Vacation is so good.
I have had a couple weeks of friends to fill up my heart with goodness. First, my friend Ed (former co-worker in Guatemala/room mate in Bogota) came to visit the community and hang out with me for a few days in Uraba. Then we headed to the Caribbean where dearest Bendy (other half of this power couple) was waiting with open arms to whisk me away on beach hopping bliss and finally, Beth (other Bogota roomie) hooked up with all of us in Cartagena. Too good to be true. Here is Ed’s blog, which has some of his own reflections from his time in the community and his photo link, which has some great photography:
My initial bus ride to Cartagena where I was to meet Bendy was extended several times due to bad road conditions and fallen bridges. As in: “Everybody off the bus, time to cross the river on foot!” (And we did, by crossing a bamboo drawbridge.) A long time later I rolled into the Cartagena bus stop in the middle of the night and arrived to a smiley Bendy sometime around 2am.
We stroll in old town Cartagena and enjoy flowered balconies and colonial architecture with pretty peeling paint. We eat amazing entrees and street vendor coco treats and stop for coffee whenever we please. We laugh in hammocks and talk of our lives. We are the goodness that real power couples should be but never really are. We are a different kind of power couple. Bendy eases me into an outside the warzone reality where low flying choppers are just the coast guard and canons protected the city so long ago that now you can just sit on them and drink a sunset beer. We catch up and laugh some more and drink beers on a plaza with salsa playing. I wear long red beads. We are but once upon a time.
Then we bus to Santa Marta. We eat more amazing food. We drink on a hostel bar balcony with a Peruvian. We repack for the beach.
We leap off the bus in front of Parque Tayrona and hike in to the beach. We hike through mud and fire ants, over streams and moss covered rock. We hike along and we sing songs. And as the rocky moss and lizards gives way to shells and sand and palm trees, we stop for a juice at a seaside resort. We hike on, walking in the waves, jumping beach to beach and then we disappear again back to the jungle. We weave and hike and laugh some more. We meet a boy picking mangos from a tree. He shares them. He tells us he has snorkel gear. We have reached Cabo. We sleep in hammocks and spend our days in front of a bluegreen cove full of brightly colored fish and white sand. We borrow our new friend’s snorkle goggles and swim along the grey-brown reef. I see an octopus. We gorge on mango and coconut. Bendy sees monkeys. We saunter from beach to beach and somehow manage to be the only people on them. Life is just us and our snorkel friend and our beer vending friend on beaches that could not be more beautiful. How can this be? I feel I am in a dream. We bronze, we swim. When the rain storm comes in the evening, I go back in the water. With my goggles I can see bioluminescents all around my arms as they move. After dinner we sit and watch the lightening storm in yet a different cove. It lights up the mountains and the forest and the turbulent water and the boat in the bay. Later, from my hammock, I still watch the lightening, while listening to the rain on the palapa. I think I may never be happier.
Bendy has a vision- an abandon beach four hours away hiking. We must make it a reality. So we take off and hike through the most magical of dream jungles. We hike up ancient indigenous rock formations to a lost city (Bendy at one point is literally a ladder which I climb.), through the thick of the thick of the jungle, through huge spider webs and snake happy vines and shallow parts of rivers. We hike through a jungle that is some mix of Jurrasic Park and Avatar and The Beach- all of those fictional jungles combined to be one real jungle of dreams bliss. Bright blue butterflies with wings the size of my palms guide us. There are eggplant colored mushrooms growing on redwood logs, poisonous dart frogs and millipedes the size of accordions. There are Manaquins and parrots and huge lizards with tongues a foot long. We walk down a nearly dry riverbed because we believe it will take us to the sea. Just as I begin to think we can’t possibly be on any sort of path, we see a building. And a sign. It reads: Welcome to all who are lost. You have reached paradise.
We arrive at Playa Brava to hear that Ed has beat us there by walking a different path in from the highway. Hurrah! That makes three of us and a beach cove and one family to feed us and house us and make us very very happy. Here the waves crash bigger and the current is stronger and when you stand on the beach and look inland all you can see are mountainous jungle peaks. It is unbelievable. I decide that this is probably the prettiest national park I have ever been to. The kids chase their dog with dead poisonous snakes to scare him. They bathe in the freshwater of the river just before it reaches the ocean. Alvero cracks open coconuts for us in a coconut graveyard just inside the tree canopy and when my stomach starts aching Sirai makes me some special tummy tea. Ed and Bendy hike to a waterfall and I succumb to parasites that I’ve been ignoring for a couple weeks. (Not to worry, the bathroom has an ocean view.) We bronze the bronze. We swing in hammocks and sleep under palapas in rainstorms, listening to crashing waves. We have a bonfire on the beach and see stars through silhouetted palm trees. The sand is flecked with gold. The hosts are so good. Alvero comes out of the jungle after having been to town wearing a “se habla espanol” shirt. The sunsets pour over the horizon like foggy honey. The stars twinkle above and the lightening bugs below on a clear night. We laugh and eat well and lounge about.
Then we hike again. A new route through the same mystical jungle. We hike all the way out to the road and we hop on a bus. We walk on waterfalls on our way to the next beach. There the view changes, because the beach in Palamino is long. We walk it and see huge black tires emerging from the waves. We meet hippies and toursits. We meet an American embassy worker with a Che tattoo (because we know Che would be pro- Plan Colombia). We are a hike from town and just go in for dinner. During the day the sun gets HOT and we have our first really hot beach days of the trip. The waves are bigger, some kids surf. We play in waves, we stroll and drink beers. We see a caimen and more big lizards. There are mangroves and white sand and hammocks lining the beach. We wind down our beach vacation and prepare to return to Cartagena.
Cartagena celebrates our return by celebrating its 478th birthday (what luck!). Could things get any better? Probably not. Beth arrives and for a day we all play. We stroll and eat. We see a concert in the park and watch traditional cumbia and all the hip-happy afro-caribe dancing that I will have to learn in some other lifetime. Beth and Ed both leave Colombia this week. This is what happens to long-term ex-pats- slowly but surely your foreign friends leave you. The scene in Cartagena had me thinking… waitress on the beach? Learn cumbia? Juggler on cobbled streets? Permanent vacation? I met a man who teaches at an indigenous school in an Australian rainforest and we decided it is decidedly strange what people do with their lives.
Bendy says our vacation is especially great because we both are doing things that really merit vacation. Bendy and I dance salsa in the plaza and talk about how wonderful we are. And how wonderful life is. And how wonderful Latin America is. We have one more day of strolling happiness pumped with a Panama hat and coco-limonade and cold beer. We have one more sunset on canons and one more slumber party. And then it is time to go home to the lives that merit vacations.
On the 20 hour bus ride back all along the Caribbean coast, I hear nothing but Vallenato. I think all about Los Caminos de la Vida. Now I am back in Apartadó, preparing for my hike back into a similar yet different jungle- the jungle of the war zone.
