The winswept coastal cliff trail to beaches near Tagonga.
Following is an excerpt directly from my journal so you can get a
taste of what it´s like to be here and now, and also find that I write
to you very similarly to the way I write to myself.
¨January 16, 2008
To get to the non-fishing, swimable beaches near Tagonga, Columbia you
must follow a narrow trail etched into a white limestome cliff. It is
a bit of a precarious track, steep, loose rocks and directly above a
drop of about 80 feet to the sea. My sort of trail. After following
this very trail to Playa Grande, and then a bit futher along though
the water until we found out own less populated beach, we spent a
perfectly lovely afternoon lounging in the sun and sand. There were
fishers about trawling (not my favorite) and we were cautioned not to
swim too far lest we become entangled in their nets.
Time passed, as it does, and it became dusk when it occued to us that
we had come to this beach via precipitous cliff and thought it might
not be the most fun to cross this at night. We had reached that last
15 minutes of twilight when the last glimmer of the sunset lends the
landscape a red tint and on this night, with a bright half moon
directly overhead, pink moonlight bathed the white rocks. We inched
our way along the pink trail and listened to the blissfully whispering
ocean below and watched the bright stars rise over the cactus covered
mountains to our left. All the while, a strong wind, just this side of
chilling-to-the-bones in a colder clime, but perfect for sailing, blew
us about. The kind of night to entertain dreams.
I have lived out of the contents of a pack before for longer periods
that this, but I have not lived out of one whilst moving constantly,
unable to unpack ever and settle in. I have taken to it naturally much
to my gratitude and hadn´t even realized the fact until just now.
There are many sacrifices but the nomadic lifestyle is easier to adapt
to than might be expected, and certainly for one such as myself who
has been enchancted by it for so long.
Today we also managed to decide upon a course of action for our futher
travels. We will go the the far south of Ecuador to a farm called
Never Never Land (sand Michael Jackson). One of the proprieters of
this farm is named Angel, a major point in their favour as we had been
saved by Angels this morning. We were all set to go to sleep on the
beach in this nearby National Park when a couple of inquisitive fellow
travelers informed us that that very beach in that very park is
credited with some alarming percentage of the white kidnappings in
Northern Columbia (Note: Incidentally as I write this from a hostel in
Quito, Ecuador we are being housed in a dorm room with Angels all
along the wainscotting... We might be being watched over, perhaps).
Later in evening my very sweet friends Aviv and Tatiana threw me a
completely surprise birthday party with delicious vegetarian fare,
cake, candles, sparklers, flowers, sea treasures and even some
improvised sangria. What a life! I even got a beautiful earing from a
Venezuelan man, one of the artisans that stay at this hostel we´re at
in Tagonga. We built and alter of the presents and candles and
listened to a beautiful Brazilian man serenade us with his voice and
guitar as we all sat in the dirt under the moon.¨
Yes, life can be like this.
So, my actual birthday was yesterday (the 20th) but after baking
myself a nice chocolate banana cake I fell suddenly ill and had to go
to bed. In lieu of this I decided to postpone my birthday until today
and I shall thusly spend the next year as an Aquarius, I´ve always
suspected them of having more fun anyway. Happy birthday to me and my
dear cousins Graeme, Tristan and Allison back in Canada who share this
illustrious week of birth with me. According to some hack astrology
book it is ¨The week of mystery and imagination¨ and also, we shall
all have our Saturn return´s in the year 2012, sure to be an important
year.
We head down south for our farming month in a couple of days and I
don´t know how much access I shall have to the web from there so take
care all if I don´t get a chance to send my words to everyone for a
while.
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