What are you doing here?

Two days after the last email we caught a flight to Miami, transferred to Fort Lauderdale, flew to Kansas City then on to Seattle. Who knows why we decided to do it – when people ask us why, Azure and I end up giving totally different reasons – but we’ve decided to rearrange our trip. Instead of 3 months in Central America and 1 month in Europe, we spent 3 weeks in Colombia and are now getting ready for 3 months in one place – Southern France – visiting wineries, improving our French and traveling by scooter. It’s a vision that completely lacks the grit and adrenaline of non-Western travel, which must be what we want if we’re choosing this path.

Colombia was, we found, stunningly beautiful and totally undeserving of its dangerous international reputation. It’s silly that people in the US repeatedly warned us about a place they’d never traveled. It was, though, tiring to travel as a backpacker and that’s what ultimately persuaded me to take off and look for another method of travel in a different kind of country. My biggest regret is that we got so much good advice from people who were genuinely excited for us to go to Central America and we won’t be using it this time around. Thanks to everyone who did help, though. Neither of us believe we’ll never go to Central America, but it’s not going to happen this year.

We’re finding that in our short Colombian time we faced tons of political issues that we’ll still be thinking about years from now, so read on if you want some political rants:

– Race has to be the most powerful social force in our human world today. This was hammered home on our last day when we went from the mixed-race, dark-skinned streets of Cartagena to its airport, where every single traveler (those who could afford this method of transportation) was light-skinned. It was a different world just in the airport. Only the airport workers were darker-skinned. But we’ve seen this everywhere – in Thailand some women used makeup to look whiter, and all over the world we’ve seen advertisements that feature more people who look like Azure than like a local woman.

– What can a person actually do about poverty? Is it OK that we’re tourists where such poverty exists? Azure definitely had a hard time with this one and it’s a very, very complicated subject. Say we spend $10 on a meal for two of us. We see this as reasonable or even thrifty, but a local guy may see it as a grotesque waste of money. So then out of respect we decide to eat rice & beans and a piece of chicken for $1.50 for two. But one reward for accumulating wealth is that we don’t have to eat crappy meals, and a different local guy may wonder why we’re riding a bicycle instead of a motorcycle if we can afford it. Basically, how should one take advantage of their wealth? When I heard that Mariah Carey has a $10,000 shower curtain I thought, “I could travel for a year on that shower curtain.” An obvious answer is to not be concerned with money, but you’ve got to eat, and eating is a political act.

– We are lucky to be born in the US/West, where the government was originally built on a foundation of human rights (for its own people, anyway) and – most of the time – tries to do right by its people. The US has immense flaws, but the American & European poor have a much higher standard of living than the poor in most other places. Clearly some practices (minimum wage, food handling standards, taxation and redistribution) are good for the human population at a basic level, if done right. Development is only justifiable if a majority of people end up with a higher quality of life (when the moral standard is individual human happiness)… but…

– The trade off: we visited an indigenous tribe at 10am on a Monday morning. Where are you at 10am on a Monday? I’m usually at my first window washing job of the week. The tribe was sitting next to a stream, hanging out as a family. I’m not saying I’d trade my life for theirs right now, but I’d sure as hell trade if I were on the losing end of development. But even on the ‘winning’ end of development, our culture’s knowledge of nature has atrophied. American culture fetishizes working, and workers are lead to believe they have to stay in relationships with employers that are downright abusive when viewed from an outside perspective.

– Our (global, developed) culture decidedly values human rights as the most basic foundation of morality, the source which justifies a decision or policy (and individual rights have bled to other realms, as vegetarianism, for example). But two other moral foundations are affected when we make human rights most important. What does our culture look like if we put the health of our species (Human) above all else? What does our culture look like if we put the health of the Earth and its natural systems above the individual and above the species? “Good” does not always overlap.

Colombian Pesos

Colombian Pesos. 2300 COL = 1 USD

20k, 1k, 50k, 5k peso notes, front and back. (We didn’t have the 2k or 10k notes available when we took these pictures).

The beautiful 5k note, with detail.

The 50k note.

Anything I could have written would have been fake

by Azure

On Tuesday morning Mike and I hiked out of Tyrona National Park. We had spent one night in our tent (an ill-conceived idea, since we had no sleeping pads and the ground was very hard) and one night in a lighthouse-esque hut on the rocks (actually a good idea had there not been a storm that night). We were a little tired, but in good spirits as we walked the 2.5 hours out of where we were staying. A jeep ride, a taxi and a collectivo got us back to Taganga.

This trip had not felt like other trips we had taken. Perhaps it is our age or our place in life or the knowledge of what we want to do in the next few years, but I hit a wall at some point early on where I thought, “What am I doing here?” and felt that traveling in this way was keeping me from living my real life rather than advancing it. During our down time we found ourselves brainstorming new business ideas, talking about a possible future of living part time in Europe and and wanting to move forward with those ideas rather than stay and learn Spanish, see Latin America and continue on the backpacker trail (so much more on many of these topics later).

We didn’t sit down in the internet cafe thinking we would leave Colombia that day or that week, but after typing in a few options for us to fly to Panama and cut the trip short by accelerating through Central America, which would have not done it justice and would not have done justice to all the recommendations of friends and family, we decided to see what it would cost to fly from Cartagena to Miami that day. No flights. The next day $450 before taxes, too much. The day after that, Christmas, $119. Wait, what??? As it turns out, traveling on Christmas is not only easy, but cheap. We found a flight from Ft Lauderdale to Seattle with little problem and decided to just go for it. After further review, it was the cheapest and easiest option for getting home, not to mention an awesome surprise for my parents.

That night we slept in Taganga, woke up on Wednesday and headed to Cartegena. The day after that we flew home. The only people in the world who knew we were coming home were our friends Nicole, Aviva and Joe. They had all been online right after we had booked and they made a pact not to say anything. Aviva would pick us up at the airport and take us to my parents house without any warning.

It wasn’t hard keeping it a secret. There was only one day between when we booked the ticket and flew out and only one gchat with my mom, so it was easy to avoid promising what we were going to do after getting to Cartagena.

Long story short our trip consisted of:
Tuesday
2.5 hour hike out of Tyrona
15 min jeep ride to the main road
45 min taxi ride to Santa Marta
20 min taxi ride to Taganga
50 min collectivo ride to Santa Marta (checking the bus schedule)
50 min collectivo ride back to Taganga
Wednesday
40 min collectivo ride to Santa Marta
4.5 hour bus ride to Cartagena
50 minute bus ride to the center of Cartagena
Thursday
20 min taxi ride to the Cartagena airport
wait 2.5 hours
2.5 hour flight from Cartagena to Miami
wait 1 hour for the bus
5 min bus to the train
wait 50 min for train
40 min train ride to Ft Lauderdale
10 min shuttle to airport
wait 1 hour
Ft Lauderdale to Kansas City 3.5 hours
wait 40 min
Kansas City to SEATTLE 4 hours
Travis (Aviva couldn’t get her car out, so she broke the pact, but it was ok) picks us up at the airport in Nicole’s car. He has delicious homemade cookies for us and drives us to my parents’ house. Once we got off the main road, we drove about a mile in compact snow and ice to my parents’ driveway. We parked and walked down the driveway in the snow.

I didn’t know what to expect coming home early. In some ways, I felt it to be a failure, but I recently had convinced myself that what we were really doing was taking responsibility for our own happiness, which itself is a very freeing experience. I knew my mom was proud that I was traveling and liked reading the blogs, so I didn’t know how she would react. I think I was kind of being an idiot here.

Anyway, we knocked on the front door. For those of you who don’t know, my parents can’t see who it is through their front door. It was late by this time, probably a little past 10 and of course they were in bed sleeping. My mom got up and asked who it was. Not wanting to say it was me, I just said, “HoHoHo” and she opened the door (okay mom, your security precautions leave a little to be desired). She looked at us and just said, “What are you guys doing?” She was so confused that she just stood there and repeated herself. She then called my dad down to see who it was. He has pretty poor eyesight in the dark in general, but also he had just woken up. He stood at the top of the stairs and sort of faked excitement and I thought he was going to go back to bad. Later he revealed that he had no idea who we were. My mom told him to come down and half way down the stairs he saw who we were and got really excited. My mom just kept asking “what are you guys doing?” (literally 5 times). Travis was still standing there and my dad went over to him and introduced himself before he realized who it was and then was excited to see him too. Both my parents were. My mom thought we had picked him up in New York or something, I don’t know.

We went up to the road and helped push Nicole’s car out of the snow and Travis was on his way safely (Thanks again, Travis!!!). My dad made a fire and we stayed up until 1am talking and eating soup and drinking hot chocolate. It is good to be back with all the snow. I have a ton to reflect on for such a short trip (only 3 weeks), but I grew and learned a lot and like I said last year, traveling each winter gives us a chance to sit back and look at the year and our lives and see how we have changed. It became immediately obvious how different I am from my previous self. More to come.

Tayrona National Park

We had a couple very interesting experiences this weekend at Tyrona National Park.

To get to the park it’s an hour by bus from Santa Marta, then an hour hike through the jungle to the first beach where you can surprisingly get a pretty good meal. The coastline is shaped like the business end of a serrated knife cutting into the Carribean. The teeth are rocks with bays in between, and each bay a crescent of sand. We hiked another hour west – alternating between jungle and beach – until we reached Cabo San Juan, somewhere out there in the middle, and when you walk out of the jungle you see tents spread out on a wide lawn with coconut palms throwing shade and coconuts. It’s actually kinda dangerous? I heard a stat somewhere that more tourists get killed by falling coconuts than any other source. Just a stat, though. I saw one coconut actually fall, and Azure saw another, but that was it. Azure grabbed that coconut and started pounding it against a concrete step. Over the next two days we worked on it until Azure got through the husk and finally split it open, which was good because a) it tasted great and b) we no longer needed to carry a coconut with us everywhere we went.

One morning we woke up and followed signs to a ‘Pueblita’ that was somewhere up in the mountains. We put on our shoes and set off through the palms and across a stream, eventually coming to some boulders. The boulders went straight up the hill for an hour, so we climbed. We got so far up into the jungle that I started thinking, “Ok, what do I do if a puma attacks? Are there even pumas up here? How do you ask that in Spanish?” etc.

We climbed over boulders that had been made into improvised bridges, under boulders that were too big to go over, over trees with thorns on their trunks and over some nasty looking ant trails. Finally we reached the crest of the hill and the Pueblita was in front of us in this little valley where three streams came together: It was what remains of a little town. There were walls and stairs that were ancient, from the year 400, made of stone and clearly places where houses used to stand. There were paths lining the little valley and a couple foot bridges made of stone. There was an indigenous family there – you shouldn’t take pictures of them – with a dad, mom and about four kids off behind one of the raised foundations. They were sitting by the stream and the kids were running around, two of the boys were throwing rocks at each other. I imagine there are more from their tribe somewhere else, but this particular pueblita was now on the map with visitors coming, so they probably moved their town elsewhere. Az and I sat for a couple minutes to rest. The high valley was very calm and actually kind of cool even during the heat of the day. I thought it was very peaceful.

I have a lot of political opinions about this part of the trip, especially after seeing the poverty in the cities and hearing about the Inquisition (yes, that Inquisition) on this same coast, but this isn’t the place for that. I’ll probably write a blog about it soon enough.

Anyway, after descending over the boulders, over the stream, through the palms, we got a rented a hammock for the night up in this “tower” that was on a high rock out over the waves. The tower is made of wood, it’s a circle about 30 feet in diameter and about 10 hammocks are strung likes spokes on a wheel with a ceiling but no walls. We slept out there with our feet to the center, heads out toward the water.

I’ll tell you, as I was laying there when the light had gone I thought I was in heaven. The wind was blasting, and I love the wind, and the waves were roaring and we were swaying back and forth, talking in the dark on this tower above the water and I had one headphone on listening to Sigur Ros. I think it’s a special place still, but that night – last night – a storm rolled in and the winds picked up. It was howling, actually. It was blowing so hard that our hammocks’ ropes vibrated like guitar strings and it sucked the heat from our bodies and I did have fun, but who wants to have fun when they sleep? It was just too much. We spent most of the night shivering or holding on or being startled by loud bursts of air… so we didn’t sleep well despite the situation.

Books

FYI
Azure is reading Dead Man’s Walk by Larry McMurtry.
I just finished Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

Omnivore’s Dilemma should be required reading for all Americans.

Next book is Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain.

Travel, generally

by Mike

We’ve been having trouble figuring out what we’re actually doing traveling here – why we’re here and not another place, why we’re traveling as backpackers and not motorcyclists or living in one spot or even staying home. It seems that every year we have to come to a point where we give ourselves permission to NOT do the trip the way we’d envisioned at the beginning. When we left, we imagined spending 2 months in Colombia because that’s what we said we’d do because that’s what we said we’d do. Colombia’s nice. I’m having a good time. But it hasn’t blown us away the way Bariloche did or the scooter trip through the mountains on the Thai-Burmese border. There’s not the food of Buenos Aires or quiet of Ko Ma.

So we have to get to this point: we could either go home and hang up the traveling boots or give ourselves permission to do what we want how we want to do it, it would be pointless otherwise. Thank god we have as much time as we do. If this had been a 3-week trip there would be no room for error and we’d be frantically trying to extract some magic from a random sampling of places before the lid closes. Most places in the world aren’t too interesting or exciting, and the great experiences for us seem to be randomly so. Florianopolis would have been boring if we hadn’t been shown the Sequencia and Samba Club. Chiang Mai would have been so-so, except that we found a pool with Olympic diving platforms and spent many days there alternating between falling and reading. Those things really could be anywhere, but we wouldn’t have found them without taking enough chances to be lucky, and taking enough time to take the chances. We sift for gold.

Pictures from Taganga

Pictures from Cartagena

Taganga

by Mike

The hills around Taganga are dry, almost desert. There are large cactus but also shady trees and other shrubs. You can see from a distance that thousands of years of rain and wind have pulled dirt down the hills and into the low, dry delta between hills that the town sits on. Where the silt settled is notably greener than the hills around it from, I assume, newly exposed fertility, and the green goes all the way down to the sea.

All along the coast there are these enormous birds of prey that perch high on the wind and peer down at the towns. There are also flocks of green parakeets and some sleek black racing birds that squack too much at sunset.

The few nights we’ve been here the wind has been amazing. It’s picked up in strong gusts, like what you’d experience in one of our winter storms in Seattle, right when dusk hits dark. We sat on some steps yesterday across the bay from the town and could see the gusts coming across the water at us, then up the beach and in our faces. Last night we layed in hammocks at our hotel and the wind sounded like it would take a roof off. We sleep with our window open and the wind blasts the curtains the whole time. We sleep with the bed under the fan (though we’ve yet to get a mosquito bite here) and Azure sleeps under two sarongs while I sleep under the one bed sheet. We’ve slept well here, it’s not too hot.

The town itself, as I said to Azure, is better from afar. The main strip along the beach has lots of backpackers and hippies selling jewelry. It has the usual gathering of the worst of the local culture – the young men looking to profit off tourists, whatever the price to their integrity. (This is a global phenomenon, the worst locals we meet are transplants to backpacker towns.) There are a number of restaurants, 5 or 6 or which are on the beach itself, and some good ones on the adjacent street. There’s not much to do here except consume food and hang out on the OK beach. The water is a beautiful turquoise and people swim far far out into the bay, as the water doesn’t seem to move much.

The best part of being here is when we’re high on the hill, reading in our hammocks in the wind and looking down at the bay.

Flowery Words (sorry no pictures for this)

by Azure

Mike often writes wonderful descriptions to start out his posts. They capture my attention and encourage me to start reading. I keep thinking about the flowery decsriptions that I could start with of things we have seen since leaving Bogota, but instead here is a list of what we have seen:

-Slums
-A dead cow being eaten by ravens
-People without shoes
-A boy come up to our table and eat the dead fish heads from off our plates
-That same boy kick a cat and later a dog because it was competition for food
-Men walking for miles in the hot sun selling food to make 50 cents
-The boy´s older counterpart on the beach asking for money for picking up trash
-Illiteracy
-Miles of beach with cheap tents for the rich people to sit under
-Miles of beach where you can´t walk alone because someone is walking with you saying ¨my friend, you want (insert item you don´t need or want)¨
-Myself as a bag of money
-A country that does not or cannot take care of its people
-A people that do not or cannot take care of themselves
-Desperation
-Myself become frustrated

I guess my expectations of Colombia were really off, as most of my expectations are before I go to a place. I didn´t expect this and I don´t know why I am here. I don´t have a reason for being here. And I don´t like how I feel when I am here. I know this place will change me, but not in a way that I want it to. I don´t like who I am becoming and what I have been thinking. I am classist for sure. I am racist. I don´t trust people who are not white right now. I don´t want to help people. I don´t care if they succeed or fail.

It has been hard to understand this place and I know that if I went to some places in th USA it would be just as bad or worse, but here is what I see. Colonialization has so horribly messed up the lives of all of the peoples it has affected. There is a value on money without the knowledge of how to earn and sustain it. And money is directly corrolated to the most disgustingly elaborate possesions and often times skips over the true needs of people. Coming from Cartegena, the oldest gold trading port in South America, I can´t help but think about the way those traders have changed this area. If the European settlers came mainly to exploit the resources and use the people, how can the people learn another way of life? I don´t know if you can start from greedy rulers and create a people who are looking out for the general good of other people. At this point they lack education at a very basic level, seemingly the knowledge to grow enough food, human rights, animal rights and most importantly the understanding of how to go from poor to rich within this system–perhaps becasue there is no way.

I have never felt the void of a middle class to be so apparent and when we say in the USA that the middle class is disappearing, we have no idea what we are talking about. The middle class is clearly a group of people who have the ability to acheive what they work for, which in reality is almost everyone in the USA. That doesn´t seem to exist here because there doesn´t seem to be a knowledge of what it means to advance one´s position and there certainly is a lack of people who understand how to be creative in the ways that they do it.

Before we left Bogota, I met a girl from Quebec who was traveling by herself. We talked about the fact that we were both women traveling, that we had the knowledge of how to get the money to travel, the freedom to do it and the understanding that everyone had the opportunity to do whatever they wanted. The understanding that you control your own life. Under both of our governments these are truths. This is the meaning of Freedom. The hardest thing to see is so many people who are not free and who may never be free. It makes me angry that there is nothing I can do about this.

Punch to the tear ducts

by Mike

Tacanga used to be a little fishing village around a tight bay, but now it’s more of a tourist village. On the other hand, this morning I woke up to the smell of lobster cooking in garlic and thyme. “Where did that come from?” “The sea.” Seems obvious, I guess. The old lady who takes care of our little hotel on the hill was cleaning the floors, and in between preparing lunch for her very welcoming family. Our room is almost in a turret with a full view of the little bay. We have a ceiling fan and a bed. Outside is a WC and a shower, shared by one other empty room. It’s 40,000 COP = about $20 USD, but it includes free coffee and the smell of cooking lobster.

How great would it be to swim down, grab a lobster, take a coconut or banana off the tree and improvise lunch? Last night we had a fried fish dinner on the beach and as we finished a little boy, probably 7 years old, came up and asked if he could finish our plates. We’d been throwing fish fins to the cat. He kicked the cat away and tore into the fish head, stripping with his teeth any flesh he could get from the leftover pieces. He finished one fish head and went to the next, then the next, scooping up any leftover rice hiding on the plate.

I had to turn away because I didn’t want the kid to see me crying, I’m sure he gets too much pity. Earlier that night we had considered staying in an 80,000 COP room because “Why not treat ourselves to a hammock on a porch for one night?” Azure asked me if I’d seen this in India, and of course in Mumbai I had seen it, families sleeping on the sidewalks and cooking on an empty coffee can, all their possessions strewn on the sidewalk over 10 feet before the next family’s plot started.

The bus ride in was like this. The top of Colombia is this random place on the map that none of us had ever considered – it’s the crown of a continent where it meets a sea, not Buenos Aires, not Rio, but somewhere else down here on the side. I’ve looked at places like this on the map since I can remember (specifically, I can remember doing this in 3rd grade) and asked, “what’s there what’s there?” which is probably an indication of my pressing instinct to travel. Well, what’s here is this long, flat area. Very natural, probably scientifically defined as a swamp… a lot of water. I couldn’t tell if it was fresh or salt water because the sea is right to the left as we drove, but the water on the other side of the road was vast, so it could be fresh. There are hundreds of naturally-made stumps sticking up out of the water and other trees lining these lagoons, and in the middle of this all there would be a shack somehow stuck in the mud with people sitting in the shade with laundry on the line. Then the land would spread out and the shacks would multiply and it would be a village of thousands living in the deepest poverty I’ve seen, including commercials for charity that mercifully run only during the holidays, when we’re out of the country. Dirt floors, tin rooves (roofs?), people running barefoot, you know. Men sold fish on the side of the road and people would get on the bus to sell the cheapest, mass-produced fried things that were of course laced with preservatives so the men could buy them in September and sell them until they all sold.

I don’t know if you can really travel and see “how other people live” without going and seeing how they live in places like this.

The four of us talked about poverty a long time last night over cards and much-needed liquor. Emotions ran from pity to anger to guilt. The conversation ended up, as it always does, veering to the role of Western governments and our own roles in or out of those governments. But when the kid comes up and asks for a piece of the fish we’re going to otherwise throw away, we give it to him. We would have turned away an older, less-cute beggar who was that kid grown-up. In other words, it’s not a sustainable thing for the kid because we’re teaching him that asking for food is enough. A more sustainable thing would be to give money to libraries or to NGOs, but then do you withhold the fish head when a kid shows up at the table?

I don’t know I don’t know.

Cartagena

by Mike
When I stepped off the plane I rubbed my fingers together and could feel the moisture in the air and it was hot at 9pm. The streets are thick with people, especially at night when it’s tolerable to be out in the open, and because the buildings are close together, and because most have balconies, the city feels heavy and low. It feels concentrated at street level. I can imagine when this city was founded in the early 1500s that it was one of those places that pirates were drunk all night and fought in the streets under the brothels. I don’t know if it’s too different now.

It feels Caribbean, though I’ve never been to the Caribbean, so I wouldn’t know. The gorgeous, colonial buildings threaten to crumble right where they stand, but there is construction. There’s scaffolding and constant painting so they’re taking care of those walls that do need attention, but not at the expense of what looks authentic.

Colombian people are very tasteful, some of the most proud people I’ve seen. Cartagena is, I imagine, as touristy as Colombia gets and everyone still takes themselves seriously. It’s great for the music – I haven’t heard any crappy Latin pop – but it also means that Azure and practically have to use dentist’s instruments to extract smiles. Fucking impossible. It’s a different culture, I suppose, and our white skin here might as well be gold in many people’s eyes, but we’re finding it hard to deal with a culture that doesn’t value the same politeness we do in Seattle. For example, we smile at someone we talk to. I know it’s different in New York as well. It rubs me the wrong way still. I was born in 1979 in Seattle, Washington and the person I’m talking to was born in – say – 1965 in Bogota, Colombia. It’s a miracle that we’ve found ourselves standing face to face after almost 30 years and thousands of miles. Anyone care?

We’ve had some great food, the best of which was on the first night when we stumbled into a tired little diner and I got chicken with raspberry sauce and fried plantains. Of course, at the same meal Azure got what can only be described as cream of mushroom soup, undiluted. She ate about a half inch of it, if that’s any indication its texture. The next day we had a whole fish fried at the beach, but the highlight was brown rice that had been cooked in coconut milk (I believe) with fresh lime squeezed over the top. I suggest you all do this now.

We’re off to a smaller town today. The beach in Cartagena is a city beach, complete with city people and a city’s pace. We’re heading up the coast to Tacanga, which is either awful or wonderful, depending on who you talk to. For just under a week now we’ve been traveling and eating with this perfect Dutch couple we met in Bogota. We’ve had a great time with them and they’re continuing on to Tacanga with us.

An advertisement – Azure’s parents make gorgeous wooden jewelry boxes and they’re having their annual Shop Sale at their property in Redmond this weekend. The boxes are an easy choice for gifts. Their website is Wood Design by Demeules.

More pictures

Bogota Safety

by Mike

The police in central Bogota check the guest list of every single hotel every single day and make notes in a separate book. They’re working to track terrorists. They’ve told us not to take our passports out with us (we lock them in a safe deposit box type thing with our own locks) because the police are not legally allowed to ask to see our passports. We do take copies, just in case. It´s good to know what a fake cop might do, though.

There are police and military probably on every block, just patroling. They seem to have a good relationship with the people. There’s a major difference between a police force that works to protect the people and a police force that works to catch people breaking laws, as is the feeling I have about police in the US. I don´t know how corrupt the police actually are here, but they’ve been cautiously nice to us in our few interactions.

We felt very safe walking around at night, we never encountered a problem in our week in Bogota.

The taxis didn’t try to rip us off at all, they used the meter every time and gave us a fair price. The airports were similar to the US, but much less of a hassel (while still secure).

We stayed in the Platypus hostel and hotel. At the hostel we buzzed to get in from the street, then buzzed to get through the entry area. Both places were equipped with very high quality security cameras.

Not so much about Bogota

by Azure

I have wanted to blog about Bogota for a while, but the problem is, I don´t know what to say about the city. Our time here has been more defined by the people we have met than the city itself, which makes it a different experience to write about. I thought that my days of hanging out with other hostel people was sort of over, but apparently it´s not. Each night we find ourselves back in the common area drinking and playing cards and talking about all sorts of things. It is a real community here, albeit a transient one. But when you are in Colombia, you realize that the backpackers trail is limited and you will end up seeing these people again and again because, well, I really don´t think there are that many people traveling in Colombia. However, the ones that are here are extremely interesting and we find ourselves liking pretty much everyone that we meet and this never happens! We´ll go to dinner with a couple of people, to lunch with some others. In fact, we have had only one or two meals with just the two of us since we got here. Not that I am complaining, but it hasn´t given me the time to feel the city like I have in the past. The other roadblock is that it is so huge. I know we will leave here today after one week, having not seen even 2 percent of the city. It´s overwhelming.

What I can say about my time here… I didn´t think I was scared to go to Colombia. Even with all the warnings that had come right before we left Seattle, I thought I was fine. But while we were packing for the final time in Miami, I started to get really nervous. At the airport, I can actually say that I thought for a second about not getting on the plane. Short story short, when we landed in Bogota, I was once again pissed at myself for buying into any of it. The airport was modern and efficient and friendly and when we got into the cab without a hitch and he drove us into the city, I did start to cry a little. It was so beautiful and full of life. For 15 years, every Sunday, one of the major roads is closed to car traffic and opened up to bikes and pedestrians. There were families and friends out together using the public space and I thought about how silly it would have been not to get on the plane, how if I hadn´t we would have never seen such a wonderful event.

Later that night, as Mike has said, we came upon a crowd of probably 10,000 people in the street and it struck me as special because it was for no other reason than to be out together and celebrate the lights and the time of year. Since then, we have seen that it happens pretty much every night, which makes it even cooler. It is quite the experience to be in Bogota leading up to Christmas becasue they decorate with so many lights and trees and everything is beautiful at night.

Scenes From Bogota

Because Karin hates words 🙂

Bogota Impresses

by Mike

Our hostel is on a steep, part-brick street that runs into the center of the city from the mountain that towers over Bogota. Our first night here we walked to the center to find a grocery store and the Scotish guy from our hostel passed going the other direction. “Yeah – it’s just up the road then down to the left a ways.” Ok. It was dark and we were skittish from the warnings about Colombia and we couldn’t really understand what he was saying. But we had slept through the day and really, really needed something to eat.

When we got to the street where we were supposed to take the left we wondered how he could possibly give us directions without mentioning this – there were thousands of people in the street partying – celebrating one of their many religious holidays with candles, lanterns and flashy rainbow sticks and funny glasses and noisemakers. There were dozens of different kinds of street foods: plantain (bananaish) that had been pressed into a shoestring and then deep fried; empanadas (baked piroshkies, kinda) filled with chicken and mushroom; and aromatica – a tea made from mint, chamomile, citrus and a spoonful of sugar. The aromatica carts steam and the green stalks they use for the tea are displayed up high so you can recognize immediately what the cart is about, if you couldn’t figure it out by the seductive smell.

Some enterprising locals were fun to watch. In addition to your regular entertainers (street statues, musicians, comedians) there were also people who let you use their cell phone for a small fee (with a line of people waiting) and guys who set their telescopes on the illuminated mountain-top church and let you look for a small fee. A favorite is the dude who sets out a half-circle of upside-down bowls with little doors cut into them. Each bowl is numbered and you put your money on top of the bowl that you think his guinea pig will run to. I didn´t win, but I think it was rigged.

We, of course, stand out a bit. Beggars cross the street to ask us for money. Azure pointed out that it´s probably good for us to be a minority for a while, but our experience being a minority is different from other people’s experience of being a minority in the US. Whether we’re in Colombia or the US or Thailand, whiteness is associated with political and financial power. That’s not the association if you’re a racial minority in the the States, so our experience as a racial minority in Bogota isn’t really comparable.

We walked around in the crowd for probably an hour and a half. I went into this lovely church where a mass was in progress and I took a video (it said no photography) and everyone was hugging each other. On the street, many of the buildings had Christmas lights lining the corners, there were lights strung across the street and lights in the trees.
We walked back up the hill to the hostel. Families along the way lit candles and sat on their front porches talking.

Bogota is nice, so far. Cheap and cold. It’s at 8400 feet, much higher than Denver, so the nights are very cold and the days are cloudy and cool. Today (Tuesday) is the first day we get to see the city in a non-holiday state, so we’re excited to see what’s here.

Key West

Hemingway tour guide with Hemingway´s cat´s descendant on Hemingway´s bed.

by Mike
I saw the room in which Hemingway wrote masterpieces – it was this attic connected to his house by only a narrow catwalk and every morning he´d wake up at 6am, write 700 words (or until lunch, whichever came first) then head out to go fishing.

The walls in the attic are still lined with books and the round table where he worked was in the middle of the room, his chair facing west. Who would have thought?

It was emotional to visit because I´d just finished For Whom The Bell Tolls in an insomniac romp at 4 that morning back in Miami. When I entered the house the end of that novel was still in my head and it matched with his life there in that spacious house and how that life eventually ended, and I teared up entering the house, smelling what he smelled and seeing where such a talented man did his work.

Azure and I woke at 8am that morning and drove a rental down the Florida Keys to Key West, one of the most interesting towns I´ve visited in the US. Regal, Spanish houses sit behind palm trees in a way that´s not pretentious, but living, used, current, and there was an interesting mix of Navy, gays and African Americans all out on the street. It was beautiful there, low and old. It felt special and was really as different from Seattle as any place I´ve been in America.

But it didn´t feel like travel – I don´t know if I could do the US in a way that felt like travel abroad because travel is about freedom, and I can´t get lost in the US.

Tonight in Bogota, we were way lost, but more about that later…

Azure’s Shirt

by Mike
Azure brought two Obama shirts with her this year. If you know anything about how we travel, you know this is a little ridic because we try to keep our possessions to a minimum as we have to carry them on our backs for four months. I brought four t-shirts last year, total. But we knew it would be a conversation piece and we’re newly proud to be Americans so she indulged.

A restaurant hostess on the Lincoln pedestrian street stopped us yesterday and started talking about the Obama shirt. She said, “I saw you can get one that’s glow in the dark!” Apparently it’s on eBay, god bless them. The girl (who looked 16) said that she voted for Obama. She had a thick accent. There’s more Spanish spoken here than English and often I’ve wanted information or a sandwich and found that the person I was talking to spoke no English whatsoever. Aviva told me once that if we’re going to talk about race, then we need to talk about what it means to be white to get the whole picture. This is a place where you question what it means to be not only white, but English-speaking. I take for granted the fact that I speak the language in which most of our national conversations take place. So, what happens when I walk up to someone in the US and they don’t speak English and I don’t speak Spanish? Who concedes clarity?

There was another Obama shirt ice-breaker. Azure asked a man what his Spanish shirt said. “Laborers for Obama.” He’s a construction worker and I said I was impressed by how many buildings were still going up despite the recession. He said that it was nothing like before. Up until about 9 months ago you could see hundreds of cranes from the tram we were in, all across the city. We didn’t see any, looking out today, but I’d seen some at the beach. He said things were way slower, but he was still working.

The similarity between him and the Spanish population is language. He’s an African-American man and when he was on the phone earlier I’d noticed him speaking in a way that sounded foreign to me – “he be” was one of the things that stood out, among others. I can’t remember the last time I heard that kind of sentence construction, which indicates either my lack of interaction with the Af-Am community (which is definitely the case) or the difference among Af-Am regional dialects. Either way, can a person achieve conventional professional success in our country if they speak in that dialect? What does it mean that I fluently speak the same dialect as the most (professionally) successful people in our society?

The Adventure School – Aviva & Cori’s business.

Miami Conversation

Father-Son advice I overheard today:
“Go in and listen nicely. Let him think that he’s fooling you, but don’t believe a word he says. OK?”

DAD why didn’t you ever give me this advice??