A Travel Day

I awake as the heat of the sun that starts to fill my tent with unbearably hot air. Pearls of sweat starting collecting on my forehead and drip down my tired face. As I climb out of the tent most people were already awake and ready - and it was not even 06:30. We start walking without a breakfast to one of the sacred places of the land we were staying on. The land was lived on by a tribe that had been forced to relocate from their ancestral land and had now started building a community in the outskirts of Cartagena. A Shaman from Arhuaco tribe in Sierra Nevada leads the ceremony that now follows. Through different processes we start cleaning the land and finish with a nice breakfast back in the village. Now the conversations started, and admittedly with my limited spanish it was pretty difficult to keep track but I imagine they were talking about the preservation of the tribes living in the Caribbean coast of Colombia. Like they had the day before during a conference in the University of Cartagena. Shortly before finishing off the last bits of rice on my plate a beat up and colourful bus pulls into the village. We get on it shortly after to reach the bus terminal of Cartagena, where most of our ways would part and everyone would head back to their homes. I had decided to go with Eduardo, a professor in the University of Magdalena. We had been somewhat dropped off in the wrong terminal so we had to take a taxi to the other side of the city, however the taxi doesn't survive and we break down in the middle of the road. After changing Taxi's we finally arrive at the correct terminal and end up taking a shared car to Barranquilla from where we head with another bus to Santa Marta. The road we follow snakes along the Caribbean coastline of Colombia and stuns with beautiful views and a wild sea. On the last bus my seat decides to break and every time we hit a little bump in the road I end up sitting on the floor. An incredibly uncomfortable ride and I am relieved when the bus start emptying and I find an intact seat. That seat happened to be right next to someone incredibly drunk. As we start getting closer to our last stop my neighbour starts to attempt putting his shoes back on his feet. This is the most difficult part of the journey for me as I can hardly contain my laughter as I watch him trying to get his feet into his shoes. I hide my head or pretend to inspect the uninteresting and dark outside every time a wide smile appears on my face. Maybe I'm evil, I don't know, but seeing him not be able to coordinate any of his body parts was incredibly funny - I felt like he was just an actor playing a scene. After more than ten minutes of this torture he manages to stumble out of the bus - just catching himself on the door of the bus before falling over and onto the dusty floor outside. I continue the trip in a Taxi with Ariel, another person that had attended the conference about indigenous people of the colombian coast and also lived in Tagalang to reach the little fisher village in the dark. We head to the promenade going along the beach before I fall asleep on the rooftop of Eduardo's house.