Skip to main content

Warning: contains goats

Day 69 - Desierto de la Tatacoa

The road forked. One way lay the city of Cali, population: 2.5 million. The other way lay the Tatacoa Desert, population: goats. Which way to go? The town of Villa Vieja lay on the fringes of the desert's sparse expanse. It is a town were nothing much happens and nobody seems to have anything much to do or at least not with any urgency, mañana indeed. A chicken bus replete with actual chickens dropped us in the main plaza. Shaded from the beating sun, old men ruminated in small groups while schoolgirls giggled in green gingham. A 'mototaxi', something akin to a cage welded to a moped, would take us the rest of the way. The first sign of our desiccated destination was a cactus sat incongruously among the trees. Trees that gradually turned to stunted shrubs above grass that straggled and yellowed. The landscape opened up before us as rocky dunes took the place of flat pasture. Life seemed absent save for wandering cows and the ubiquitous goats.
Estadero de Los Hoyos would be our oasis in the wilderness. We wandered lonely as the white clouds above, away from its squat concrete structures and down a dirt track winding further into the desert's interior. Unmolested by human presence save our own everything was silent and still. It was a place where a man could lose himself in solitude, could allow the din of life to quietly subside, could find a kind of peace. The sky seemed bigger and bluer out there, a deity to the two tiny dots that walked beneath it. We returned for a lunch interrupted by the voracious antics of a goat whose inquisitive hunger so typified his species. He enthusiastically supped beer from Michael's proffered cup and though my offer of hot sauce induced a sneezing fit I doubt it will curb his culinary adventures in the future. For his finale he abandoned all social decorum and surmounted the table itself in search of what lunch scraps he could find. As night fell over the Tatacoa and the horizon streaked purple and orange we set off again, this time in search of a restaurant for dinner. After 45 minutes of fruitless stumbling and having admitted to ourselves we had little (read: no) idea of the distance to our destination the inevitable retreat began. Our return was rewarded with a sumptuous dinner of rice and spaghetti flavoured with small chunks of what we feared was our four-legged friend from earlier.
With little in the way of passing traffic the desert was never going to be the easiest pace to hail a cab. Come the morning and feeling like a latter-day Livingstone and Stanley, Hillary and Norgay, Scott and Oates we resolved to escape the desert on foot. The two of us plodded a metronomic pace through undulating sandstone watched by distant peaks. A carpet of green began to spread across the land and the sky closed in to hug our perspective. Butterflies danced in the verges - black, white, red-dotted and swallow-tailed. Life returned as birds warbled to each other in the now proud trees. Everything in Villa Vieja was just as we'd left it as though time had stood still, time for another bus, time for another place.

Comments

Popular posts

The Duke

Pub review They say: "We came for a skittle on a Saturday night and they were very welcoming but you know how you hear about lizards ruling the world, the barstaff had a very lizardy look. Make your own mind up!" --Craig Savage 4/5 I say: 'The place where everybody knows your name' The claim is painted onto the wall and doesn't seem so outlandish on this chilly Tuesday night as there is no-one in the pub to know my name or not. Dry January? I can't imagine that's a thing around these parts. You don't keep over 30 pubs in business with virtuous gestures like that. It might be a Tuesday thing. Per usual I try to find a quiet corner with my beer, surely an easy task in an empty pub? Not so. Speakers hang from every nook and carpet the space in a thick fog of sound. It isn't even the usual autotuned pop/R&B dirge being vomited into my ears. That stuff I can confine to a background hum. Instead it's the pre-match commentary for the Brighto

Sisyphean Airlines

Day 56 - Panama City We nearly didn't make it into this slip of a country. Cruel fortune had us standing in the queue for the only Panamanian border officer who had read and decided to adhere to the rules. "Return ticket?" bugger.  His steely, uncompassionate gaze was unmoved by our desperate explanations of our travel 'plans'. Bribery also failed to move him to endorse our entry so our bus driver, with infinite generosity, offered to relieve us of another $36 to write up a return ticket to San José that we would never use. This finally satisfied the entry requirements and the stamp thumped down. The country is divided by a synonymous strip of water down which floats a not insignificant quantity of the world's goods. Though our initial plan was to dive the canal, renovations kiboshed that idea and we had to settle for the traditional topside view.  On initial viewing the city itself seems built on the wealth its transoceanic connection brings.  Buildings soa

Angkor Whaaaaat?

Day 5 - Siem Reap With the water festival finished we has one more place to visit in Cambodia. Angkor Wat is an indisputable wonder of the world and the largest religious monument ever constructed. It sits within a temple complex covering 400km², the scale of which is impossible to adequately describe. Its towers seem to rise organically from the ground, the stone flowering from the earth into wonderfully symmetric form. Only modern capitalism and totalitarian hubris seem to inspire similar architectural endeavour as the gods did in the past. I don't necessarily agree with any of those ideologies and their human cost but religion's diminished power permits me a less coloured appreciation of its monuments. In the stone of Angkor Wat you see reflected the same desire for, and defiant belief in, permanence that runs through our species. I see it in the chiselled signage above the entrance to long dead banks and businesses in the City of London. The owners thought the gilded lobb