And everybody has a uniform in Colombia.* They are so thoroughly uniformed that many of the uniforms look pretty good and not at all the sort of thing one wouldn’t be caught dead wearing—and I don’t even like to wear a suit. It is part of the bureaucracy, perhaps, that they do it so well. They have to have a little piece of paper for everything, and besides the military checkpoints, they have bus checkpoints, and this person checking off this and that person checking off that. If you have to be the person making the nth official check on x daily event, then you probably want to have a uniform so that nobody in a fit of pique suddenly skips your rather inconsequential duty. If you have a uniform, then it must be official and important.

Which is, incidentally, one way to spot the random lunatic wandering in the streets: no uniform, unless it is a tourist. I was particularly impressed with the black leather combat boots you see everywhere, and am thinking that if I end up there, I might need to sport a pair. I think the more privileged police (I am not sure it is possible to even comprehend the multitude and variety of military uniforms on display in Bogota) actually have jackboots, and perhaps I ought to go in for a pair of those instead. Which makes me think it may be the militarization that makes for all the uniforms. The country has been at war with itself for decades, and soldiers and the military are not like here mostly out of view.

*Note for dimwitted persons: This is a slight exaggeration.

So we made it to el Terminal de Autobuses. Everywhere you go in Bogota you can expect to see the military, or the police, or private security. Dogs with muzzles and leashes are regularly at the entrance of public places such as malls. If the Obama administration continues the way it is you can expect to see that here on a regular basis too. Anyway, when you arrive at the bus terminal you hesitate as you enter because you wonder if the guards are going to shake you down like the TSA, but they don’t as they are professional soldiers and not some illegitimate branch of a government increasingly resembling an octopus. They’re just on the lookout for suspicious persons or something, and people come and go under the gaze of armed soldiers with impunity.

The terminal is large, two stories, full of restaurants and shops, and buses depart from it for all the rest of the country. It isn’t crowded, and in a way it is a bit pointless, but nevertheless there it is. If nothing else, it serves as a place for the bus drivers and the five other employees involved in the elaborate business of sending a bus out of the terminal to eat. We ate there too, and had a meal that was not bad.

Colombians eat big meals sometime in the afternoon and call it the Almuerzo. All the restaurants (and I’m not talking about chains. Chains there are some, but holes in the wall and such there are more) offer specials, from what I can tell, and you can get your soup (they always have to have soup) and then a plate heaped with rice, with potatoes, with corn or yucca, with plantain and avocado, with boiled chicken, or stewed pork, or grilled beef or trout or what have you. We found the place where all the bus drivers were slumped over their bowls or plates and entered in. The waiters tend to be a little frantic, but they are efficient.

They do not eat alone, the Colombians. At least, I never saw anybody eating all by themselves but anybody who went to a restaurant managed always to have a companion along. So we ordered the most expensive thing (I ordered it since Katrina was hungry and clueless and it only came to fourteen bucks for both with coke and juice and bottled water) which was churrasco Argentino, though it should not be told in Argentina that the meat was being associated with that land.

Not bad but not finishable, which the Colombian waiters seemed to find a little baffling. The quantity is extremely generous. I always thought I ate too much, but not while I was in Colombia this time around.

I said the terminal was a bit pointless. In Colombia you can flag down any kind of bus other than the Transmilenio, at any point in its trajectory and it will stop. They have drivers who are important and drive and pick their teeth. They have ticket selling women at the terminal whose job is pointless but exists. They have a chap who checks your ticket as you walk out of the door to the bus, and his job is also pointless. Some bus lines have girls that come on the bus once you’re on and sell you a ticket at that point, or ask you if you have one already and take your word for it. And then you have the guy who does all the work: a young guy, of great agility, shiny shoes, a tie, and the person who collects the money from everybody who gets on after the terminal (most of the passengers in some cases), does the baggage handling, hawks the bus by shouting out of the window at people standing on the sidewalk looking like perhaps a bus might be in their near future, dashes from the bus at traffic lights and runs ahead to warn bystanders of the impending arrival of the long-awaited bus to the small town of their dreams, and carries on the tradition of frantic service for which Colombia ought to be more famous. We rode three buses with conductors (two smaller ones without and those without merely had drivers who are very staid persons, of great dignity and tending to pick their teeth and spit out of the window with slow deliberation) and all three of them were enterprising young chaps who hustled and earned whatever wages or commission they received very thoroughly. Perhaps it is one day their hope to end up in the driver’s seat, cultivating a paunch and the relaxed composure of a more privileged rank in the hierarchy of the bus company. These running conductor chaps will spot a customer a mile away, since they aim at everybody, are routinely ignored by most people they accost, and seem to thrive on it. You hardly need to mention where you are going because to come within the range of their powers is to be accosted with a shouted question that involves a list of destinations: “Paipa, Duitama, Tunja, Sogamoso, Paipa, Paipa!” It is very easy to get around in Colombia as long as you know Spanish.

We had a rather wildeyed taxi driver take us to the bus terminal in Bogota. He was from the country all right, and had a way of hollering hoarsely whenever he wanted to speak which was often. They like to drop letters out of words, in Colombia, though it is generally practiced around the Caribbean, from what I can tell. Spanish is a language with shorter vowel sounds, which is what makes it sound so rapid, I suppose. It goes quickly enough, but not quickly enough for some, and in various parts of the world various inconvenient sounds are neglected or changed. In the Caribbean coast and islands, for example, the letter S receives some unusual treatment, not being recognizably pronounced as an S in many instances, if pronounced at all. The Spaniards have their own way of lisping some sibilants, though they have a way of preserving locutions that strike my ear as wildly archaic (as if they were to use thees and thous and forasmuches and we beseeches in English, though that is not strictly a parallel comparison, but more of a suggestion). In Colombia it is plosives that suffer, though they suffer elsewhere, notably in the Caribbean where the attitude toward all things is pretty casual.

So the common preposition ‘of’ = ‘de,’ is often no more than an E when it happens between destinations or sometimes between other obliging plosives. The Spanish R in many ways resembles a Spanish D and it is often treated the same way, resulting in the curious expression, “Paondevas?” instead of “Para donde vas?” It is a common tactic of the unlearned to drop the last ‘ra’ in Para in many places, however, and not just the unlearned, so that ‘pa’ for the preposition ‘for’ or ‘to’ is practically a common word. One of the ways to take a Spanish speaker by surprise, when said Spanish speaker is not expecting fluent Spanish from you, is to subtly begin dropping letters that way. Not egregiously, mind, because it is just too much of an incongruity, like speaking Spanish with a really sing-song lilt the way the ranchero hicks in Mexico do, which is also worth doing from time to time.

In the case of the taxi driver, he had the habit of substituting Js (which in Spanish, you must remember, are a kind of velar fricative) for his Fs (which in no way resemble velar fricatives, being your usual labiodental fricative even in Spanish). “Ya se jue pa’ya,” you see, will mark you as a country bumpkin. Its allure is that it moves more fluidly and quickly and the result is not at all indistinct, and a remarkably economical way of saying “Ya se fue para aya,” which is perhaps why it appeals to the poor.

‘Mano,’ they call each other, instead of ‘Hermano,’ or ‘mana,’ in the feminine. In Mexico they use the word ‘Büey’ corrupted into ‘Güey,’ but it is considered vulgar and impolite and a sort of mild form of swearing (at which no Spanish speaking nation that I know of outdoes the Mexicans) which common people (male, of course) use to address each other regularly, whereas in Colombia ‘mano’ is not at all discouraged and another taxi driver went so far as to call me ‘mano.’ “No mano, esque por ahi ay una manifestacion y no hay paso.” (‘Buey’ is a gelded bull, or an ox, and I believe it comes from the bullfighting world, hence the onus, though I merely speculate. It reminds me that once when at some place of public bathing in thermal waters I answered my little brother who was about five or six, saying “No way!” and one of the Mexican women heard “No, güey!” and said, “Ay, le dijo ‘güey’ al güerito [small, fair person]!” to which her sapient husband replied, “No, le dijo que de ninguna manera,” which was funny but also lets you know not to overpronounce that Spanish G, but let it flow like an English W with a little bit more emphasis. One of the ways English speakers give themselves away is by overpronouncing the consonants, besides lengthening all their vowels—when attempting Spanish, that is.)

It struck me from the moment I heard the ‘Chao’s (soft ch, remember, not a sound like a K) in the airport that I would need to adjust my Mexicanized spanish. ‘Arto,’ they say instead of ‘mucho’ or ‘bastante.’ “A si, hay arto y tienen artas tiendas.” Orale pues, I think, and realize they don’t use ‘orale, ande, andale, camara’—admittedly cheesy, that last, and usually followed by the monotonous ‘güey.’ I received blank looks when making the query “Mande?” I found it an incredibly difficult habit to break and only near the end succeeded in producing the requisite ‘Que?’ To seem more authentic you can stutter it as the Colombians often do, ‘Queque?’ and that last is helpful when expressing incredulity, but you have to do is slower than you would for a mere interrogative ‘What?’

In Colombia they don’t much use the word ‘dinero’ commonly, resorting to the word for silver almost exclusively: ‘plata.’ “Deme toda su plata o le pego un tiro!” “Listo!” which means ‘ok’ or ‘certainly,’ or ‘I understand,’ or many other forms of assent and compliance besides the dictionary entry, ‘ready.’ In Mexico when you are invited to enter they say ‘pase,’ but in Colombia they say ‘siga’ and they say ‘siga’ for everything. The DAS at customs kept saying it to get people to move up to the next available booth, you hear it when you darken the door of a restaurant, when you enter any establishment where your wallet might be welcome, or are welcomed to somebodies house.

In Mexico it would be extremely vulgar to use the verb ‘coger’ but in Colombia that is how you get the bus and anything else you might want to grab. In Mexico you might run into trouble if you say or get offended if somebody abruptly says ‘tranquilo’ and makes a motion with a flattened hand. In Colombia it is supposed to be reassuring: “I’ll take care of it,” or “I’ll take care of you,” and it means ‘be calm’ or ‘calm down,’ which you can see they might take badly in Mexico.

Few Mexicans would recognize the word ‘gaseosa’ or the even more esoteric ‘ducha,’ but if you want soda or a shower in Colombia, that’s what you’re going to have to say. If you want some strong, black coffee say ‘un tinto,’ and if you want to be polite in Boyaca say ‘su merced,’ or as our neglected taxi driver might have put it, though he was from the wrong department to do it, ‘sumerce.’ Where the custom of speaking in politeness to others—equals, superiors, though perhaps not inferiors—as ‘your mercy’ came from is one of the things it would be interesting to find out.

The biggest change for me was to hear everybody in Boyaca using the familiar pronoun ‘tu.’ It is like theeing and thouing in English, I suppose—and not what I mean when I say the Spaniards speak in a way that seems wildly archaic “Os ruego que os sentais”–type stuff—and it wasn’t commonly done there when I was growing up. We called it ‘tutetiando’ and considered it effete.

Como cambian los tiempos, Venancio! Que te parece? Es la influencia de la tele.

I am happy to say that I did not once say, ‘Gracias, eh’ but instead managed a few ‘muy amable’s, though I did not bring myself to greet with the mere ‘Buenas,’ or the even more idiomatic, cheery ‘buenas, buenas,’ or to utter the downright locally idiosyncratic ‘juimonos, mano!’ to my brother the other taxi driver.

“Ya’amos llegando’orita.”

“Que va!”

“No son vainas, mano.”

“’Ta bien.”

“Tranquilo. Cinco minuticos.” [not as you might expect, ‘minutitos,’ and it has nothing at all to do with a mere five minutes but more like half an hour and always involves the obligatory glance at the wrist whether it has a watch or not]

“Ay!”

The lonely planet guide, consulted by cheap semi-hoboes, students, and other itinerants, has discovered some of the hostels in Colombia. It recommends the Platypus in Bogota as one of the most unusual hotels. (It is doubtful that any hostel is more unusual than the one you just departed, especially if it is regularly patronized by Anglophones.) If you don’t mind staying in a hostel, they’re cheap and full of awkward travelers, experienced travelers, helpful conversations, notices for other hostels within traveling distance and misleading advice. There are always stupid people sitting around drinking beer in a hostel, but there always seem to be people working there who know their way around the block and if you can convince them that you are not one of the stupid people sitting around drinking beer, these employees can be helpful since they know their way around, as I have said, at least the block.

It was dark when we got to our destination, like I said. Our room was damp & chilly and I was afraid, needlessly, that we would be cold. The Colombian measures for keeping warm may not be our measures, and they are certainly a bit startling if one is coming out of Minnesota where the houses are sealed and in January we emphatically keep out of the open air. The contrast is the contrast that you obtain between a coat and a ruana—wool blanket with a hole cut in the middle for the head which people to this day sit around wearing in the highlands of the Andes. In Colombia all of life is lived in the open air in one way or another, and you would be hard put to find any room that is not in some way vulnerable to the open air. The old style of architecture builds in a square around an open courtyard so that there really are few if any rooms not giving immediately into a space open to the sky. Our hotel was in an old building and was on this scheme. The hotel room was so damp I put a receipt on the table and picked it up two hours later all limp. The lights there are dimmer, or of a sleepier quality it seems, and I noticed it, and perhaps that added to the perception of the damp & chilly, since there was no bright flood. (Perhaps that I why I am not fond of bright overhead artificial lighting.) The blanket that seemed inadequate was wonderful right away, and we did not require the consolation of any more. The other consolation is the coffee, and, if you want to be precise, the ruana is probably a third, but we did not have one.

In the night the rain fell in the courtyard and I heard it splashing, watering the plants. In the morning all the birds were carrying on and it was not cold, but fine weather for coffee nonetheless. Perhaps the problem with the room is that it was not much inhabited, or it might not have been as damp as it was when we first walked into it. It continued to be dank, but we were hardly in it for more than 12 hours altogether and that was not continuous.

But before we retired, I had talked to the dark chap who spent the night watching at the desk in front room, which was a sort of lobby with orange sofas and a non-functional refrigerator full of bottled water and bottled beer (thinking over it, it seems to me most of those things I thought were refrigerators were just display cases for bottled water—con o sin gas—juice, soda and the like, which is fine). He knew very little English and had three English customers who did not appear to speak any Spanish. Two of them tried to complain and be outraged at him for expecting complete payment all at once. He did not understand the outrage or the complicated reasoning behind it (they appeared to have a limitation on their ATM withdrawals, which I think was due to using it in English and not in Spanish—I found the ATM uncooperative when I tried to use it in English but very cooperative when I opted for communicating with it in Spanish, oddly), but he still insisted that they had to pay the full amount. They thought it was outrageous, but I am not sure that word was in his English vocabulary or why exactly the idea should have been outrageous, even to natives of the British Isles. The third one was sick, very sick, apparently and needed extra blankets, which she was able to obtain.

He let us use the internet, he let me get a bottle of water, he showed us pictures that he googled of the shopping malls in Bogota which were very modern, he tried to google hotels in Tunja with confidence but without success, he explained to me what hours he worked and the difficulties of having to work during the day on Saturdays (his usual shift was 6PM to 6AM three or four days a week, and then the bit on Saturdays), and I should have had more conversation with him except that I couldn’t think of more things to ask without being impertinent, though I thought he was very interesting and would have liked to know what aspirations he had in life if any.

We did not have hot water there, but we had a good location in the oldest part of town. We walked in the fog of early morning, had some breakfast in a respectable place that was not too small (all the shops and restaurants, to the unaccustomed, are so small that one draws back), and then went back to rest. The woman in the morning gave us all kinds of advice about riding the Transmilenio—a kind of aboveground subway involving double-long buses—but there was a protest against the mayor and the Transmilenio was shut down, oh well. Really, if you wanted to write a Hitchhikers Guide to Colombia it could be as weird as the Guide to the Galaxy, and perhaps I’ll try my hand at that as well.

Altitude is a real consideration; you want to take it easy and drink your water and refrain from pushing yourself. I thought of it when I saw my first lunatic, you see, and knew that I was not hallucinating but might soon well start. I’d seen this form of lunacy before: dress shoes and then instead of socks two rags knotted above the ankle and pants of length not entirely adequate, though perhaps they were pulled high—not sure where I had seen it formerly (though when simulating a lunatic I also like to pull my pants high, like people from the WWII generation do even though they are not simulating lunatics, though perhaps it is a sign of madness), but I am very sure I had. This lunatic also had a sort of cape, and was, of course, very dirty since he lives on the streets of Bogota. He was one of the purposeful type of lunatics, you know? Went like he was in the middle of something important and was unusually cheerful, with a bounce in his step that drew attention to the inevitable ankles.

When we got back the woman was commiserating with a Scottish chap about his friend who apparently was drinking herself to death on aguardiente and would not listen to his appeals—what sort of hostel would be complete without somebody on the premises in the middle of drinking himself to death on the local liquor? Then she commiserated with us about the Transmilenio. We had gone to find some replacement things for the wife, but the wife was only able to find suitable the things she needed absolutely and it was not as successful a shopping expedition as might be expected—which I do not think it would be fair to blame on the store. Ah, well, the sympathetic woman said, or something to that effect, and she did not in the end charge us for the use of the internet and personally flagged down a taxi for us so that we’d be sure to have a good one to get us to the Terminal.

How does it begin? It begins with the waiting in the early darkness, then the comfort of the dashboard lights, the arrival and wrong airline (“Jesus!” the attendant exclaimed, and, “You’ve picked a hell of a trip.” And he wasn’t even a Northwest employee), the waiting at security, the foolishness and indignity of the unnecessary security and of all of us succumbing to it. And then a long way to the gate with an unbelievably convenient pause at an optional McDonalds, and then no waiting at the door but straight onto the plane. We do wait in the aisle of the long tube of a 757.

We fly first to Orlando, and the flight is full of families. The challenge they face is to understand which seat is theirs, who will take what, when to take off their coats, etc. The flight crew urge them into places and want to leave. We sit and wait and I wonder how it will be when at last we can begin. We taxi and I watch a man with two dogs out beyond the airport fence in freedom. Then we fly.

The ground is white: you see the designated houses, the roads, the reed-bordered lakes. You hear the children cry and call, and still we rise. The land is all below with a thatch of winter trees, winding rivers and all the geometry of rectilinear man. We get some fog, thin clouds, we wriggle and we bounce.

A twelve hour trip (which is part of the reason why the attendant felt the freedom to accost us with profanity so early in the morning) with perhaps eight hours of flight. We picked airline travel with the long tubes, narrow passages and narrow seats, the attendants and employees of airlines. We are glad we are smaller people and I notice the wary look in the eyes of the large who sit in the main cabin.

Travel is a long and weary waiting. You enter the hard surface of the airport and you stand and lean, shifting your position to avoid intolerable discomfort. You are battered and you are bounced all the time until at last you escape from the predatory spaces given over to and controlled by airlines. Modern ways of travel seem difficult, it seems, because they do not correspond to modern ways of living. Airports form their own zones, enforced by the employees.

With an hour to go of travel we reach the cattle-car hour. Too many people in one space, the air flow is insufficient, the flight crew is saving up whatever reserves they have for the last bit when they have to smile. We wait, the pressure changes, the cranium strains and the airplane wavers through the air; the children and the aged stand waiting at the bathroom doors.

I see the coast, a distant line of the traversible Atlantic. The red Georgia clay has given over to sandy Florida soil. Not much winter here to see; the hills of Tennessee had snow, but here is the ground is soft with foliage.

In Orlando I see the sun, the rippled waters, the pines and palms and trimmed hedges. Now the latin element enters in rapid Spanish conversations, sharper featured women, accented English, darker complexions and the latino flash and flair. Then Orlando passes in sunlight and decay.

In Miami the air conditioning is chilly and the international terminal seems to molder. Our departure is from a dank basement which smells of mold. The terminal was built a long time back and perhaps renovated in 1972. Above the basement, on the main part of the international terminal are slanted, tinted windows, stucco, mirrors and wood repeated for decoration or oppresion. Like O’Hare the international part of the terminal is large and largely deserted. I have seen and heard my first Colombians.

Flight, a friendly Australian, a peevish, dull, dogmatic-looking man with a small Notre Dame logo on his sweater is obstreperous and the flight crew laugh at him behind his back. The coffee is astonishingly bad, but the flight crew serve it up unflinching. The night comes sometime over Jamaica; and after a long while a few dim lights and I have seen Colombia again.

Long lines inside the airport, the militarization is evident when you see jackboots, and uniforms not of a softer, civilian cut, but of a military cut and guns: the scowling DAS inspects and stamps our boring passports and our tedious customs forms. Then we wait for baggage one of which does not arrive. Then we stand with another ten of our fellow passengers and fill out forms so that the airline can look into restoring our property to us; the attendant protests that they had another flight come in earlier that day and there were no baggage claims filled out in that one. And I think: congratulations.

On the way out they scan our bags again. I am felt casually by a tall soldier who has a dog with him on a leash. The soldier has clear, brown eyes and looks at me very directly as he quietly asks in Spanish how much currency I bring.

Outside the night, soldiers and military police stroll up and down and watch and watch, short men hawk taxies. I wander a bit in search of an ATM, I hear small Colombian women saying “Chao, chao!” The peculiarities of Colombian Spanish will be a great part of my consciousness for the next few days.

We find the absconded and unnecessary taxi-dispatch booth. Get a slip and get into a taxi and are off into the night. Bogota is warm to our sensation, dim, deserted until we get downtown where micro buses swarm and taxis dart and crowds flow and stand, and garbage waits on the sidewalks for the midnight pickup. We wind into smaller streets, past dim little stores, past streams of students getting out of school at 10PM, onto a winding brick-paved street, between walls to an almost undesignated door.

“I think it’s here” the taxi driver says. He has shown us the Hotel Virrey which is cheap and where he would have stayed. He has given us his hand printed card. He has been most forthcoming. It turns out to be the place, after a long, narrow hall and the small courtyard filled with the obligatory plants. It is dark in Bogota, and damp, and we have arrived.

Food in Colombia comes not with the exhilaration of Mexican food. I thought, at one point, that Bogota is like Mexico City only that the food is worse. It isn’t entirely true, but there is some truth to it. The Colombian food is blander, generally, and I have a taste for sauces and flavors in combination. When it comes to the plain flavor of a thing, however, Colombia holds its proper place.

Take, for example, the humble potato. I cannot stand unmitigated potatoes in the USA. I am no fan of eating a potato with just its simple flavor as the flavor and dislike the practice of the baked potato. But in Colombia that is not the case. In Colombia the flavor of a potato is wonderful. They fry potatoes there and the flavor of them is wonderful. My wife disliked the fries, but I think that is due to their not being coated in all the things wherewith they are coated here. I even enjoyed a plain boiled potato, and I did not even get to the glory of potatoes, the little yellow potato. They make a whole soup based on a potato (Ajiaco) and it is rather plain, but it has the glory of the Colombian potato. When we got back to Orlando and ate at the Chili’s in the airport there, I had some fries. Lousy. Didn’t finish them. Bad potatoes.

They make superior hot chocolate there, especially when they make it with milk and not water, though they do water too. We had chocolate with large slices of cheese and old bread in a damp town sometime after dark. Wonderful.

They have these breads that are cheesy tasting: buñuelos which are fried and almojabanas which are not. Both have the hint of cheese and are good with coffee and with chocolate. The taste is not overpowering, but distinct.

I didn’t have a bad cup of coffee all the time I was there. They apparently export all the best coffee, but what they keep is of no mean quality. It was one of the pleasures of being there that one could stop anywhere, or even at church (at church! when has good coffee ever been served at church by the people of the Lord?) one could get good coffee. In the late afternoons you see the Colombians filling up the cafes all along the centers of the towns, talking, having coffee. Nothing like a place loud with the sound of people talking, with efficient service, and good coffee.

The fresh avocado is one of my delights. Had it in at least three meals—all alone with some salt. There they use the large, green avocado and not the small black one one sees around here, though the difference in the taste is not apparent to me, there just is more of one than of the other. Another thing they do well is fried plantain. Nothing like the taste of it to complement anything, just the bare plantain, ripe (it is ripe when the peel has turned all black) and fried, so that it rests limp beside the rice or meat or wonderful potatoes on whatever state they are.

I had a stale empanada, which was a dumb way to have it, but I saw them stacked in ranks like fish inside of glass counters and shunned them and built up the desire to try one, giving way at last. The best we had back in the day were brought by a woman selling them door to door out of a plastic bucket. Hard to come by that when one is just traveling through.

Fruit is good there: papaya with some lemon (in the USA limes and lemons are reversed: lemons are small and green), mango, jugo de guanabana, guayaba, of course, and the banana. I’m not a fruit eater, but in the heat of the day with the dust and traffic of Bogota it was pleasant to enter a dark and crowded restaurant and among other things, start with some fruit and fresh, not powder concocted, lemonade.

Portions are large there, and compared to the prices here, relatively inexpensive. Even though we walked enormously, my appetite was not equal to the opportunity there. Well, knowing what I know now, next time, should it come, I think the eating will be even better.

So on the fourth day from that time, Silas and Eppie, in their Sunday clothes, with a small bundle tied in a blue linen handkerchief, were making their way through the streets of a great manufacturing town. Silas, bewildered by the changes thirty years had brought over his native place, had stopped several persons in succession to ask them the name of this town, that he might be sure he was not under a mistake about it.

Silas Marner, George Eliot

Tunja

Tunja is an old town, having been founded during the last half of the 16th Century. The bus station is at the bottom of the hill on which the older part of the city is built, and climbing up that hill having recently arrived into the altitude of the Andes is a noticeable experience. We weren’t down to a small bundle tied in a blue linen handkerchief, but we were kind of glad we had lost Katrina’s bag and not stayed in Bogota to retrieve it. I noticed there was a hotel advertising not only private bathrooms but also color TV down by the bus station. but I thought it might be a bit too authentic, and I knew the center of town was old; I wanted to be up there. The center of town is on the top of the hill, for some reason, and so we went gradually up the hill.

We found a hotel with a long, narrow entryway and went through into one of these courtyards around which all the old colonial buildings are built. I went to elementary school in buildings like that and I wish people would still build that way because the buildings lend themselves to all sorts of convenient use. In this case, instead of making classrooms they made individual hotel rooms. The place was cheap enough ($12) and even had private bathrooms. I settled for it but probably ought to have looked around longer. Tunja is the capital of the Department of Boyaca and eventually we saw the better hotel, but ours was a Colombian experience: hard bed, cold shower, TV blaring in the courtyard till 12AM or so, single naked light bulb on the wall, padlock to lock your door, solicitous if helpless staff.

We walked. It is a busy little place, Tunja, and nowadays the disconcerting thing is traffic. So we were tired by the time we went to bed, and slept fine on the hard bed, and left early, and ended up spending around twenty dollars altogether in Tunja since we did not really have a meal there. In the Casa del Fundador, beside the cathedral and one of the actual buildings from the 16th Century, now, we had the good hot chocolate and cheese and bread and talked to the owner.

Sogamoso

Sogamoso was the destination I wanted to reach since it was the town in which I had grown up. It is warmer than Tunja, and we actually got sunburned there. Sugamuxi is the old Chibcha name for the place, and I remember that is somehow associated with La Ciudad del Sol, or at least Sogamoso is called the city of the sun. They have a great monument of some Chibcha women worshiping the sun in the plaza right in front of the cathedral.

Not far from the cathedral, on the north side, I believe, is the Hotel Litavira where we stayed. Here they had hot water, firm beds, and less rustic service. Colombians are all very friendly and helpful, but some of them are shy when it comes to talking to Americans. In Tunja and Iza we had some shy ones, but in Sogamoso not so much. The sun was not shy in Sogamoso, and we walked to and fro and up and down trying to keep in the shade. Traffic is the bane of Colombian cities nowadays, it seems to me. What with the altitude and being short of breath till you get used to it, the direct equatorial sun, and the exhaust from all the little cars, it can get unpleasant on the streets. But this was not the worst of Sogamoso.

Many good things are in Sogamoso, but many of the old things are passing out of it. After the shock of finding the street where I had lived—it was all very small at that point, almost miniature—and a rapid retreat, we wandered and by a long circuit returned to the hotel. In the late afternoon we found the old quarter where the fountain is and climbed the hill and looked out of the town sprawling in the valley. I was happier on the hill than in the valley, as the old quarter was still characteristic of what I remembered.

Iza

We left for Iza the next day. Iza used to be another Indian village. I don’t know if the Chibcha’s built their towns on the edge of the eastern mountains or if the later settlers did, but the village of Iza is still on the edge of the eastern mountains, has narrow roads, old buildings and very little traffic. There it was pleasant, and we walked across the valley through the green pastures under the shade of the willows to the foot of the western mountain where the hot springs are. These smell of sulphur and that smell, as smell tends to do with me, brought back memories. Then we went up the dirt road along the side of the mountain, under the eucalyptus, looking out over the valley beside us.

El Rincon de los Sauces in the days of its glory was a wonderful place with a great old house that had a low, dark bar, a dining room, places for guests, and to my imagination suggested a place full of undiscovered, interesting rooms. I think I had been told by my mother something had happened but I was not prepared to see part of the old house collapsed and the whole thing uninhabitable. Neglect had come to it due to the death of its owner and some legal battles subsequent.

But one can still stay in the cabins or where we did in a row of rooms with six beds in each. No TV and hot water, though one wishes there were more in the way of armchairs. We lingered there, reading in the shade with the cool wind, climbing a ways up the mountain and between the pine, eucalyptus and cactus to look over the valley at the town in the distance, walking back to the town and wandering in it, having coffee at the square and supper in the only restaurant we could find open, all by ourselves. It was quiet there all day till around 8 some people came to a cabin near our room and had a parranda till 12AM. And the next day we got the bus to Sogamoso and from there another bus to Bogota.

The airlines managed to misplace our baggage going down and coming back. They can’t help it, really, as they are all run by incompetent people who are out to get me. In this world we must be afflicted by such things, and worse, perpetrate such incompetence ourselves from time to time. Airlines, however, do it more than anybody else and nowadays have the effrontery to charge a person to mishandle his baggage, besides enforcing a whole bunch of arbitrary and ridiculous Government notions that have been codified into law. Part of this is due to the fact that these companies hire people who couldn’t think their way out of a barf bag. Part of it is due to the fact that their attempts at efficiency impose inefficiency. A plane can be loaded as quickly by letting everybody get on at once as it can by loading people in rows—Icelandair does it all the time, or did when I flew with them. It is especially inefficient to board the first class first, but then people are not awarded first class seats as a result of an IQ test, nor is such a test administered for persons wishing to work for an airline in any capacity, apparently.

Especially not Northwest in which airline all the employees are definitely well and safely below average. American Airlines may not be as bad as Northwest—they only managed to lose one bag and not both of them—but by far the worst coffee in the world I have ever tasted and could not even finish was the coffee served on our flight from Miami to Bogota. I think it might have had something to do with vulcanizing rubber before it got to the coffee pot, but I’m not really a connoisseur of that sort of thing since, I suppose, I do not really fly all that often. American Airlines certainly gets the award for the most abysmal breakfast ever served in the history of aviation for what they served up on the flight from Bogota to Miami. Green eggs, lousy boiled yucca and some extremely dubious sausage.

Let me also single out the Boeing corporation’s 757 as the world’s airplane of worst design. Not surprisingly ( I was in six airplanes all together—two airlines and both of them, unfortunately, American ones) and none of my flights failed to be on a 757. I suppose there are many airplanes designed that probably cannot fly at all and which even employees of Northwest Airlines might be expected to balk at which are sitting on the drawing boards over at the Boeing corporation somewhere. How the 757 got past anybody is not mystery: it is actually predictable: it is absolutely the worst thing they can get away with so far. I had a better seat and more comfortable for a bus ride that cost me a dollar from a quiet village to a small town and that cost me less than ten from a small town to the capital of Colombia. I had a more comfortable ride in the back seat of a sub-compact Colombian taxi with my wife and luggage for two bucks than I had in any single seat located anywhere in the main cabin of a Boeing 757 for $100 and more. When at last I sat in the seat of my Chevy Cobalt I felt like I was in the lap of luxury, and I have sometimes wondered if the seats of Chevy Cobalts had been designed by the Boeing corporation or an employee of Northwest Airlines as they make less sense than other car seats. If anybody can, somebody ought to advise the Boeing corporation about putting windows in their cheap airplanes as they do have the knack of placing all of them exactly wrong. Perhaps the Boeing corporation ought to be in the business of modern art or modern art galleries, or just gather as a herd on the sides of a hill and precipitately all run into the sea and drown.

I would wonder why all these things are, but I am pretty sure I know. It is too bad, in our day, that rail and ship are not more prevalent as it seems to me they could seriously compete with airlines that are obviously not even trying. Or maybe just carts pulled by oxen, managed intelligently, could bring the whole airline industry to its knees in a few short weeks. It is too bad we don’t use smaller planes, or at least planes built by companies that know something about the sort of creature the planes are built to transport—although in the airline industry (take the TSA for example) that is probably asking for too much. Something is rotten with modern travel, for it has not become more convenient, more interesting or comfortable. It may be faster, though I sometimes doubt they even hold the key to that. Can one say that modern travel is shorter? I would not be that person; modern travel, I think, is interminable, and the curious thing is that the interminable bits all have to do with staying in the same place waiting. Somebody could improve on the whole flying experience immensely by eliminating the TSA or privatizing it or telling passengers to fly at their own risk and let us bring our own weapons, bottles of water, shampoo and other such hazardous substances, by having a more efficient system of runways which required less taxying and queuing, or by the unusual measure of either bringing service up to the level for which they charge, or bringing the costs down to the level of service they provide.

When men of future times look back on our age and wonder at things, certainly they will marvel at our tolerance of nefarious organization such as airlines, the Boeing corporation, and among all government programs, the inept and pointless TSA, not to mention air traffic control.

And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

Job 1:7

One of the distortions of travel is that for people with a comfortable and organized way of living the comfort of organization and routine is largely lost. Even if it is a peculiarity of organized people who enjoy their comforts to be able to adjust quickly to a new situation and order it to their comfort, it is difficult to retain when one travels. Some persons are not organized, and the absence of order does not encroach so much on their comforts. I believe the comforts of such persons are probably of the more ephemeral, rather than otherwise, and that on the whole the disorganized life is far less worth living; but it has to be true in some way that if one lives a life characterized by more chaos than order, then one has less to lose during travel when an inevitable imposition of greater disorder might be expected.

Thomas à Kempis has made me pause to think when he warns against traveling, and when he urges that those who must travel to avoid looking at the landscape in order to avoid distraction. In our day travel is a measure of success, which makes one think that what à Kempis warns against is not to be taken lightly. It is common to call what à Kempis advocates Puritanism, especially if one wants to dismiss it. And yet it is one of the marks of Christianity in all ages that the more intense and admirable manifestations of it are never without a certain tendency toward an absolute ascetical purity. It remembers that man is one thing and not many, even though it tends to forget that man has many faculties and levels of responsibility in the world and not just one. It was the genius of George MacDonald and the transmission of that vision by C.S. Lewis that found the intensity of holiness (holiness, it sometimes seems to me, is the quality things achieve when they are put to their proper use—as marriage is holy—though this is not an exhaustive definition of holiness and completely inadequate when applied to that which lies outside of the created order, namely God whose holiness is absolute, as holiness, in some sense, always must be) in what might be the opposite tendency, the tendency of fecundity, creativity and (here follows a word that is probably on the verge of becoming useless through tendentious, ideological—that was redundant—use) diversity, rather then the unifying and simplifying tendency of ascetic Christianity. The warning of Thomas à Kempis is a good one. The unexamined life is not worth living because it is not a Christian way of living as it is a disordered rather than an ordered life.

Home is a place that you order in order to live your life, and all travel is a departure from that place. We long for home when we long for peace, for familiar arrangement, for comfort, and especially when we long for the leisure without which it is impossible to live an examined life. Home is the place of stillness, of attunement, of contemplation. To desire to travel, in some way, is to desire, however indirectly, to cause at least distorting ripples on the surface of the clear waters of our contemplation. To desire travel is also to desire a destination, another place. When we go to other places it is common for us to return bearing things that we add to our homes, things that remind us of the other place and which serve as symbols of something we have achieved by the means of travel or just ways of starting conversations, I suppose. But the real benefits of travel arise through contemplation. You cannot be active and contemplative at the same time unless you have achieved a sort of consciousness to which the human race has not yet arrived. And so I have returned, and am home, and am glad for Minnesota and the cold, the sealed houses, the steam and heat, the snow and the smell of winter outside, the partial order we have achieved in our present establishment, and I am ready to contemplate my activities and recover from the distortions of travel, from which one can profit by reflection.

How to order these, reflections, however, is the thing at the outset. Location? Location brings with it the tyranny of chronology and we of the human race still have very limited notions about time (Owen Barfield, a companion on this journey by means of a very interesting book I borrowed from a friend and will now have to replace, gave me this idea and backed it up with an illustration comparing the Medieval notion of gravity with our present notion of gravity which is somewhat more expanded). I’m not sure I want such organization, besides already having it in the green notes in my notebook, which exist in a certain state of disorder. I do not desire the tyranny of chronology. Perhaps I might examine my travel under the various disorders inflicted upon me or which I inflicted upon myself. There it becomes apparent to me that whatever tyrannizing image one uses to polarize what one wants to order brings with it a certain inevitability. The positive pole at which you begin implies the negative pole at which you end. It makes me thing that I ought to be asking what instruction do I want to derive from my contemplation? Perhaps this is how the wise man must proceed and it has only now become apparent to me. I am not, however, wise enough to desire that at this point. I want to arrange things into a coherent whole, because I believe coherency essential to clarity and wisdom, and I would like my reflections on this journey to be characterized by whatever measure of both I can achieve. But I am afraid of failing to learn by a certain lack of exploration. The examination which makes for an examined life is directed at the unexamined life, and must be, it seems to me, a kind of exploration, a participation in thought rather than an imposition of thought, seeking out of that which is exterior to arrange that which is interior by the perfect alignment of both (I spent a lot of time reading Barfield rather slowly, you see, and I think what I’m after is a more perfect apprehension of the implications of what he said—and everything in my life up to this point, just because he is the sort of thinker who hates to leave anything out and it rubs off—through the medium of my reflections on the experiences I had). Contrast and comparison is a form of organization that usually appeals to me, but however unwisely, I feel more ambitious which will probably lead to a lack of organization. I believe form is imaginally perceived, that order must arise organically, from inside of the thing, rather than being imposed from a prior abstraction the result of a mere feat of reason, and so that is my great difficulty in all of life.

Well, one way or another, here it comes. Some topics, tentatively:

The Great Potato, or, Eating There, or, The Coffee Was Welcome
Some Locations: Tunja, Sogamoso, Iza, Bogota
Mountains and Valleys
Memory and Time
Disparagement of Airlines, none of which are competently run
Bureaucracy and Militarization
El Vallenato, or Give Me Handel
Ruin and Dismay, or Our Irrelation to Time
Altitude
Things One Might Not Expect, etc.
Ways of Living, or, Missionaries, Order & Pilgrimage
Or, Anthroposophy, the Meaning and Culmination of Romanticism—Barfield again.