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Bogota, Colombia
Wednesday, February 15, 2012

We've just emerged from several days in the Tayrona National Park, a jungle & beach paradise on the Caribbean coast. I'm seizing the opportunity presented by airport wifi to send a note. On the long flight home, I'll put together some concluding observations.

I write this in a beachside cafe in Taganga, near Santa Marta, where the boat from Tayrona dropped us. We've just had our last local fish meal. Almost every night for the past week on the coast we've had a local fish placed before us, it's grilled head glaring accusingly from the plate. And every such meal has come with either pataconé, a boiled, mashed and refried plantain whose final result is not worth the effort that went into it, and/or an arepa - that quintessentially Colombian delicacy of a fried corn mush patty. Appetizing, no? I think I'll start a list of Ten Food Items I'll Never Eat Again And Never Miss. Arepas will certainly be on that list. Hmmm, then I guess there's that pathetic attempt at pizza the Turks seem to crave. If I ever go to Peru again I won't get suckered into drinking Inca-Cola. And, may lightening or Winnipeggers not strike me dead, but Jeanie's Cake is on the list. Anyway, I digress.

We spent three nights in Cartagena. As you may recall from my earlier blog, an obscene amount of that time was spent in quest of postage stamps. But we also walked the ramparts of the old walled city constructed to defend Spanish interests from naval attack (I'm sure my old British History teacher from grade 5 would be horrified to hear SIR Francis Drake referred to as " Francis Drake, that pirate!"). We watched drummers and dancers in the streets, performing for the tourists lingering in the plaza cafes. We saw the Miami Beach of high rises along the new waterfront, and wandered the warren of narrow streets with balconied two-story houses in the poorer parts of town. (One of our guidebooks warned us quaintly that this district is noted for its "ladies of ill repute", but frankly we couldn't discern ill repute from outrageously sexy Colombian fashion sense)

After Cartagena, we went for one night to Barranquilla. Now there's a city with almost nothing to recommend it! I once referred to Guayaquil, Ecuador as The Armpit Of The Americas. Since these things usually come in pairs, Barranquilla is probably the second pit. But Barranquilla does have one thing of interest: leaning on its Latino-Afro-Caribbean culture, it throws one great Carnaval, billed as "the second-best Carnaval in the Americas". That's an interesting claim, since I think I've heard at least two other cities in other countries make the same claim. Rio got Gold, hands down, but the race for Silver is very tight. You can hear the fans chanting, "we're number two, we're number two!" Anyway, the official Carnaval is the following week, but we caught a warm-up event: a parade of dancers, musicians and floats that made its way through town. Some of the groups were wonderful - well choreographed men and women in wonderful flamboyant costumes. Watching them dancing made me sad that we'd miss the Main Event. But some of the groups were just masses of partygoers dressed in nylon clown outfits, jiggling along. They made me wish I were back at Vancouver's Pride Parade, where at least a certain level of originality is to be found. We took up our place at the street corner, paying some lady a scalper's price for the plastic chairs she had set up, and at about 7:30 the parade in front of us began to move. Since we don't know Barranquilla or the route of the parade, we actually have no idea how far forward or back in the parade we were. For two hours we watched dancers snake past us, and large floats with local musicians belting out songs on the speakers that the roadside throng all sang and danced to, and then more costumed dancers, and then more running, jumping clown mobs, and then groups with plastic elephant heads (elephants were a frequent theme of the costumes - a lingering heritage of some pre-captivity legends of the Black slaves who make up a large part of the population), and all the while some happy bozos in the crowd were spraying everyone with pressurized cans of foam. After two hours, we surrendered our seats (which were useless anyway as more and more people slipped in front of the seats and just stood there), went to get some snacks on the street, back to the hotel for the bottle of rum we had forgotten to bring, and came back to walk the sidewalk to see more of the parade. It was now 11:30 and still the parade swept on. We never did see the end. Around midnight we turned in at our hotel, while whooping and hollering and spray foam continued in the streets.

The next day it was to the bus station and some local run, with the requisite dubbed action movie blaring on the bus TV, until we got to Tayrona. Hiking time. The trail we followed from cove to cove took us through the jungle cover, though this time in dryness. Again we saw the flowering shrubs, the dangling lianas, and, frankly, a lot of repetitive greenery that only a botanist or herbalist could love. Parts of the route took us through now-abandoned coconut groves, remnants of an earlier economy. These were beautiful places, with massive coconut-studded palms soaring overhead, new palms emerging from fallen coconuts on the forest floor, and the litter of nuts and husks everywhere. One of these had the obliging but disquieting sign posted: "Danger! Falling coconuts!" Tell me, just what would you do with that information?

In places, such as the coconut plantations, the jungle floor held a mass of holes and piles of extruded baked mud - the handiwork of some giant crabs we saw at the entrances and which, I suppose, somehow feed on coconut and other decay. The jungle floor also had its share of lizardy-type reptiles I can't identify, multihued butterflies alighting and taking off, and the most amazing traffic flow of leaf-cutter ants. We'd pass these things, moving in the thousands and tens of thousands, along massive ant freeways - 6 inch wide paths, absolutely cleared of any vegetation or stones, running deep into the litter-strewn forest, and along them, as along any urban freeway in America (though without the gridlock) flowed thousands of ants to the left, each carrying a piece of a leaf in its mandibles, and thousands of ants to the right, going back for another load.

It was a three-hour hike, with fully loaded backpacks, along trails that ranged from boardwalked construction to root-and-rock strewn mud path, often with the added jungle colour and perfume of the fresh horse droppings from the pack animals you can rent and which the campsites use to bring in supplies. The point of this hike was, of course, to emerge from the forest and onto one of those postcard-like beaches (oh, oh. Bad simile. There are no postcards) where palm-fringed stretches of sand are caressed by the lapping blue-green waters of the Caribbean. I'll spare you the rapturous description and simply say we were not disappointed in what we found. As Ruth sought the shelter of shade, and I sought the sustenance of sun, we odd-coupled the hours on the sand, feeling that the long hike in, plus the wet and mosquito-filled days in the Amazon, all justified the few days of indolence that most Canadian vacationers to the Caribbean take as their natural right.

But it's all behind us now. Sigh!

Vancouver, here we come. We'll trade the guanabanas and maracuyas for eggplant and string beans. It's amazing what you begin to miss.

We wish you the best. Appreciate where you are, even if it's not dry and sunny. At least you don't have some bozo spraying foam all over you.

Avi

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