The Conscious Traveler: Colombia
After the hell that was Panama for me, there was no other feeling that could beat what it felt like to arrive in Colombia. Imagine after almost two years of Traveling and not only visiting, but living in every single country in Continental North America and many in the Caribbean. What it felt like to not only once again be in an entirely new country, but an entirely new Continent — There was a feeling of completion, a feeling of accomplishment, but there was also a feeling of starting fresh and anew.
After Landing in Bogota I waited in the airport till morning to catch a bus to the random hotel I had looked at online. While waiting I reflected on all of the friends I had made, all of the side quests I had been on and all of the lessons I had learned.
Bogota
When I arrived at my hotel I immediately crashed and slept till the early afternoon. I woke to the sounds of motorcyclists working and testing out their bikes. When I looked outside, as far as I could see, there were shops fine tuning bikes and selling merchandise for motorcycles. Anyone who has been to Latin America will tell you a moto is the number one way to get around, but never have I seen anything like what I saw in Bogota. After a bit I decided to go out to the bank to get some money. * Travel Tip* When you are abroad, an easy way to dodge high fees at the ATM is to use apps like Remitly and pick your money up at the local bank, or the old school western union is a great way as well. When I went back to my hotel I slept till midnight when I awoke to get some food to eat. I headed out and walked the opposite direction than what I walked in the afternoon. After one block I was in the red light district. After all my time in Latin America I have not seen an area so vicey. Little did I know, sex work was legalized in Colombia. I am not one to participate in the purchasing of sex workers, but I have always enjoyed being on the alt side of town. This time around though, I was over it. I had been living in a hooker motel for a month in Panama before leaving and had been living in San Jose in Costa Rica prior. Still there were things I needed and wanted to do in Bogota before heading up to Mexico for a most important affair. Before moving to a different part of town though I did get to know one sex worker in a bar who told me she and most of the women working that district came from Venezuela and she was dying to get back but the money was just too good to give up in Colombia and she makes double there than what she would in Venezuela. It's the same story the neighbors I had in the hotel in Panama told me except in Panama the women came from Colombia.
Moto shops as far as the eye can see
After a few days in the “other side of town” I moved to a part of town that facilitated a different type of fun, Clubbing. I hadn’t been in a decent club since my time in Philadelphia when I was forced to take that hiatus from my travels for a month. This accommodation was centered more in the center of Bogota and was a nice walk away from a Muay Thai gym I had been dying to check out. This place also had a kitchen which meant I would be able to cook for myself, which is something that I hadn’t been able to do in months. This was a prime place for me to be for a time, but I was still growing bored of the city.
The Gym I trained at, Exile Muay Thai, was pretty decent. They had talented guys and a young couch who paid attention to his fighters. The regiment was great and very practical. I got to work with everyone. The gym was the highlight of my time in Bogota. The clubbing on the other hand was a let down. There was this world renowned club, Octavia, that I had been dying to go to since my time in Nicaragua. I have a list of clubs around the world I want to visit. The music was great, the DJs were amazing, but the atmosphere, which is a key factor in if a club is good, was off. There were tables on the dance floor, which is a no no in any decent techno club. There was a VIP area, which is absolutely a no-no in a techno club and the crowd there was just too obsessed with looking like the videos they have seen of people having fun at EDM carnivals in other countries than actually having fun. At any good techno spot there is the feeling of the outside world not existing; it's just the dance floor. There is a sensuality to the dancing, to the interactions. At Octavia though, although the DJs were great, the atmosphere did not help manufacture a feeling of sensuality.
Fitlandia
Giant hands holding a giant mug
After being let down by Bogota in some ways (don't get me wrong, It was great, just not what I was looking for, but if I were to live in Colombia, I would probably still live in Bogota) I decided to go to Fitlandia. It was a random small town even deeper in the mountains than Bogota. Here they had a week of festivals and parties for Columbus day, but during my time there most of it was spent hanging out in bed at the hostel I was staying in. Okami, my dog, would go out exploring with the hostel owner's son and come back and tell me about what they did for the day. I was finally understanding what the women I had met in my travels who had loved Colombia actually liked. After two weeks of city life that seemed to only appeal to male tourists. I finally got to see the part of the country that they were telling me about. Although I was in a small town most have not heard of I imagine it was similar to the areas they had been to. So much of what I was accustomed to seeing about Colombia on social media made it out to be this place of vice young men from around the world go to to have sex with hookers and party. Especially places such as Cali and Bogota. Before leaving the U.S. to start this journey years ago a colleague of mine obsessively would talk about Colombia in this very way, where he would travel to Colombia and get himself a sexy girlfriend that knew her place, because he was over the “masculine” energy girls in America had, specifically his baby mother.
Morelia Film Festival
After my time in Fitlandia it was time to make my way up to Mexico for a rather important affair. I was set to attend the Morelia Film Festival where I would be doing a Q and A after the premiere of a documentary about my late mother Diane Luckey, known to the world as Q Lazzarus. The documentary, “Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus made by her closest friend before dying Eve Fuentes was premiering that coming Saturday and Eve had booked for me a stay for the entire weekend going into the middle of the following week.
After dropping my dog off at a puppy hotel for the 5 days I would be gone, I hopped on a plane for Mexico City where I would be meeting Eva and her boyfriend ,a character I am quite fond of, Benji. We spent the night at her parents home and in the morning we were off to Morelia.
That evening and into the night was spent watching the premiere of “Emilia Perez”. A few of the cast members were there to give a Q and A before the viewing. Now, this is not a film critic blog, so I will keep it short and simple. After the first fifteen minutes to twenty minutes of the film I knew the critical lens leftists streets that I associate myself with were going to tear that film apart when it was released and I was not wrong. After only being able to stand the film for its first act; me, Eve and Benji went out to the hall where the opening night reception dinner was taking place. There I met a couple of Eva’s friends, Jim and his little sister Meg, who both knew so much about the festival that I thought for the remainder of the festival that they had worked for it. Not until the end did I discover neither of them were a part of the staff there. After the reception dinner Meg took me out to the after party that was going on. It was just what I needed after spending so much time in the mediocre night clubs I had been to in the rest of Latin America. I was finally at a party where there was a good atmosphere and good djing. Not particularly as good as places I was used to back home, but exceptional. Also I drank for free at every place in town so I can not complain.
Me and Eve
The second night was my big night. Throughout the entire day me and Eva had interviews to attend where we talked about a film that I hadn’t ever seen before. When it was time to see the film I cried as soon as the opening sequence started till the end of the film. Imagine seeing on the big screen, in an audience filled with strangers, the wrong doings the music industry has done to your mother, the hardships that she went through. Imagine having life changing facts about your own life depicted on screen and being said by your own mother. Now imagine never knowing any of it and finding all of it out at the same time those strangers do in the theater. I couldn’t take it, I cried the entire time. Afterwards in the QnA I felt a sense of power representing my mom and through the tears I gave answers to the audience’s questions the best I could. Afterward Eve, Benji and I, along with Eve’s very elegant and lovely sister Chloe went to dinner. As we pushed through the double doors of a historic colonial building. I thought to myself “ This is a Lovely restaurant” as that thought finished Chloe looked over to me to tell me “Can you believe this is someone's home”? This was the home of the organizer of the festival and owner of a well established movie theater company throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. While on the rooftop enjoying a pre-dinner cocktail someone introduced me to this woman named Liv. She looked so familiar and I felt extremely comfortable around her as soon as she spoke. She asked me how I was feeling after seeing my mother’s life unravel on screen. She wanted to know so much about me and somehow it came up that I was a fisherman in Alaska which she was absolutely fascinated by. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew who she was, the feeling that I had seen her before. I Asked her if we had met before — “You seem very familiar, have we met”? She said she doesn’t think so. I asked her what she did for a living. “I am an actor,” she told me. As I asked her what she had been in Eve came over and said “ I knew the two children of Rock Stars would get along” and in that instance I connected the dots and said “ Oh, I am so sorry! You are Liv Tyler. How could I not have made that connection sooner, I used to listen to your father all of the time. My mother was a huge fan”. From then on until dinner me and her were inseparable. She told me about why she was there, she was on the film committee as a judge, and about her chicken she raised back home. I told her about my adventures with my dog abroad. Chloe teased me about the entire thing. After dinner Meg had let me know she and her brother were at a party that was much better than the one that we attended the night before. So I headed over where I was greeted by the pair and we partied all night. When things died down there was this woman, who at the time I thought was a model, who I was very infatuated by. She had a beautiful dress that was encrusted entirely in crystals and a pair of gloves that went three fourths up her arms. We started to talk and not once did it come up why we were even at the film festival to begin with and after a bit, we decided to go home together. The next day I found out from Meg that Ishbel was not in fact a model but an actress. The reason why I didn’t see her earlier in the evening? Our films were showing at the same time. Her’s a netflix top ten. Mine, an indie telling of my mothers life.
Post viewing QnA
On Sunday I moved to a different hotel on the other side of town with a beautiful view of the Michoacán scenery. Afterwards I went for lunch at a local shop for a chicharron torta, I had been missing Mexican food since leaving Mexico so I filled up on as much as I could. There was a second viewing of my mother’s documentary so I sat outside of the theater eating. This is when things started to become strange in town. I had been sitting outside of the theater when a group of teenagers came up to me to ask for a photo. I was confused about why till one of them told me they recognized me from the film last night. I, with a shirt filled with torta crumbs, obliged them. Afterwards when I entered the theater I snuck into the back to watch the film once again. Only this time I couldn’t make it all the way through. About half way in I left. The emotions I was feeling was too overwhelming to watch it all the way through a second time. I walked around Morelia for a bit, running into people that recognized me and wanted to take photos, which prompted people that didn’t know me at all to be curious enough to take photos with me. I was a tall black guy that appeared to have some sort of fame, it turned heads. I made my way over to the main theater where I used my guest pass to go see a film about the CEO of an important record label in Latin America who signed a lot of artists that I had grown familiar with while traveling through Central America and the Caribbean.
Afternoons in Morelia were spent eating lunch with different directors and people in film. Evenings were spent on a billionaires rooftop having cocktails. Just like the previous night I spent most of my time that evening in the company of Liv, talking as much as we could till we had to go tend to our respective obligations. This evening however ended with Eva and Benji going to a separate party with me and Meg. Afterwards me and Meg met up with her cousins and we continued to look for another party, but as that quest became more and more futile it was only me and Meg left. While we searched for the next venue, my new found fame got me into another awkward predicament. Two drunk women had come out of a bar and faced me with my back against the wall. Things quickly became awkward when they started to ask me to kiss them. I froze, I didn’t know the proper way to say no without sounding mean, but Meg came to my rescue and dragged me out of there yelling at the girls like a protective mother. She escorted me safely back to my hotel like the classy lady she is.
Monday was filled with viewing different films, but in the evening me, Eva, Chloe and Benji met with Francis Ford Coppola and sat around a beautiful private den and bar listening to him tell stories from his past. I joked “I didn’t know the great wine maker also made films”. After a couple of hours of hanging out with Francis the four of us attended a dinner at the city palace where us and the other guests were entertained by a children’s orchestra. Afterwards I partied with Meg one last time and what a last time it was. The next morning I overslept and the housekeeper caught me sleeping butt ass naked with someone from the balcony window. I missed the meeting time with Eva and the gang for our departure. Luckily Chloe’s rich college friend who had been hosting us for dinners with Coppola and Liv offered us his chauffeur to bring us all the way back to Mexico City. That evening I flew back to Colombia.
Homeless in Colombia
Upon my return to Colombia I was met with a litany of problems. It was now important for me to have a closer communication with business ventures in the U.S after the premiere of the film, but I didn’t have a phone since leaving Panama and I didn’t have enough disposable income to buy a new one at the time. After having just enough for a room on the evening I landed I knew I wouldn’t have enough for a stay and I was now effectively homeless. Bogota could be quite cold in the evening and it very rarely got above 65 degrees that time of year I was there. Here I was — the previous week on a rooftop rubbing shoulders with Celebrities and the wealthy in Mexico and now I was completely homeless. Though, I was optimistic about my circumstances and felt that it could make for a good analysis for my writing
A bench that I frequently slept on during my homeless stint
The first thing I did during my two weeks in Bogota as homeless was go to the puppy hotel Okami was staying at and tell the owners it would be another bit of time before I was able to come back to get him. They agreed to take care of him and I was relieved till I could get back on my feet. I wasn’t nervous about being homeless. It had happened to me before in Panama and I had learned how to operate. The biggest issue I faced was the temperatures at night which I never became comfortable with. In the day time I walked around the city exploring different nooks and crannies — I got to know Bogota very intimately. In the evening I slept in the bus station and became familiar with the other homeless people in the area near the station. I would imagine for them it was strange to have an American amongst them. For me it felt good to not be completely ostracized from community. The “ones without” were much more generous and showed a sincerity with each other that you would expect from your average “one with”, but you rarely see it. There was this panhandler I used to walk by on a daily basis before leaving to Fitlandia, who I used to give money to and converse with when I had the time to. When I returned as homeless, after a few days he clocked me for it and offered me his food. After a week of living on the street a friend of mine I had met a few weeks prior invited me to her house for the evening to have a hot meal and a shower. The next day I went to visit Okami and tell the hotel it will be a little more time. By this time I had started a website for my mothers estate and her film and was making money from selling shirts. I still needed about a weeks time to make enough to get my dog and then head out of town to the next chosen leg of my journey, the Amazon jungle. This is around the time things became particularly rough. I had been kicked out of the bus station in the evening and now had to sleep on various benches in the city. One thing I realized, or rather, experienced during my time as a homeless person, is that normally one does not start out crazy and then under his or her condition become homeless. There is this narrative to protect the mentally ill before they end up homeless and not from a sincere angle, but from a self preservation angle. “If you just muster through life without going crazy, you should be okay”. From what I experienced though, very quickly the housed world can sense a freshly homeless person and from that moment on there is a subconscious dehumanization of that homeless person. Something as simple as ignoring them, not because they are asking for something like money or resources, but because you fear that question just might come out of their mouth. Capitalism strikes again. I think through this dehumanizing and the unhoused persons realization that they are being treated like a second class citizen, leads them down a road of psychosis or mental illness. When no one will talk to you, you may end up talking to yourself. For me though, after two weeks of being homeless I had enough money to get my dog from the hotel and head into the Amazon.
La Amazona
Me, Okami and a travel friend in the Amazon
It took me almost a week to successfully get to La Macarena, a town in the exterior Amazon, where you can walk in and out of the deeper parts of the jungle freely. I fell in love with the town and all of the surrounding towns. I found work at a hotel where half my pay went towards my stay and the other half I saved for a guide to show me around a lesser known wonder of the world ,Cano Cristales. I became friends with all the employees of the hotel and spent my days working and my nights practicing my Spanish, which at the time and still to this day should be better than what it is. There were weekly festivals and live music in the streets and a piece of nature the size of the United States that was relatively untouched by man. This was exactly what I needed.
A band practices in the courtyard
After a month of working at the hotel I saved up enough for a guide to go to Cano Cristales. I was joined by a Frenchman who had arrived the night before and his guide. It took us an hour on the back of motos, a river crossing and an hour of walking to reach Cano Cristales. After that we explored for hours. For those that don’t know, Cano Cristales is this location filled with lakes rivers and waterfalls that are different colors. Any given body of water can be red, blue, green, yellow, or any other color imaginable. This is due to many different reasons, from biodiversity within the water to the natural color of the stones. There are also pools of hot water that complement the chilled freshwater waterways. I was tired of being in cities and this excursion was meant to get my travelers mind into nature mode, focusing on getting physically into spaces occupied by nature.
360 degree drops and waterfalls appear randomly in Cano Cristales
The next day, Okami and I said goodbye to the Amazon. We said goodbye to all of the workers. The locals we had grown accustomed to knowing, the grandmother from Cali whose daughter was a doctor, but she had to work as a traveling escort in small Amazon towns to make a living. She would babysit Okami, obviously not because that lil independent guy needed it, but because she had grown to love him in a very grandmotherly way. I miss all of them.
