From mid-March to the beginning of April I had the pleasure of visiting two new countries with a dear old friend who was traveling South and Central America for four months after also leaving active duty. It’s one of the boldest and quickest decisions I’ve ever mad. I will forever be glad that I made it though. I got a facebook message from her on a Monday inviting me to a hike and a sail in Colombia and Panama. I was on a plane to Bogota on Saturday and somehow made it on my own to meet her in Santa Marta, a beautiful Caribbean coastal town in Colombia, on Sunday. We started our hike that Monday. I feel like the best way to blog about this trip is to share excerpts from the journal I kept throughout the 16 day adventure and add some thoughts afterward. Enjoy! And don’t think twice about visiting South and Central America.
21 Mar 2015 –
Bogota is 8660′ elevation – no wonder I awoke with dry eyes. I’m sad I didn’t spend an extra day to discover this city. I woke up early and did some stretching because I was all jammed up from travel and only six hours of sleep. I popped some free (delicious) Hilton lobby coffee and found an ATM (in the basement of a different hotel – I could tell I was in an unfamiliar land). According to my account balance in Colombian Pesos I’m a multi-millionaire. I’ll enjoy that for now.
Everybody has been really nice so far although my lack of Spanish is becoming more and more apparent. The hotels were great. When I went across the street to use the JW Marriot ATM the concierge was more worried about practicing his english for a trip to Miami than my inability to communicate in his language. I’m at the airport waiting for my cheap flight to Santa Marta on the airline Viva Colombia, Colombia’s ‘Ryan Air’. From the best I could communicate with anyone I gather Santa Marta is beautiful and the beaches are lovely. I don’t meet my friend Liz there until the evening and can’t even check in until 3, so I’ll get some time to explore.
My taxi driver from the hotel was a funny, little dude and hilarious. He drove like a Colombian bat out of hell. He even apologized for ‘mucho rapido’. We communicated in extremely broken english and Spanish.
I’m on the flight now to Santa Marta and I can not wait to see the playa. I only had a short amount of time to read wikipedia about the city and Ciudad Perdida (the Lost City), or Teyano – the hike I’m about to do with Liz and her friend, Juan. It’s older than Machu Picchu in Peru. I got a window seat.
The farther away from the Hilton I got, the less english I heard which is refreshing in its own way. I am finally on an airline that doesn’t make announcements in both languages. It’s really fun though, fumbling my way through normal airport processes and being the outsider. I am now glad that my fifth year of college made me take two semesters of Spanish just so I know what the very, very basics are. French and Latin helped too, but once it gets fast I’m done. For about $65 a ticket, I’m not surprised this flight is packed. I can’t imagine being somewhere in Asia where there’s no way I could pick up any part of the language. Guess I’ll have to do that sometime soon then.
I realized today I don’t have a lot major firsts left to accomplish. I realize I’ll never do everything there is to do, but the major firsts are incredible. Stepping foot onto a new continent may not ever happen again. I’ve had the luck to get to Australia, N. America, Asia, Europe, Africa and now S. America (although I know it can sometimes be considered just the American continent – I still see it as a significant and new landmass). I don’t know if I’ll ever make it to Antarctica. I missed this feeling. Firsts are so powerful.
I see the Caribbean. I am landing in Santa Marta. Won’t see Liz until about 4pm.
(End journal entry)
On that flight I had an intense moment of personal reflection. That’s what traveling does. It physically takes you out of a familiar, often comfortable environment and lets you look at yourself in this world in a new light. How you fit in, what’s different, what’s incredible and scary and new. inevitably it helps guide you gently or thrust you headlong into an area outside of your comfort zone. It’s therapy and to me it’s essential. After making such difficult life changes in the past year, I knew after some very deep reflection, that I could honestly trust myself and the decisions I made, even when it’s in the form of deciding on a whim to take a trip to somewhere I’ve never gone, where I don’t speak the language and I have no idea what to expect.
I arrived in Santa Marta and upon exiting the plane I felt the same tropical, humid environment I felt when departing the aircraft in Grand Cayman. Back to the Caribbean! I struggled to get a taxi and find my way to the hostel, also a first. I figured out my way to the market safely and got some sunscreen and bug spray. I wrestled the front desk about our reservation which was wrong, and fixed it.
I greeted Liz and Juan when they finally arrived by bus from a different city. We unpacked into our bunks and went out to explore the city, eat, have a drink and catch up. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen her in about five years! Tomorrow we depart for La Ciudad Perdida, a 4-day hike covering almost 30 miles and quite a lot of elevation change into the Sierra Nevada range of Northern Colombia. It’s an experience I will never, ever forget.
