Aracataca

would someone help me with the translation, I took a brutal stab at it...

Finally, a tail wind. I had a good start out of Taganga but 5km into the ride I had to get through Santa Marta, and since I hadn't spent any time there yet and couldn't do it justice, I should at least roll around a bit. 15-kms of strolling the narrow colonial alleys and seaside boardwalk, two amazing espresos and 3-hrs later I was finally back on the road with a goal: Valledupar and the festival of Vallenata music. But the 5-day festival was just kicking off this day so I had a few to get there and could spend time in a place I´d looked forward to for awhile: the hometown of, without a doubt my favorite latin writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The name of the town is poetry itself and rings like the sound of gunfire, or more cynically its the first words uttered by a certain president after 9/11, or most accurately it is the name of the local river in the language of the native inhabitants: Aràcataca! Marquez, or Gabo, as he is affectionately called by the locals (or Gabito by the elders), fictionalized the town as the magical "Macondo" in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I remember it as a place "of the mountain but born of the sea", or something like that. Aracataca is nearly 100-kms inland though, but is flanked by the 5000 plus meter range of Sierras de Santa Marta, a massive uplifting that was reported to me to be the highest peak so near to the sea. Whatever, it must have some influence on the myth of these people as it is reflected in arguably Gabo`s most important novel. The first thing that happened to me as I pulled onto the streets of this tiny sleepy town was to be most pleasantly mobbed by a group of smiling old men and children. These sorts of experiences I've grown weary of because they make me feel like some alien dropped from the sky who is poked and proded without any intention of trying to relate to me, just to be able to say they touched the gringo. These must be the residual affects of having been so often mobbed in India and Asia in which good intentions eventually to you being pulled in every direction. They were fun and exciting at first, admittedly, but the experience seems to be the same now no matter where or when, and I'm in search of the new. But this time was unique because the faces before me were kind and warm and there to give back and not only take. My first experience in Aracataca was as magical and mysterious as my first pages in the town of Macondo. The group eventually parted and I made my way across the street to the big red Panadaria on the corner for a local delicacy that one of the old guys insisted that I try. They were just coming out of the oven (more magic?) which made the cheese-filled croissant absolutely heavenly. I washed it down with a Pony Malta, a gaseosa unique to Colombia that is like Rivella to the Swiss or ginger ale to the Canadians, and then walked my bike to three blocks to the Marquez Museum which is housed in the home of his birth, a national monument since his Nobel for literature in '82. The displays were simple and unpretentious photographs, newspaper clippings, random artifacts from his childhood and flowcharts of family trees not unlike those of the great Macondo family. Next day I was on the road early but my legs felt heavy. Traffic on this road had been bad the day before and the traffic resumed to so terrible that I sensed it to be the worst that I'd experienced in all of Colombia. This was hard to believe, but the huge trucks constantly blew past and more often than not they were side by side trying to pass. Or drag racing. When I arrived in Bosconia 80-kms into the day I thought I would catch a bus to Valledupar because it was still another 90-kms, but the guys around the juice cart laughed that I'd actually riden this section of rode becuase of the notoriously bad traffic. They said the next section to Valledupar would be better and I felt so relieved that it was easy to just push on. The next 60-kms were wonderful with the quiet roads and new scenery: mountain vistas and strange jungle like savanahs with grazing cattle. At 4pm I reached a small town 30-km from Valledupar and within 30-seconds had a ride flagged down the rest of the way in the back of a small pickup truck. The driver was absolutely nuts and I had a deathgrip on the rails, and he was going so fast that when I would poke me head up over the cab the wind would fill my mouth and puff up my checks. It was a fun sensation and I played with this for awhile until I had the epiphany that a low flying bird at this speed would rip my head off. In tens of minutes they were dropping me off on the outskirts of Valledupar in time for me to easily find a hotel by nightfall so that I could get out and catch the evenings Vallenata festivities.... or so thats how it would normally go, but this was not to be one of those days. Writing this now from 3-days afar and from the comforts of a cafe in the kinder, more gentler highlands of Colombia I can say that this was the turning point in which I turned and descended into a sort of hell. Care to join me?