Caño Cristales, Part 3

Like ET following a trail of Reese’s Pieces, we were lured farther and farther downstream.   Each bend in the river seemed to be hiding an even more spectacular treasure.  But even in our childlike enchantment, we remained vigilant--not for soldiers or paramilitaries lurking in the jungle surrounding us, but for the tourist guides.  We kept our eyes peeled and our voices low, lest we be caught and forced to listen to a walking lecture on photosynthesis. 

But in spite of our best efforts to keep to ourselves and be left alone, by the time we trudged back into town, sunburned, rain-drenched and happy, we had gained semi-celebrity among the locals.  Our walk down the main road pulled inconspicuous glances like magnets from bar tables and restaurant windows and our shadows were followed by discreet whispers.  A random woman walked up to us when we were eating dinner:

“I was worried about you two all night.  I heard that a young man and a pastusa went out alone in the day and never returned in the evening.  I thought you might not make it back!”  (Good grief, where is the sense of humor in this place?  I am clearly not from Pasto.)

There may only be electricity for six hours a day, but that little town has an information sharing network faster than 4G WiFi.   We never knew if it was the soldiers at the port who spilled the beans about our “nonexistent” conversation, or if a rumormonger had been spying on us from the trees, but our movements were definitely well observed.  Who knows what the people must have thought when we set up our tent on the public basketball court that night.  I can only imagine the diner table stories spinning around the sighting of the two of us in the early morning following a local teenager through a mud-swamped pasture out to the countryside (we met the side-banged high schooler called Emo at the pick up game on the court the night before and he told us he knew a short cut to another swimming hole).   What would they say about the giant bag of mangoes we were carrying when we came back that afternoon?

As the rickety Red Baron Cessna sputtered off the runway later that day lifting us (with an unsettlingly grand effort) over the thick green jungles below back to civilization, we left our curious whereabouts up to the speculation of the gossipers back in La Macarena.  We landed in Villavicencio started looking for a lift back to Bogotá, standing on the side of the highway with our thumbs out in the rain.   Just when we thought we couldn’t cause any more scandal, the first car to pull over had a familiar face inside: the random lady who worried about us all night.  She didn’t have room for both of us so we politely declined her offer for a ride.  The poor woman is probably still beside herself fretting about those two crazy kids who seem incapable of doing anything the normal way.

Caño Cristales, Part 2

There were indeed a pair of armed officers at the port who asked for our names, ID numbers and the name of our guide.  When they asked where I was from, eyeing me from blond hair to sunburned ankles, I went for my go-to crowd pleaser: “Pasto.” (The Mobile, Alabama of Colombia).  It got the expected chuckling reaction and once everyone was humored and relaxed, all we needed was a little smooth talking, eye batting, hand shaking and it was agreed that they had never seen us and we never had any conversation.  

So we did not walk down to the dock, we never paid the boy in the motored canoe $5 to take us across, and we certainly did not walk ten kilometers down the trail without a guide toward the caño.  

Just when the forks in the road were starting to inspire worst-case-scenario jokes (our laughter tinged with nervousness), the sun gleamed in a curiously bright reflection around the corner.  An illusion?  A mirage?  A metal roof!  A sign of human life!  

It was shading a posse of uniformed soldiers with their arms crossed looking like bored cowboys waiting for the cattle to come home.  They did not threaten us with their weapons or interrogate us with spotlights and handcuffs, as the people in the town made us think would happen if we dared enter the territory without a guide.  In fact, they seemed impressed.  For all the trials they must suffer living out in the sticks for months at a time with nothing to do but stare at each other, I still don’t understand why they were so awed by our low-budget vacation.

“You came alone?  You’re carrying everything in your backpack?  You’re just going to put up a tent and sleep in it?”

Yes, it’s called camping.  And yes, girls do it too.  We were fine!  Two healthy young adults, well-prepared with rain gear, flashlights, bug repellant and hiking shoes.  There was only one small detail we had forgotten: food.  

But this is Colombia and in this country where there are people--albeit two old farmers in the middle of nowhere--there is almuerzo.  Next to the army shed, there leaned a rickety wooden house, overflowing with cats, dogs and chickens.  The old man called us in for coffee and after serving each of us a plate piled with plantains, almojabana and a mug of hot chocolate, he leaned back in his wooden chair resting his gnarled hands on his belly.  With only three teeth in his mouth he said out loud to no one in particular, “Thanks be to God we’ve never suffered from hunger.  And I don’t care too much whether the person who shows up at our door is a rich man or a poor man, if he is hungry we will feed him.”  

The rest of the afternoon was spent bathing in the river that they say escaped from heaven, with fluorescent pink and green algae blooming below the surface of the Disani clear water.  If mermaids had dreadlocks they would be just like those algae, waving in the current, soft and bright.  

...to be continued...

Caño Cristales, Part 1

It was too dark to really see anything, but the sound of combat boots trudging through the grass toward our campsite was unmistakable.  Two armed soldiers approached the tent where Saul and I had set up for the night near a small farm house in the boondocks of Meta, Colombia, a region swarming with army types thanks to the land’s infamous fertility for certain not-so-legal crops and the consequential presence of not-so-governmental military groups.  

Honestly, I was relieved that someone had arrived to relieve the impending awkwardness when Saul and I would run out of conversation topics.  We had already spent the entire day together traveling and hiking, going through our stories and jokes like a tube of Pringles and we were reaching the last crumbs of interesting material.  So when the camouflaged men arrived in the night, we both greeted them enthusiastically: “Hey!  How’s it going?  Hot day today, no?  It’s cooling off now though.  Did you guys walk far?”

Despite what the townsfolk had warned us about the scary soldiers of the backwoods with their big guns and their bureaucratic rules about trespassing, these two turned about to be normal friendly humans.  Within two minutes, we were all chuckling and chatting it up in the near-pitch blackness of the starlit jungle evening, swapping adventure tales about their boot camp and our travels a La backpacker.  Eventually they fessed up why they had come to pay us a visit in the first place:

“Some people from the town called us on the radio and said they had seen two young folks walking by themselves out to the caño.  They said one was a pastusa (a person from Pasto, Colombia) with a funny accent and a fake ID number and it seemed fishy.”

Saul and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.  It seemed a simple joke had gone a little too far.

Let me back up a bit...

When we arrived to the town La Macarena, guides fluttered around us like moths to a lantern.  Tourism from the renowned Caño Cristales river is the only thing keeping the economy afloat out there in the middle of war-torn cocaine land.  But Saul and I had come with heavy backpacks, light wallets and a hankering for adventure.  We were simply not interested in paying $50 per day to be herded around with a flock of sun-screened families listening to a local in blue jeans calling off names of the plants and the birds.  

The people in the town told us there was no other way, that only the guides had permission to access the caño, inferring that the jungle soldiers would pounce on us from behind and tear our throats out with their fangs if we didn’t have the proper paperwork, which was coincidentally only available through their outrageously overpriced services.  We smiled, nodded, thanked them for their advice and continued walked to the port of the Rio Magdalena which separates the town from the road that leads to the caño.  

...to be continued...

I believe dreams can come true

Oh I get it, I thought, they’re going to ask me for money.

At first I was flattered to receive an email from a pair of Singaporean women inviting me to an event for their documentary.  They had heard about my website (when I read that I fanned myself lightly with my hand to calm my blush of famousness).  They wanted to hear my story and include it in their film.  I looked up their project and saw they were biking around the world talking about dreams.  

A little cliché, but still kind of cool...

Then I saw the part about them not having any money and my eyes narrowed.  Living in the world of Liberal Arts hipsters for too long unavoidably results in desensitization to the girl/boy-next-door hero types who come up with completely nonprofitable ideas, create a blog and set up PayPal accounts for all the suckers sappy enough to throw cash donations at their projects called “Knitting for Peace” or “Photography for Women’s Rights.”   Yeah, yeah, yeah, wouldn’t we all like to save the world by posting mini-memoirs about our hobbies (and make a living at the same time).

But my inflated ego at the mention of my website was a stronger force that my cynicism... so I went. 

And that’s when I met Tay. 

Tay is a highly successful and award-winning film director who left her job, her company, her home and her family to pursue something she wasn’t even sure how to define.  She is not a cyclist.  She’s not a hipster.  She’s just a girl who found something worth risking everything for and she went for it.  She’s a storyteller.  

At the meeting, she spoke for an hour and a half and it felt like five minutes had passed.  Story after incredible story of the journey she embarked on with her partner Val two years ago captivated everyone in the room.  Nothing too dramatic, just accounts of random adventures, failures and lessons learned, all told with the intention to inspire us to follow our own dreams.  It sounds cheesy, but somehow--in spite of my jaded bias against all things humanitarian--it got to me.

She presented me with a romantically simplistic version of life: do what you love and share it with others. 

Although it won’t likely have the same effect to read about it online, you can see more about their project (and yes, how to support them) here: 

http://www.ibelievethatdreamscancometrue.com/

https://www.facebook.com/ibelievethatdreamscancometrue

Happy Mother's Day!

A Short Story

A Short Story, by Katie Williams: 

No work, no Skype dates or lunch meetings, no phone calls to make or errands to run; the whole afternoon was wide open.  Just her and the sun in the clear blue sky with nothing to do... except salvage the remains of a relationship she’d shattered into a thousand tiny pieces the day before with just one fist.

It wasn’t a punch but rather the unclenching of her hand that did it.  When she released her grip on a bouquet of flowers and let them fall to the sidewalk, a silent mushroom cloud rose from where they struck the ground filling the air with a gas so toxic that the only thing left to do was walk away before tears started falling.  And that’s what she did.  She walked away.  He had intended them as a gift and she, in her childish pride in an act of defiance, abandoned them on the side of the road as if they were a smoldering bomb spewing poisonous fumes.

She didn't throw them down, she simply refrained from intervening with gravity.  It was typical of her to be so blameless and detached, merely allowing nature to take its destructive course while shrugging her shoulders and claiming uninvolvement.  The worst enemies are the ones that do not fight.  You cannot wrestle a dove.

                                  *                                    *                                   *

The key to productivity is finding something you want to do even less than all the other things you have to do, thus rendering the To Do list a selection of relatively appealing procrastination alternatives.  In her nothing-to-do afternoon, she managed to bus across town, leave her business card with several potential clients, sit in the park, listen to an entire Pink Floyd album and write a poem on the back of a napkin.   Every time she reached for her cellphone to make The Call she would remember that email she had to send or the garbage that hadn’t been taken out or that granola bar she’d been wanting to eat.  The entire day slipped though the cracks of a chain of distractions.  She leapt from one to the next like stepping stones in quicksand. 

She decided she couldn’t just call.  She needed to think, to plan, to organize.  She needed a five-section outline with bullet points, a flow chart with arrows and boxes to make sense out of the scrambled Rubik’s cube that was her brain: the red angry squares next to the orange guilty square; the self-righteous green squares lined up on the same side as the blue regretful ones; the white apathy square appearing randomly and inconsistently on all sides. 

So she took out a piece of paper and a pen and started to write.  Then she crossed out what she had written and started over.  Then she traced over the word “Stressed” until it was too ominously bold and black and she had to scratch it out and write it again normally.   She eventually reached the edge of the page and declared it good enough.  

She dialed.
"Hello?"

“Hi.”
"Hi."

“I just wanted to say I’m sorry about yesterday.”

“Ok.”

Mayday.  That was not included in the script.  They both knew this was about more than just yesterday's incident.

“Maybe we can talk about it later?”

“I’m free now actually.”

Bite the bullet, she told herself, just get it over with.  

She read her script from her notes and that’s exactly what it came out sounding like: a recital of a dry monologue on an empty poorly-lit stage with a bad microphone and no one in the audience.  He listened... or rather, he didn’t interrupt.  Once he started talking she realized he hadn’t heard a single word.  Thus the conversation spiraled in toilet bowl circles, rapidly decreasing in circumference as they approached the abyss of their fatal end.  

“So what now?” he asked clinging to the slippery porcelain surface.  

She couldn’t open her mouth for fear that the small animal nesting in her throat would escape.  So she curled her lips between her teeth, raised her eyebrows and shook her head slowly.  

I don’t know. 

The things we do for free t-shirts...

My foot kicked at the steering wheel but my back was already pressing into the corner of the passenger side door as two zombies crawled up on the hood of the car, blood dripping down the glass every time they beat their gnarled hands on the windshield.

“Now scream out loud,” the photographer instructed me.  It was awkward but I obeyed, letting out three high pitched wails in the abandoned junk yard lot wondering what the pedestrians on the other side of the wall might think was going on.

But then again, I wasn’t really sure what was going on.  Several months ago (Halloween, to be exact) some friends and I heard about a zombie parade happening in downtown Bogotá.  We went, got our faces painted, and groaned our way down the central avenue with 5,000 other living dead people, claws outstretched, feet dragging.  For kicks, I uploaded a short video slideshow on Youtube and (I must have been the only one because) last week an email appeared in my inbox from “zombiesbogota@gmail.com” telling me that I’d won the video contest.  I was unaware I had entered, but who’s going to complain about a free t-shirt?

This morning I showed up at the cemetery entrance at 10:00 sharp, as instructed, to receive my prize.  I waited for a half an hour until I heard a voice behind me, “Katie?”

A high-class Colombian Dracula wearing patent leather shoes and Louis Vuitton sunglasses greeted me.  Expensive gel held his dark wavy hair off his face that was framed by the pointy collar of his knee-length leather trench coat.  His hand retracted early from our handshake to grab his vibrating cellphone in his pocket and after a brief one-sided conversation he slipped the phone back into his jacket and muttered to me and to no one, “I can’t stand it when people are late.”

I refrained from commenting.  

We entered the cemetery and it was explained to me that we were going to take a few “action” photos and I would receive the prints as a part of my prize.  OK no problem, I thought, it can’t take too long...

The Count was accompanied by two similarly sinister sidekicks also sporting sunglasses and leather jackets, one with a silver stud in his left earlobe the other with a pencil-thin beard stenciled across his chin connecting his sideburns.  While the four of us waited in front of the mausoleum for the zombie models to arrive they puffed down about three packs of cigarettes, guffawing smokey comments about last night’s rager between inhales. 

“It was intense man, I almost got my lights knocked out.”

“Yeah dude, I didn’t get back until like four in the morning.”

“Smoke?” the Count asked looking at me behind his dark lenses.

“No thanks,” I said, occupying my hands with my cellphone debating whether or not it was worth the effort to wedge my way into their semi-conversation with a hilarious joke about hangovers or an intriguing question about where the party had been.  

Thankfully my mental coin toss was interrupted by the cemetery security guard who came to kick us out.  No vampires allowed, or photos for that matter.  The begging didn’t work.  The bribe didn’t work.  The explanation about being with the blonde American tourist didn’t work.  So they trudged their fancy shoes back to the entrance and decided to go to the junk yard. 

The zombies and the apocalypse cop met us there and I spent the next two hours being chased after, grabbed at, stabbed, axed, bitten and rescued--all in freeze frame.  It was awesome.  Not exactly how I had planned to spend my Sunday afternoon but with free lunch and a glass of whisky included, it wasn’t so bad.  

And, of course, the free t-shirt. 

Apocolypse

I have a sneaking feeling that my roommates think I’m insane...

...which, as of late, may not be such an inconceivable diagnosis. 

I can’t imagine what life on earth would be like if everyone really believed in the 2012 apocalypse because living in a world with a definitive end does bizarre things to the human psyche.  When you have your existence (your job, your house, your friends, your daily routines) and you have a date (June 20th) on which all of those things will cease to be a part of your life, things look different.  It feels like swimming across a reservoir that is being drained.  You can keep striving, keep pushing, keep giving everything you have... or you could just float.  The end will be the same: you standing, wet at the bottom of an empty pit wondering where to walk to next. 

Apathy.  Detachment.  Futility.

I’ve stopped eating meals (unless it’s for a restaurant review).  I just snack compulsively throughout the day because indulging in the millions of sweet and salty treats that you can’t find in the States seems like the most valuable way to spend my time.  I’m too embarrassed to be seen eating a bag of fried plantains at 8:00 in the morning so I sneak them into my room, close the door and eat them next to the window so that the traffic noise will drown out the crunching (sign #1 for my roommates’ diagnosis).  Cups of cereal have quickly descended in rank from a luxury to a habit to an addiction.  What before I only enjoyed as a guest in someone else’s house now I consume as a prerequisite for any form of productive work: preparing class, writing a review, editing photos, updating websites... all must be performed with mug and spoon in hand.

I’ve become anti-social.  The thought of going out or meeting new people sounds about as appealing as going for a jog in a hamster wheel.  

Every time I climb the steps to my apartment I am praying that there won’t be light shining from the crack under the door.  Coming home to an empty apartment feels like biting into a melty bar of dark chocolate--I am torn between wanting to just sit and savor the stillness or to feverishly devour the opportunity, throw my bag on the floor, my coat on the chair, raid the fridge,  spill the milk and not wipe it up right away, listen to Lady Gaga on the loud speakers while making phone calls while checking my email/facebook/couchsurfing/twitter/and reddit accounts.  That way, when my roommates come home I can be doing something “chill” like drinking tea while writing in my journal or watching my goldfish eat the rainbow flake food floating at the top of the tank.  

Walking into an inhabited apartment feels like getting into a hot tub that’s only luke warm.  Your body anticipates something relaxing (coming home) but once you’re in it’s actually kind of uncomfortable.  It’s not bad enough to make a fuss over but it’s just unpleasant enough that you can’t really focus on anything and you feel constantly distracted or in need of a distraction (like a cup of cereal, for example).  Sparking a conversation feels like sparking a fire on a desert island.  Too much work.  I’d rather be cold.  Of course if one of them initiates a conversation, I play along--engaged, smiling, participating, sharing.  And then afterwards I feel like I need a nap (or a cup of cereal). 

There are three common reactions to apocalypses:

1. Crime

2. Depression

3. Carpe Diem

(I refer to the end of my Fulbright year as an apocalypse not to be dramatic but because it is, essentially the end of my present world and reality as it exists right now.)

I’m over shoplifting and I don’t want to spend my last two months in Colombia being a gluttonous introvert so I think it’s time I move on to option number three and seize the day! That may or may not involve eating plantain chips at 8:00 in the morning, but it’s the new attitude that counts.