Yeah, I know it’s been quiet from down here – we have been like a tumbleweed picking up speed as we moved through our days in Colombia, and generating the well-formed sentences to tell you about the trip has been a challenge. Between sunshine and cerveza, I’m pretty sure I have about 43 brain cells left, but I’ll try.
Short story: We survived Carnival and have made our way to an island off of the coast of Colombia where time more or less stopped at a point right before things like running water and electricity were a thing.
Long story:
After nearly 15 hours of parades over three days, I think it would be fair to say we have probably seen every person in Colombia. Just kidding. But there were thousands of people – many in fantastically bizarre and beautiful outfits – marching through these parades and it was crystal clear that this is a tradition Colombianos love dearly. We bought tickets for a bleacher near the end of the parade route – a very good call because it offered modest sun protection, food and beverage hawkers, and space for our butts that would have been difficult to find in a free parade section. In those bleachers, it was obvious that we were interloping on traditions that spanned generations – entire extended families dressed in matching clothes, exuberant welcomes to one another, and two gringo women wedged into the middle of it.
I was so struck by how kind the people around us were to us – they helped Mom up and down from the bleacher, nudged me when good floats were coming up the street, and sprayed us with the ubiquitous foam that everyone had giant cans of – which I at least hoped was a sign of affection. Haha. But when things got really good in the parade, they had no problem migrating on the bench to stand right in front of us and dance because hey, get off your asses, gringos. We did exchange numbers with several people to trade pictures via WhatsApp, and I saw that at least one of them put me in her phone as “Gringo”. Hahahaha. OK – I guess I am.
It was a hustle to get out of Barranquilla because only one boat per day leaves Cartagena for Isla Grande and it’s at 9 am., which meant we were up at 5 to catch a shuttle. It was brutal because the street party the night before went on until 4 am. Um, no, we weren’t there, sillies, but we might as well have been because it sounded like it was right outside our window. Actually, it more or less was.
Anyway, two hours in the car and an hour on a boat landed us on Isla Grande – a primitive island with an even mix of peculiarities, frustration, and awesomeness.
We don’t have any hot water (by design), there are feral, hungry, but entirely pleasant animals everywhere (I hear they are working on the animal situation), and something is eating me alive so badly that I woke up during the night in a panic thinking my bed had beg bugs (it doesn’t).
BUT last night in the pitch darkness I swam in a bioluminescent lagoon – you know, filled with plankton that glows and sparkles when you agitate it – and I’ve never seen anything more magical in my life. It’s small, up-close magic – you have to be in the water to see it and it has to be pitch black, but it was mesmerizing to watch sparkles trail from my fingers as I swirled them through the water. Incredible.
Also, an insanely colorful amazon parrot squawked at me from a tree near our cabana, a peacock got irritated with me for scaring it off the walking path, and Dante, the resort’s king dog, escorted us to a beach 15 minutes away like he was a tour guide and then chased a three-foot-long iguana up a tree when we got there. Spectacularly weird. There are fruits I’ve never heard of, bugs I’ve never seen before, and birds you only see in books and pet stores. I think I can live with the trade off of no hot water for a couple of days.
Today we found an amazing beach bar to while away the afternoon. I also got a tour of the mangrove swamps that rim the island and a walking tour of the tiny pueblo that contains the island’s 1,000 residents. There is nothing more sobering than desperate poverty and this town had plenty of it. Emaciated animals, cobbled together homes, and miniature dust storms that swirled around the kids as they played in the dirt streets (because they don’t have any electricity to sit inside on computers and such, by the way), it all made my whiny complaints about hot water seem pretty dumb, to be honest. Here were people with absolutely nothing doing the best they could to enjoy their day, and I thought of how spoiled we are in the United States. Also, our kids don’t know how to play like that. What a shame, I thought.
And then I saw a boy carrying a pretty little hen around petting it, and I thought “How sweet.” And then I saw another boy carrying a rooster, and I thought, “Huh, that’s odd.” And then they set them down in front of each other and were preparing to have them fight and I ran away. OK, I didn’t run, but kind of, and as I scurried off, I really wished those kids had a computer to go play on instead. True story.
Mom sends her love, and I’m attaching a couple of photos of her as “proof of life” that I haven’t gotten her killed. We are ready to come home, but first I am going to scuba dive in the morning to see what this corner of the Caribbean has hiding beneath the surface.
We keep hearing that it is so crappy cold and snowy there – sorry you are suffering. And we are sorry we are coming back to that. Haha. But we are coming just the same and will be glad to see your smiling faces soon. Stay warm…
