I got a lot of interest from my excessively long photo essays of Santa Marta and Camarones so if this is too many pictures you only have yourselves to blame. Actually it’s my fault: everywhere I look is a picture.
The silted up branch of the Rio Magdalena that runs past Mompox. I had imagined high white walls overlooking the river with gardens and the realty is a little more mundane.
Homeless seem to camp overnight along the river.
Waterfront clean up.
Too many local dogs for Rusty to be comfortable here. The locals look after the dogs but they aren’t loved.
Our KIA Picanto is off duty for two days. Sunday is an all day drive back to Cartagena to unbox GANNET2 on Monday morning.
I felt like the vultures were waiting for me to stroke out in the heat.
Mompox as tourist destination will be a hard sell as it lies at sea level in a steamy river basin. I like how quiet and pretty it is but I can’t imagine rainy season here with a well insulated home and powerful a/c and the money to pay for it.
If there is a large clean modern grocery store we haven’t found it.
You may remember how this blog started in 2007 to record my scooter riding days and evolved into a photo record of Key West and my comings and goings there.
I could do the same in Mompox in old age with a camera, a rescue dog and a linen suit. Except no one would care as Mompox is tvKey West and it is far off the tourist route in Colombia.
The library in our hotel has shelves loaded with books in German so I suppose some few Europeans wander through here. These was a party of a dozen retired Germans in a tour staying at the hotel when we arrived. Now we have the place to ourselves.
Pretty middle class homes caged to make the residents feel safe though to me they look more like hails with all the bars.
The lady was selling horchata, a delicious rice milk drink much enjoyed in Mexico. We had no way to carry it or store it so we had to pass. It’s on our list to taste.
Mompox Bolivar New Town. They called the city Mompox or Mompós Bolivar to celebrate the Liberator’s connection to the city, where he raised his first volunteer army in 1812.
Our $64 room. Unimaginably expensive to the men sleeping in the river bank outside. Travel makes inequality stark.
Drinking water truck:
These death notices are familiar to me from my youth in Italy. Where I saw them posted on walls here they post them on lampposts.
This is the death notice I saw in Italy on my visit last June to my village in Umbria, of a woman I grew up with. Same format roughly but in Colombia the notices are put up by different families to honor the dead person. In Italy they are posted only by family members:
No dogs allowed. When my parish priest told me dogs don’t go to heaven I lost interest in the whole project.
I don’t think there are fans enough to move the hot fug in the cathedral.
Mompox adopted the white cross and red background for its flag long before Switzerland chose the same design oddly enough.
Mompox loves Jazz and has a festival every year.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez used Mompox as the basis for the town of Macondo in ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. He spent decades in exile for being too left wing so when he died in 2014 he was mourned in his country of birth and in Mexico home of exiled from all over the world.
