With night comes a refreshing tropical breeze, a welcome respite from the day’s constant heat. We have wandered the city for two days and three nights, meandering amongst the tightly wound streets and alleyways with surprising squares and plazas full of young lovers, silent old men and verdant flowers and foliage.
This city is proud of its history, from resiliency to the blades and blasts of the pirate hoards to it central role in the fight for independence exactly 200 years ago.
Writing from the South Western fortifications, overlooking the now darkened of the afternoon sea. These coral walls once holding back buccaneers and foreign invaders, now furnished as the plush Café del Mar, the naval museum and the headquarters for the Cartagena Film Festival. Street vendors peddle their wares of colorful bracelets, broad brimmed hats and traditional bags, occasional creative coral sculptures and intricate paperclip puzzles, directly below us, and Chivas shuttle eager workers home along with snap happy tourists towards the distant glowing high-rises down the peninsula, as behind us, the towers of San Ignacio are lit brightly and the lightly populated terrace with couples enjoying a rejuvenating late afternoon aperitif.
The final night was punctuated by a well scripted final scene as we flash to a second story club with vaulted ceiling with arched, almost Moorish brick patterns and a large square wooden bar and balcony stretching along the outside wall and overlooking the busy street below. Rock band lays a mix of their own creations alongside classic Mana, Jarabe and Los Cafres as the clientele, dances, mingles, bouncing back and forth between the dance floor, bar, balcony and bathroom, with flashes of a host of characters from the trip. The bartender from Café Gourmet twirls two blonds around the dance floor as the cook negotiates deals in the corner, the street musician bounces up with a mischievous grin and pops up again on the dance floor with the Dutch girls from the Hostel in Salento as the German girls and a couple of Israelis from Casa Real smoke cigarettes on the terrace. And then back to the hostel, having a final bear while helping the staff check-in late night arrivals, ranging from exhausted old Germans coming in from Venezuela to young couples of the night, appearing and negotiating passage, and then thoughts of the early wake-up only hours away, and I toss this sweaty human heap upon the bed, feet shooting off into the night.
Writing on the Wall...
Cafe Gourmet
As we are about to arrive at only my second Thanksgiving away from my family in the 30 years of life I have enjoyed, I want to give thanks and blessings to all of those who have been a part of this adventure that I have had the pleasure and joy of living, made better, always, by those with whom I share it.
As I am about to head off to dream, and dream I have been, believe me, of love and suffering, of joy and success, of pain and ecstasy, I am so grateful to know that friends and family will celebrate tomorrow and that I will be able to be with them in spirit if not in person.
I am truly graced by the knowledge, wisdom and joy that I have shared and gleaned from my loved ones. This trip has been an opportunity to reflect, to smile without needing to know why, and to seek something larger than myself. Often times, that which we seek is right in front of us.
As I wrote on the wall of Cafe Gourmet (bottom left hand corner in grey) this evening - where Carlos and his friend, cook and bartend - my favorite lines from one of the OGs, Alfred Lord Tennyson:
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Bendiciones a todos mis cariños, nos vemos pronto, y mientras tanto que sean bien. Gracias por todo.
Thank you.
