A thousand kilometers journey. First ride.
Rediscovering my homeland through the eyes of a traveler shedding off “traveler’s pride”.
You probably have heard the advice: enjoy your country as if you are traveling abroad; it’s good advice. The traveler perspective and mindset are unique, some say that while traveling you are your better self, more resourceful, attentive, perceptive, open to experiences and people, tougher, more determined, and most importantly, you are no longer constraining the capacity of amazement and awe that was your natural state as a child: that mindset that allowed you to marvel at a caterpillar, the shapes of the clouds or the color and texture of a pebble on the curb. With time, the impact of people, social practices and habits that scorns the enjoyment of simplicity, the pursue of more complex gratifications, and arguably, the weight of experience and responsibilities, you become dependent of stimuli overload to enjoy your experiences, yet while traveling everything is new, so everything stimulates you.
It started quite mundanely. We bought a used car with my girlfriend; a proper 4x4 powerful enough to travel the harsh back-roads of my country, Colombia, whit its amazing landscapes and conditions for adventure off road tripping; a car big enough to travel with our families, our doggies and the bunch of stuff we carry around, but small enough to be versatile in the city and don’t burn gas like a pyromaniac. It wasn’t easy with our limited budget, but after we bought it, with some use we discovered signs that the car was passing oil, so our mechanic recommended us to run it for one thousand kilometers to check if the oil level lowered in that distance.
The mandatory official mechanical revision that you need to stay road legal in Colombia was only a few weeks ahead, so we needed to know if there was some damage to do the repairs in time. As you know, something always happens when you plan something, so at the end we had only one week to run the thousand kilometers. Nubia, my girlfriend, has an office job, so it was up to me. I decided to make day trips to avoid paying lodging; with the unique geographical and environmental diversity of Colombia, you get to see widely different landscapes, climates and ways of living in a day’s travel starting from Bogotá, my hometown.
I set base at the family farm in Subachoque, a little town an hour away from Bogotá, that allowed me to avoid the city’s traffic and some tolls. Tolls are a pest over here, there are so so many, and they’re not cheap, between 4 and 6 dollars each approximately. Depending on your route you can find six or more tolls in a single day, so, if you are planning to travel Colombia by road, (and you should, as I said, it’s one of the more diverse and beautiful places you can visit, and nothing beats the road for enjoying the landscape and the local culture) keep in mind to have a toll budget. The province in which Bogotá and Subachoque are located is called Cundinamarca, it means land of the condors, a gorgeous place, right were the Andes, the longest continental mountain range in the world, separates in three ranges, which creates deep valleys and climates that go from near snow heights to almost sea level; from very cold to very hot.
I chose the destinations of my trips quite haphazardly, just checking google maps during breakfast looking for places of interest. The first day I decided for Zipacón, a very little town not too far, but distant enough to add some digits to the odometer. To get there I had to go through Facatativá (Faca for short), the town I grew in. I was born in Bogotá but lived in Faca from my second week until I was 12 years old. When the guerrilla blackmailed my family and we had to leave the town and the country. We have been there many times since, the public order situation got better in our town after some years and the guerilla disbanded completely in 2016, but every time I go I´m filled with a kind a nostalgia that goes beyond reminiscence of times gone, something that has to do with leaving against your will, in hurry and fear; there’s a sadness to it, a relief of being able to be there, and an anger for what happened and this place no longer being your home. Our family had some difficulties sure, especially my dad, but we did fine after all; for most victims of force displacement it is truly tragic and traumatic, suffering incredible violence and being completely dispossessed. We were part of the few lucky ones, we just had to leave, hide for a while, and restart somewhere else with enough resources to do it.
I just had to pass through Faca, didn’t even stopped there. I went trough Cartagenita, a neighborhood at the outskirts that was a stronghold of the guerrilla when I was a kid. It was beautiful to be in such a humble neighborhood; I remember many streets of my childhood that were just like that, narrow streets that I went by playing with my friends. Welcoming, friendly, with some little adventure in most corners, streets I called home before the guerrilla drove us out of town, before we had a little more of money at the heavy price of inadvertently letting classism slip into our behaviors and minds, not as something that you consciously embrace, but that somehow slithers into your way or living, and you only realize it when you notice that the kind of humble streets that as a child were a playground, when you grew older somehow felt ugly, or even worse, dangerous, and you start avoiding them, first partly, then completely.
This new old car and its testing trip gave me a wonderful gift, the opportunity to see the beauty of that neighborhood that I had never visited, its faded brick walls against a green hill with trees at its top; the honesty of a boy dressed in shorts and flip flops walking on the street on a Saturday afternoon without the faintest care of what might be fashionable; the shining smile and joy of a kid, grateful, surprised and relieved when I stopped the car and waited without hurry so he could get the ball that rolled under the car while he was playing soccer with his friends on the street. Such a true smile, the kind that spontaneously takes over your face when you are grateful because something great just happened. Beauty, true beauty, beyond the pleasant arrangements of urbanologists, gardeners and façade designers, just people living with peace and joy the space they are in, just being.
As its true in every part of America, or as US citizens like to call it: The Americas, all the Colombian territory is the ancestral home of many Native American nations. The indigenous people of this region are the Muisca, they still live in some small communities, even in Bogotá. As an historian and art historian, one of the things I really like to emphasize is that Native Americans and indigenous peoples worldwide are not something of the past, many are very much alive and share with us this world just as everybody else. The chieftains of the Muisca people of this region were called Zipa, the town crest says that Zipacón means “The weeping of the Zipa” as if it were his refuge in hard times. Whatever the truth is, it’s a lovely little country town, with just a few blocks to go around and old republican architecture living in balance with more recent houses painted in bright colors, embedded peacefully in the green of the mountains that frequently are clothed in mist.
Many years ago, we went there with some friends and ended up impromptu camping around a bonfire with no tents. We just couldn’t leave the place we found, a soft hill completely covered in white daisies. We spent the day and night there, crafting our own rituals and telling our stories; we howled at the moon, a friend danced naked under the night sky, we made magic our own. You might have heard the stories of Spanish conquerors and adventurers looking for El Dorado, the fabled city of gold, or as some other tell it, the place of the fountain of youth. While I was there, resting in the grass surrounded by white flowers, watching the white clouds drift slowly in the blue sky, I had no doubt, that was the treasure of the Zipa, glorious, undying, free for everyone, right there in Zipacón, waiting in plain sight for those that were not engrossed digging for gold.
Back then I was 20 years old, I think, now I’m 42, and my recent experience was quite different, poetic in a very dissimilar way; humbling, taking down my “traveler’s pride” which I think it’s a very real thing. When I was 20 I don´t think I thought of it as an actual travel, I was more focused in the mystical aspect of the experience. At the time I was starting to get into Runes and Wiccan practices, so I was more into the relationship with the land and my friends, and the deeper meaning of the nature and landscape we were sharing than into a traveler’s experience. A couple of months ago when I did this last trip, I was impacted by how touristy it was. I had always felt that the tourist practice of traveling far to get to a place, stay there for an hour or so, have a bite, take some pictures and rush to the next destination was missing the whole point of traveling, and avoided doing that all of my travels, trying to use the services of guides and tours as little as I could, setting my own schedule and routes to savor the new places at my frequently slow pace, bidding my time and focusing in whatever I wanted. Well, this time I got off the car, grabbed a bite, took some pictures, and went to the next place in about an hour, yet, it was very meaningful.
This was the first time I ever traveled with the odd purpose of accumulating mileage, which is weirdly Zen; the objective of the action is achieved by just doing the action without any additional goal, very different to any work-related trip, when you go to a destination to do something, even if it’s to get a chronicle of the travel itself. This time, the purpose was to travel, not to reach any destination, not to enjoy any experience or place, not to get any other job done, so getting out of the car, having something to eat and taking some pictures was actually an indulgence that I cherished and enjoyed.
I had a forcefully sweet dessert with figs and blackberries that took me to the tastes of my childhood and images of the fig tree on our backyard; as for the photos, taking pictures has become a part of my identity, sure, working professionally as a photographer, but beyond that, being one of the main ways that I connect with the environment, interact with it, of being. It rained must of the time and the mist covered frequently the mountains, so my goal was to capture with my camera the smallness and pastoral beauty of the town, its indigenous heritage, its balance with nature, and the cold and humidity of that afternoon without losing its color. A picture says more than a thousand words? Well, let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to convey that in a couple of sentences than taking the right pictures. Oddly, and aptly enough, besides the girls at the dessert shop, the only other person I interacted with was a mute woman that very kindly and somehow intensely helped me park my car in exchange of a tip. Words were not the legacy of that day’s trip, not until now and the writing of these lines.
I descended through the stunning Zipacón -Cachipai road going from the cold mountain landscape to a more tropical and temperate land in less than an hour. I reached Anolaima about an hour before sunset, parked in the town square, and went looking for an arepa (a typical corn cake that you can find in most of Latin America with probably a hundred local variations that you should definitely try) finding to my taste a particularly good one, salty, buttery and with plenty of melted cheese inside. Then I went back to the town square while the day faded and sat beside some kids that were playing in a spot that had the best location for the pictures I wanted to take. Meanwhile their watchful mothers sat nearby, apparently not overly concerned by the tattooed stranger eating an arepa, taking pictures and writing in a journal while their curious kids candidly sat next to him peering into his notebook to find what he was writing about.
Some kids played basketball, couples talked intimately, and people gathered in small clusters to talk and eat something while the day turned into night, the golden hour into the blue one. And now I leave you, until I write the next days of that journey; leave you telling you that undoubtedly traveling through some truly awe-inspiring places in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Egypt, allowed me to see so much clearer the uniqueness, power and beauty of my country, my homeland, even when I travel as the more touristy of tourists.
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Until the next time.
