before heading up the coast to Parque Nacional Tayrona and the Guajira peninsula, but we are back now getting ready to board the sailboat that will take us to Panama through the San Blas Islands. Yesterday we were followed around for a couple hours by a smiley dog that we named Pericos (after Hilary's favorite breakfast dish). Perhaps our last canine friend from South America.
We spent two days in the crowded but gorgeous Parque Nacional Tayrona at the base of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain range in the world, with a páramo and a permanant ice cap, though that is hard to believe from the bottom where it is crushingly hot and jungly. We spent two nights there swimming and walking through a landscape full of monkeys, frogs, lizards (some with electric blue tails), a profusion of bugs, and bizarre plants entangling everything. One of the most fascinating things was the highway system of the leaf cutter ants. They have cleared long pathways through the jungle where they relentlessly march carrying bright leaves back to their nests to grow the fungus on which they feed.
From Tayrona we headed for the Guajira peninsula close to the border with Venezuela, highly recommended to us by our friend Steffen. We took a bus past Riohacha to a place called Cuatro Vias (four ways or crossroads) where we found we had just missed the pickup truck, and took a taxi with Daniel and Karen from Bogotá, catching up with the truck in Uribia. We rode in the back with the friendly locals, the kids staring at us wide-eyed.
After two and a half hours of jouncing over the desert roads we reached the small indigenous beach town of Cabo de la Vela where the desert meets the sea. We slept for three nights in hammocks under simple shelters right on the beach. There is little fresh water in town so we bathed in the sea. We took a pleasant walk on the beach with Karen and Daniel and played Uno with them in the evening, listening to vallenato music with few other tourists around. But the most important part of each day was the sunset, dreamy visions in their own right.
There were also many dogs in town who we befriended by day but cursed at night as they sang chorus after chorus of the age old doggy song. On the second night, I discovered that hurling a full two-liter bottle of water into their midst, then shouting and shaking my stick tended to scatter and silence them. One dog named Perry (not by us) took offense and growled at me all the next day, but most of the others, especially Frijoles and Cream Cheese (our names) took it in stride. Also living at our hostel was a small litter of larval puppies with their eyes still shut.
Leaving Guajira was difficult. Partly because it was so beautiful and relaxing and partly because the pickup trucks only leave for Cuatro Vias at four in the morning. One of the few times I have felt paranoid in all of South America was being stuffed into that truck in the dark, bouncing over that horrible dusty desert road, not understanding a word being said, and then suddenly being joined by several hogtied goats bellowing in bloodcurdling fashion. I thought, "What if these people all want to rob us, or sell us to the FARC, or leave us out here in the desert like something out of El Bueno, El Malo, y el Feo? What's to stop them?" But the guy I was most suspicious of turned out to be very kind and friendly, jumping out at Uribia shortly after sunrise to buy us coffees, restoring my vision to reality.
Finally, from Cuatro Vias we grabbed a bus to Barranquilla to join in the big dreams of Mami and Papi, as our time in South America winds down.
No comments:
Post a Comment