Colombia

Hola from South America, the sizzling southern continent with sexy capital names like Montevideo and Asunción. I am up in Colombia, on a one-month journey to find what I´m not sure I´m looking for. I tend to do such things. I also have plans to WWOOF on two farms and then visit the Amazon, one of two places considered to be the lungs of our entire planet. I´ll thank it on behalf of all of us.

Trips like this always plunge me into a state of harrowing existential crisis. What the hell am I doing here? Answers I never anticipate materialize when I´ve let go of my grasp and accepted my inescapable despair, like when a restaurant I´d been looking for unsuccessfully for two days appeared 9 feet in front of me as I sat in meditative silence at a neighboring cafe. The restaurant was called Esta Es El Punte, or This Is The Point. Meditation has become the point of my trip.

Meditation got me through Cartagena and its Getsemani district. You might compare it to San Francisco´s Mission District 15 years ago: edgy, authentic, colorful, ethnic, and with streets perpetually drenched in potent urine aged like a fine rum. It´s also crawling with 20-somethings trying to get laid and successfully getting drunk, intermittently resting in the shade, attention buried in their smartphones. I appreciate Cartagena´s beautiful locals, awesome street life, and architectural legacy which is the finest left by the Spanish in all of South America. That being said, I´m looking forward to Phase Two of my trip, which begins with a bus ride down to Medellin of Pablo Escobar fame. But not before a quick jaunt along this beautiful Caribbean coast.

My awesome friend Meg told me not to miss Tayrona Park and the little village of Taganga. Magically the opportunity to visit both of these places in a two-day blast came in the form of my new friend Camo, evidently a local ¨public figure¨ and also a photographer for Vogue Magazine hell-bent on trying to sleep with me. Like a complex soup of spices and vegetables waiting for its main ingredient to be added -- say, clams to a masterful cioppino -- Camo´s unabashedly heavy-handed flirting (in also a literal sense) only added to my own stew of discomforts that had been culminating since my trip began -- including my ineptitude in speaking Spanish, the futility in seeking to eat anything along the lines of salad or vegetables, and finally a quite urgent realization that I should high tail it to Cuba ASAP. But more on that later.

Our boat ride from Taganga to Tayrona was the most scintillating (or frightening) bodily experience I´ve had since skydiving in 2003. A powerboat being driven by an apparent madman, traversing 20-foot swells of cobalt-blue open water near craggy rocky coastline covered in exotic cactus. I keep remembering that this is the Caribbean coast of a continent I´ve been drooling over for years. And if this boat were to take a hard left, we´d eventually hit something like Virginia or maybe Maine. This is happening! And it´s thrilling both physically and mentally.

Later, we are on a cab ride through town, on a narrow one-way street. The cab in front of us suddenly stops and both the driver and passenger get out. They proceed to open the trunk and begin to unload 4 or 5 dozen boxes of cake and bring them all into an apartment up two flights of stairs. Recalling Hawaii´s ¨Live with Aloha¨ credo and pondering a Colombian equivalent, I can only laugh as we wait patiently, cake after cake.

Tayrona was beautiful and staggering. I´ll later post photos that will not do justice.

You know that potent goo that you get at the bottom of the pan when you oven-bake an entire chicken? Colombians use that stuff in rice and in soups. It´s glorious. Other awesome foods are arepas (grilled corn cakes stuffed with cheese or egg) and papas rellenos (a ball of fried potato stuffed with meat and vegetables).

Things I miss:

Fiber

Tap water

Ecstatic Dance

You

Hasta luego,

Me

P.S. About Cuba: I heard something in the last few weeks of the US lifting is decades-long embargo with this island. The embargo had lent itself to a time-warp atmosphere where not a single car was newer than models from the 1950s and ´60s, and I wonder if this new situation will bring a flood of hideous new cars in and ruin the aesthetic. Let´s get there fast!