Antipodean Travelers

Imagine you live in Melbourne Australia and you have a 27 year old daughter. She’s got a great job working as a lawyer in a bank and her prospects are excellent. Imagine she comes home one day and announces she’s going off to travel the world with a back pack by herself. 

Were you Cassie’s mom you’d pat her on the back, drive her to the airport and promise to meet up with her in Egypt to see the pyramids together. Lots of parents might be worried but not this one. Rusty knew a sucker when he saw one. 

She’s traveled alone around Europe North Africa, South America and Antarctica and had nothing but good times. It shocks me how scared people are of travel especially when I come across youngsters not trained to be fearful and who are open to experience. 

Why is it I ask myself there are no Americans traveling South America, their own backyard. It can’t just be fear can it? We had a birthday party for Mark Saturday night. He’s from Boston and actively considering settling down in Barichara. We had four French, two English, one German, two Dutch, two Colombians and one New Zealander around the table eating Layne and Greg’s food.

Mark Layne  and I were the only travelers from North America. Layne checked in with a Facebook group that did a roll call on people actively driving around South America and about 330 people checked in. That’s a number conjure with next time you find a campground fully booked into the foreseeable future. 

An afternoon break of stuffed doughnuts and cappuccino in Barichara, not exactly uncivilized. These musings lead me to wonder why this is my first time visiting south America and why exactly did I delay it until I was 66? 

For some people who style themselves adventurers, not a term I’d use on myself, driving from Alaska to Patagonia is an accomplishment to be achieved. Get it done. Then again I remember my neighbor on Cudjoe Key, watching us pack our lives aboard GANNET2 who asked where we were going. I was shy about our destination but I figured in 24 hours I’d never see him again so I said “Patagonia,” which seemed impossibly distant and remote from the Florida Keys. My neighbor screwed up his face in puzzlement. “Pata- what? Where’s that?” 

I was talking with young Alex twenty four years old and from New Zealand Sunday morning and he was talking about his parents happily farming and his contemporaries settling down in careers and child raising and he’s spent the past eight months wandering Europe and Latin America.

He’s looking forward to going home because he misses the freedom of New Zealand. He told me you can hunt freely in New Zealand’s open spaces and national parks. Indeed he says hunting is encouraged to reduce the out of control deer population in the parks. He was surprised to discover in the rest of the world  you need licenses and permits to hunt and fish. We compared notes on how restricted public access to wilderness is in Latin America. Hikes in Colombian parks forbid dogs of course but also require guides and scheduling.

Travel teaches you to try to appreciate different cultures but for me it also gives me a greater appreciation of the good at home. The people we meet often asking I would consider settling here or there had I’ve never been tempted. Like Alex I like the freedom we have at home simply by ignoring or sidestepping convention. I look forward to summers in the mountains wild camping Colorado or Arizona and looking back remembering the mad moments on the road in South America. 

There is much to enjoy and new places to see and weird animals to watch in South America and it’s a shame more people aren’t doing it I guess. Sooner or later, in a week maybe we will fire up the van and get back on the road.  

The Sirens Of Colombia

I have been very very naughty and I propose to continue this behavior for at least another week. Tex Mex nachos on the square in Barichara? Sure…

I have allowed my true nature to surface and take control of my life. I like it very much. 

Well, says Layne the quartermaster, we are saving money even when we have an extravagant lunch. Oh dear, I reply, does that mean I have to put down my book and take a tuk tuk into town again? 

Rusty is learning to enjoy riding in the bouncy noisy three wheelers, especially if it means he doesn’t get left behind at the campground.

And the campground is the cause of my total abandonment of morality, and the Puritan work ethic and the need to produce, and test and push the boundaries. I am sunk in lassitude. 

It doesn’t look like much, a flat space in a dusty field at the height of dry season, parched leaves, croaking cicadas and the calls of weird and exotic birds filling the fields. And yet this place is absolutely magical. 

I sit in the shade in my Kermit chair and listen to the breeze and the birds, I read, I watch Rusty sleep and before long it’s dinner time and we gather in the kitchen with the volunteer farm workers from England and Massachusetts and we cook and play cards and I win. A perfect conclusion to an excellent day.

Tomorrow more of the same, sun and shade, breeze and birds, books and silence.  And perhaps a crossword and an exercise video. And a few chores. And so it goes at Guaimaro campground outside Barichara in Colombia. 

The native Guaimaro tree after which this place…

…is named. 

My sin is laziness. I confess to it and I apologize for it but were you here you’d understand, you’d sympathize or you’d leave in disgust. I had the excuse of momentary ill health to allow me to adopt the pose of the sloth early in the week, but the indigestion is gone and the strength has returned and the excuses for lounging around  have evaporated.

To be fair I have done my duty, helping with laundry, emptying the toilet, keeping us supplied with electricity and water, and even enjoying romantic walks with Himself. 

We went to eat lunch in a noted restaurant in Barichara called Elvia, owned by Colombia’s fifth best chef. Rafael Buitrago opened our meal with light fluffy corn cakes with tomato jam: 

We had fried meat balls, croquettes filled with a cream sauce and pieces of fried beef served in pot kept warm by smoke and embers. 

Grille langoustines served with pigs ears that tasted like crispy bacon and a gray creamy sauce made of ants. It had no strong taste and the ingredients were pulped. Local food…

We shared a main course of grilled yota, a vegetable unknown to me. It tasted like slightly sweet pasta served with beans and water cress and potato pieces topped with discs of toast. It was all designed to highlight local products. 

Layne had a margarita made with Yerba Buena a mint flavored leaf but I stuck to mineral water. It was the middle of the day and hot.  

There was a photographer at work helping the famous owner do some useful publicity thing. 

We had a plate of various chocolate flavors to sip up with local banana bread with our coffees. The whole extravaganza for two, all taxes and tips included cost about $68.  

We make the effort to visit Barichara from time to time, it’s only $3 and fifteen minutes in a tuk tuk from the campground, and it’s worth getting to know as it’s a pretty town known as a heritage city, history preserved in a place where there is no advertising allowed. 

That’s very cute but it’s hard to figure where the stores are and what they might be selling so Layne has enjoyed doing her usual exploration, locating the hole-in-the-wall bakery… 

She picks her way through the vegetable and fruit markets:

Or the hidden and unadvertised D-1 supermarket. That’s the grocery chain with the peculiar name. 

And while she stands in endless lines I walk Rusty. 

Barichara is a tourist center but for Colombians who live in the capital six hours away and spend weekends and holidays here enjoying the country. Foreigners are almost unknown though you will see a few Europeans meandering around pretending they know where they are going. Americans? None of those as they know Colombia is dangerous. 

Barichara spills down the hillside in curving asymmetrical slopes, each cobbled street like the last and takes several visits to identify landmarks. 

The town square is shriveled and parched by the lack of rain but locals bring their dogs to walk here in the afternoon. 

The traffic is mostly one way and the sidewalks though narrow and enormously high are regular and easy to walk. 

The city is spotless with no dogs or trash in the streets. Rusty loves it. 

An old Indian scooter caught my eye as it advertised  a scooter rental shop. 

Waiting for Herself to finish shopping. 

It gets dark before seven and this close to the Equator there is no summer time switch as sunrise and sunset hardly change year round. We were in eastern time but now I guess we’re on central time as the US changes.

I have no idea if Colombia can outlive its civil war past in my life time but I fear that for years to come this country will be tarred with the fearsome brush of the cocaine trade. 

Colombia itself isn’t ready for tourism not least because no one anywhere speaks any English, and that is the language of travel.  I find the place fascinating and we have decided to put in a weeks tourism before Holy Week shuts the country down on the 23rd. Our idea is to see a few sights and then we will pause again, 10,000 feet high in the mountains in a rented apartment to avoid the Easter crowds. We figured we might as well start acclimating to altitude while we wait for the national week off to wind down.  

Meanwhile I promise to get my energy back and get on with posting pictures as we spend another week in the campground, enjoying the fact, still surprising to us, that we are in South America. 

Another night in the silence and serenity of a campground cool enough at night to require a blanket, dark enough to see the stars in the sky and inexpensive enough at $15 a night to allow us to save money while we bliss out.  

This overlanding life is full of surprises.