For someone who more than eleven years ago published a book titled “The African Macondo,” this trip, so many times postponed, there was something special. And it was more special than I suspected when we arrived in that city with a summer in debt...
We leave Bogotá by car, that city that Gabriel García Márquez (Old man) defines how “the eternal drizzle of the saddest city in the world”, Macondo road. It was raining, it rained, all those days between 24 and 27 July a dry sky. There are cities that seem better to live in than to visit.. That happens with the capital of Colombia. Climbing the Monserrate hill, contemplating the 3152 meters above sea level the city, nothing is saved other than the memories. And those take time.
The first stop is Zipaquirá. “The salt mines, that the Spanish found alive, They were a tourist attraction on the weekends, which was completed with the baked overbelly and the snowy potatoes in large pans of salt.”, Gabo writes in his memoirs “Live to tell the tale”. He spent his adolescence there poorly studying at the high school in a place that for someone who came from the Caribbean did not seem like his homeland., It just didn't seem like his world.
We visited those mines converted today into the Salt Cathedral. We enter with distrust and leave with doubts. We are not believers, and there inside, between shadows and dim colored lights, between statues and crosses, we wanted to believe.
García Márquez remembering his years in Zipaquirá wrote the following: “Those highlands were part of a colonial culture: solemn, gray and very cold… “They felt like another country.”. And he was right. We didn't know, nor did he, who crossed those mountains in a hurry between his Caribbean homeland and the cold of a foreign capital of his country., but in the following days we enter Spain. There, between the Andes, with its Iberian peoples forgotten about that incurable wound of love and hate that is the motherland. “The idea of Spain becoming European… It is as if one's mother is going to sleep in another house”, the writer said when from Madrid it was decided to jump to see what was behind the Pyrenees for the first time in its history. Spain is America, as our ancestors are us and they are out there mixed up in genes and bones with their successes and their mistakes.
Villa de Leyva is beautiful, very beautiful. We arrived on a Monday, and that took away the enormous tourism that seems to arrive from Bogotá on weekends. So Villa de Leyva was not only beautiful anymore, It was accessible and complete for us who were walking restlessly through a town surrounded by peaks., with its cobbled streets, its whitewashed walls and its square so Castilian that Lope and Quevedo resonate, Saint John of the Cross and Machado… That's not Macondo, it's language, and without it Macondo would be something else. “The town was officially founded on 12 June 1572 by Captain Hernán Suárez de Villalobos, under the orders of Andrés Díaz Venero de Leyva, who was the first president of the Royal Court of the New Kingdom of Granada”, tells the history of this town.
And there it stayed, stillness, holding back the hiccups so that no one would modify it with the crap of the new times. He got it.
From there we leave by car along roads that wind through mountains.. Long truck trails that pass one by one between green valleys. slow pace, captivating landscape, a stop to eat the famous blueberry ice cream, theThe feeling that you are not making any progress because the same truck is always waiting for you later.. The car requires time and patience.. There is reward.
The town of Barichara appears as a series of cobbled slopes that twist like slides. We stayed in Terrazul, a hotel ten minutes walk from the center. It is probably one of the most charming accommodations we have been to. It's almost hard to reveal the secret, as if it deserved to stay in a drawer in case one day I return. and I want to go back.
Barichara is one of the most beautiful towns I have ever seen., not in Colombia but in the world. It's almost perfect. With its steep slopes, its cobblestones and tiles, its views of an infinite canyon from the Salto del Mico viewpoint with your feet hanging from the clouds, its square and its church where you can wait for the night with a beer, and its cemetery converted into a pantheon of art with its tombs carved in stone. In some they carved a musical instrument, a sewing machine, some tools or a hat. And those dead people seem alive, useful, unable to leave at all with their chores on duty.
The second day we decided to take the old royal road from Barichara to Guane. It is an old cobbled path of the Guane indigenous people that cuts through the valley. First you go down a hill, and then you walk between stone fences and a field in labor. Six kilometers of mountains to reach a town as beautiful as the one of origin, I'm sorry (the cover photo), with its streets still made of sand, but the same colonial houses, a small square where neighbors chat and a beautiful church with its handmade wooden roof.
There we found a young woman, with her son on her chest and a smiling face and Colombian kindness, who had lived happily, said, Madrid. It was joyful, and he had gone with his partner to open a restaurant, Beautiful, in a place full of absences. We ate a Lima causa of those eaten in El Callao. A well-kept and open space, as its owner, in which you eat in your other people's house. And Guane you understand that it is a gem of dust and rock to be remade, and In a tuc tuc you return to Barichara climbing the wind.
That night we had dinner at a very famous restaurant., Elvia, one of those that you have to reserve in advance. We didn't do it, but they offered us a table between the bar counter and the cash register which we accepted, how we would have agreed to eat on the stairs. And we ate such delicious things, and they treated us again so well, That night we slept awake so that digestion would be slow.
We left Barichara screwed, without wanting to leave, but it is complicated to travel like we did before, making decisions and then adding dates. We leave for Girón, a town halfway to Macondo. We understood that this was the last break before attacking the Caribbean, the last colonial trace of the mountains where we stopped.
It was a four hour car trip.. On the way we were stopped by a road safety checkpoint.. A young man knocked on the window, and when I got the passports he, azorado, said: “No, I don't need documents, This is to teach people the risks of the road”. And two minutes later, We didn't give a damn about the road and we celebrated Spain's victory in the World Cup and our common Real Madrid sentiment.. There was no fine, nor was there any request for anything, There was a farewell “Hala Madrid” after five minutes of dissecting both the signings and convincing ourselves that this season there will be a harvest. You travel with people, and Colombia is a place of lovely people. I have lived in many places and I have learned to value kindness over many things that previously seemed coarser to me..
We arrive at Girón almost dusk. The historic center is surrounded by a chaos of people and cars. It was beautiful, not at the level of Barichara and Villa de Leyva, but it is a perfect stop to get closer to Macondo. But a biblical storm broke out, and we take refuge in a church first, where the priest gave mass and those of us who did not carry umbrellas gathered at the back simulating prayers. Then, how it didn't stop, We ran through puddles and went into a bar with its terrace overlooking the square to see how two teenagers threatened to start loving each other under a tap and, among so many threats, They said goodbye warmly and with a tender hug.. When it cleared a little, We had dinner in a very bad restaurant with a nice terrace next to the stream. Songs played on the radio from my childhood.
That colonial Colombia and those landscapes that we discovered from the car those days we did not expect. Not like that, not so beautiful, and I had no choice but to write a message to some friends who had already been here: Why hadn't you told me about Colombia before?, bastards?
And then we still didn't know that we still had to discover Mompox's lie...
PD. I mention the car rental, what we did through the company Discovercars, because from the beginning it has worked perfectly. Not only the advice and price, which through them led us to book with the Alamo people at the Colombia airport and delivery in Cartagena de Indias, but we contracted the insurance with them, there was damage to the moon, and the refund has been easy and fast. And I have been reserving cars all over the world for many years., and when there is a company involved, that doesn't always happen.
