In 2007 I toured across Colombia for three weeks by bus stopping in Popayan, Bogota, Medellin, Cartagena, Santa Marta, and a few small towns and villages along the way.  There was one village that stood out called San Andres.  It was near Popayan in the south, but more east, so heading toward the fringes of the Amazon.  The village wasn't hiding in dense jungle, though, it was more open but with emerald, lush hills peppered with banana trees surrounding it.  Small-scale farmers on the outskirts harvested from these trees, and my guess, probably sold locally.  I know the first part because I took a long hike outside the town to explore the hilly countryside.  Thankfully, there were well-worn trails, and views of the town were never far, so it would have been difficult to get lost.  When I climbed into the hills and walked past humble rural homes the evidence of banana harvesting was apparent.  The day was humid, which is typical of the region, and the temperature was probably high 70s.  The near equatorial sun blasted down.  That night I stayed in town at a bed and breakfast.  The following day I hiked to a nearby historical site known as Tierradentro where large underground man-made tombs (hypogea) with pictographs checkered the sloping lawn.  There were some panels to read about the tombs, but the general consensus from what I read, and from talking to locals was they didn't know much about the pre-Colombian culture who made them.  Today, they remain mostly intact for anyone to walk down into them and breathe in the stone-soaked air, and gaze upon the ancient artwork.

Before departing back to Popayan, I had lunch at a tiny cafe in town.  The cafe wasn't only tiny because of the size of the village; it was run and owned by a tiny man and his tiny wife.  In Spanish they are known as enanos, in English, midgets.  Despite their small stature, their positivity and generosity were on par with the other kind and open people I met in the village.  I caught a bus back to Popayan, which coincidentally, was also being ridden by the tiny woman from the cafe.  I can't remember her name, but we talked in Spanish during the hour ride back into Popayan.  She mostly asked about my travels and adventures across South America.  Every description and explanation I gave her was followed by her genuine smile and a "que rico!"  (how rich).  Her pleasantries and those of the village and surroundings have stuck with me as a highlight on my 5+ month adventure across South America. 

My few days in San Andres and the surroundings contrasted sharply with the larger cities and other countries I visited.  My time in South America wasn't exactly easy-going, to say the least.  The heavy tourism in countries like Peru, Ecuador, Chile, and Bolivia (though to a lesser degree) combined with the general poverty maintain a kind of desperate, aggressive energy that left me weary, anxious, and mostly on my toes as the weeks tacked on.  I had to watch my back as a matter of course.  I was nearly mugged by a group of fishermen in Peru, for example.  Colombia, by contrast didn't have the same level of tourism as the other countries I visited.  In 2007, Colombia was still reeling a bit from Cali and Medellin cartel shenanigans - even though a large portion of the organized drug trade had moved north into Mexico.  When I went to Medellin for a few days, it seemed, well, pretty chill.  Not to say it was a bustling, cosmopolitan financial global centerpiece, but it was certainly bustling with normal everyday people working and going to and from work.  I didn't get the sense that it was particularly dangerous or ripe with daily crime.  The same can be said for Cartagena and Popayan, despite the armed guards patrolling the streets with AR-15s - a lingering reaction to cartels and communist guerilla forces in the east. 

Colombia hadn't transitioned to a full-fledged tourist economy, then, even though, in my opinion, Colombia had something that the other countries didn't.  To say exactly what that was, it's hard to say.  Certainly, the openness geographically, the people, and the lack of tourism, had something to do with this feeling.  The fact that there are many endemic exotic fruits and fruit juice that are only found within the borders of Colombia, surely added to the charm.  All this is to say nothing of the attractive women casually walking around with little to no inclination of the male attention they'd get in the USA.  Beyond the tangibles, there was something else, though, lingering in places like the hills beyond San Andres.  I felt it walking around Parque Nacional Tayrona off the Caribbean Coast, and in Cartagena walking along the colonial stone wall surrounding the city.  To go with the cliche, there was something in the air.  Colombia has its own unique history, myths, politics, people, and above all, mystery.

Perhaps a better explanation can be found in the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the seminal work of magical realism by the late Colombian, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  The story follows seven generations of the Buendia family after the patriarch Jose Arcadia Buendia establishes the fictional city of Macondo.  Throughout the story, many strange events occur, many unfortunate ones, to Jose and his family.  A common feature of this epic juxtaposes the extraordinary as ordinary and the ordinary as extraordinary.  Not everything is as it seems - symbolism, Latin American historical allusions, phantoms, and mystery infuse the story.  By the end, Macondo, originally founded as an ideal or utopian community, degrades into a failed project, finally blowing away with the wind along with the prophetic parchment giving to the Buendia family many years before, which describes their fates in detail.  Despite their attempts to forge a new path and create the perfect world, in the end their history, and the ghosts that line the pages of the stories of old, deny their transcendence.   Tragedy and failure once again befall them, like so many historical communities in Latin America.

Some scholars believe Marquez’s novel was his attempt to help Latin America better understand itself.  From this perspective, the novel offers insight into real historical problems in Latin America and how they seem to repeat despite similar warnings showing up in advance.  The ghosts of the past linger, and if the people would understand them, instead of trying to move on from them or erase them, then perhaps they can carry the lessons of the past, with maturity, and avoid the mistake of their forefathers.  On the contrary, the magical realism elements infused in the story give the reader the impression of inherent paradoxes, both within the story and by extension the real Latin America, which are integrated into a land and a people that can never be fully understood in rational or linear terms.  Latin America exists and grows, (or fails), on its own mythical terms, somewhere between the solitude and possibilities of the jungle, and the hall of mirrors surrounding the idealist elites trying to pull the strings in a land where strings are goldfish, and utopias are hidden somewhere beyond the hills of banana trees.        

             
Summary:  A layered, intriguing epic with enough colorful characters and events to create a bit of wonder for a land both misunderstood, and impossible to understand on conventional terms.   

Rating:  6.5

-E.B.  2023-01-08