I arrived in Necoclí before 6 in the morning. Waiting for my host after my bus from Turbo dropped me, another bus came to park in front of the bakery I was eating in, and a thought about accessibility came to me: “How would the people here, with this bus not as fancy as French public transportation (a platform on wheels with benches and a roof) would do if one disabled person would come around?” I imagined something like pulling the person up, somehow… And lots of smiles…
After meeting my startled host (I tend to have photos with very short hair or a lot of them), doing some groceries, taking a tuk tuk to go further from the centre, crossing a river after taking off the shoes, hoping to not fall in with the electronics, I discovered a protected paradise, full of animals and an empty beach.
This stay has been a thoughts challenging experience on many levels, as lighting up the bonfire out of scraps brought on the beach by the sea is not exactly the most environmental friendly idea I had in mind, but when you’re far from everything, you have to think differently based on what you have at hands. We also talked about health systems and the cancer industry, and how chemotherapy is forced onto people, when less invasive methods can actually work. Considering the recent stories from my family and close friends, the conversation definitely rang a bell.
These were 4 days of absolute tranquillity (albeit a lot of talking). I remember lying down on the beach, watching the cloudy sky, closing my eyes for a while and opening them to a clear starry sky… It is the first time, when looking at the sky, that I fell I’m lying on a place that belongs to a way bigger whole, instead of watching a panoramic image of stars. It is a good feeling…
This is the beach where we would watch fishermen patiently practising their craft at night, in the distance…
A lot of talking, a lot of cooking and a lot of eating, with all the stories that came with S.’ delicious food. Stories about mapanas and tarantulas when the mangrove is flooding the area… The home-made madeleines, the monitor lizards hunting for Chirimoya, the hot chocolate, the Bollo slices fried in coconut oil, the fallen mangoes from the numerous surrounding trees and the subsequent nectar extracted with her magic machine. This really makes me feel I should dive deeper into cooking and baking. So many combinations of colours and tastes, like… Try to mix spirulina with garlic for example!
The food was not the only upside, as I came to live with beautiful toches, a whip spider that really didn’t want to leave my room, blue crabs hiding in their holes on both sides of the path as I walked by, creating some really weird animated scenery, tiny asymmetric clawed crabs, pelicans flying low over the water for fishing, a few big and small lizards, with short or long legs, and a dead tarantula falling from the roof, right in front of us (why here and then?)…
G., a friend of S., lead me to the gigantic “tree of the witches” (misbehaving kids were threatened to be sent there), more recently called the “tree of the wishes”, where weird slimy things were falling on me… Needless to say I didn’t stay long.
One of the moments I will keep with me forever is that night where I was seating on the beach alone (There is mostly crabs out there), watching the storms on Panama and around the bay, lighting the entirety of the sky and the sea, casting moving shadows as the waves got stronger with their approaching winds, thunder mixing its rumble with the sound of waves crashing on the shore…
I left this wild heaven to head for Santa Marta, through Tolú, where Y. helped me to find a place for the night I planned to stay there, then Cartagena.
