Month: May 2015

Why Colombia? 

The hospitality I received in Barichara was not unique to this quaint little town.  All the articles from travel blogs I had devoured before arriving in Colombia were not exaggerating: not only was Colombia safe but its people golden. From my hosts in Bogotá who made me feel at home to strangers on the street, Colombian hospitality rivaled that of Turks and that’s not something I say often. I can tell you about the poet we met on a local bus from Aracataca (hometown of Gabriel García Márquez) to Valledupar, who gifted us a copy of his recent book of poetry, treated us to a bottle of aloe vera water, and waited with us under the rain until we got a cab to our hostel. Or the staff at the hostel in Valledupar, who went out of their way to help me as a serious case of food poisoning got me in a very unpleasant state I won’t detail here for your benefit. Well, maybe I will but in another post:) Meanwhile, there is one question …

From One Sleepy Town to the Next: Feeling at Home in Barichara

As hard as it was to leave Villa de Leyva I was excited to go to Barichara, dubbed the most beautiful colonial town in Colombia. I would be going from one sleepy town to the next. According to incoming backpackers on the reverse route, I would find a quiet village with nothing to do after 20:00. Perfectly fine with me, I thought, more time to relax, read, and write. Since all of my new friends had already left a couple of days ago, I was to take the three-leg bus journey on my own. There is no direct bus from Villa de Leyva to Barichara, so one must first take a local minivan to the closest big town Tunja (about 45 min) and from there a bus to San Gil (around 4 hours) followed by another half-hour local bus to Barichara. I was a bit nervous for my first intercity public transportation experience. Bus stations, I was told by all experienced South American travelers, are one of the most dangerous places with pickpockets and thieves …

Villa de Leyva: The so-called sleepy town that whipped my ass into shape

The itch to travel is a desire to be everywhere at once. It’s a mental disease but an excusable one, since human nature instilled in us a certain insatiable curiosity. Until my early twenties, I used to have this obsession with sitting in the middle seat of any dinner table, large or small, so that I could follow the conversations happening on both ends. But of course, one can’t be at two places at once, and it can be stressful to follow two (or three or four) conversations, especially at crowded dinners. After all, you are sitting in just one seat. You are confined to the space you occupy and there is no way to be on every chair at once. If you get up to the other end of the table, you miss out on all that happens in your current seat. Before embarking on this journey, I made a promise to myself to not over-scratch this itching spot–I would not be able to see every museum, climb every beautiful hill, or watch every magical sunset. …