Baru Island

You know those few times in your life when you feel you´ve actually lived a cliche? When everything is so perfectly fitted together that the time seems like part of an imagined tale whipped up by your brain because of pictures you´ve seen in magazines and movies? Well, neither had I....until this weekend.

After the Islas of Rosario enjoyed a morning breakfast of rain, rain, and more rain, (while we, of course, sat sipping fresh maracuya juice under the palm trees as the songs of raindrops pounded out our visions of sunbathing), the weather decided to cheer up just enough so that when our tiny cruiser finally pulled into the Isla de Baru, the beautiful afternoon sun cut through the menacing clouds to kiss our shoulders and cheeks with some much-needed rosy hellos. My traveling companions and I (being Laura and Neil from England, Neil´s Colombian girlfriend Joanna, and me) hiked to our picnic of ensalada con mayo, patacones (fried, squished green bananas), pescado hornado (baked fish butt), arroz con coco (coconut-basted rice), and limonada (lemonade), and watched as the dark-skinned natives knitted necklaces of natural pearls and the pelanqueras (women with baskets of fruit on their heads) walked with the ultimate poise. All of a sudden, it was not Colombia that we were in; it was more like an African village, complete with all the trimmings.

However, the strange thing about Baru island (two hours off the coast of Colombia towards Ecuador), is its stark taste of serenity as opposed to the literal insanity of the city beaches of Bocagrande and Crespo in Cartagena; where relaxing is instead batting off hundreds of massage offers, baked fish, sunglasses, souvenir shirts, mangoes, and juices, among a million other services for sale. Aside from when we exited the boat and the eight men with necklaces and seashells actually lined up along the dock, grabbed our arms and shoulders and shoved shells in our faces, yelling ¨Promocion! Promocion para ti!¨, the beaches were perfect. After we made the long, strenuous, sweat-drenched hike to our hostel, La Sirena, (recommended by our travel agent as one of the best), we waited an hour to check into our hammocks while Carmen, the ownder, drank on Aguila beer and chatted with her amigos; but after finally droppìng our bags into the cabana where we´d be sleeping, we stood face to face with the most enchanting, most perfectly cliche Caribbean beach I´ve ever seen.

The water was unexplainable--crystal clear does not describe the lucidity of its beauty. I imagine it was indeed drawn from a Corona commercial or other tropical paradise, but I can´t be sure. The colors of the sea are not colors of water but of surreal sunsets, as the turquiose recedes into green as the tide washes in. Huge palm trees lined the pure white sandy shore, with bunches of ripe green coconuts hanging in tranquility from long, perfect branches...coconut shells, mangoes, trees of all shapes and sizes, running along the rolling hills surrounding the shore. Wood-frame huts thatched with dried, beige palm branches cooled the natives as they lazily passed the day in their sarongs, their bare feet lounding in hammocks while sipping on coconuts. We buried our watches and spent the late afternoon swimming, bathing, sun-soaking, sleeping, and practicing Spanish, all the while chatting with each street seller who passed by with the hopes that three white people and a Colombian would buy their products. Of course, two women surprised Laura and I by sneaking up behind us and dumping coconut oil on our backs with the intention of giving us massages (I tell you, it´s so popular here it´s bizarre!), and though my persistant refusals did nothing but allow her more room to jump in with cheap offers, we accidentally fell under the spell of a tropical massage on a Caribbean beach, and for $2.50 for a half-hour, it actually seemed kind of worth it.

After sunset, which, naturally, lasted all of six minutes, we collected our things and hiked back up the hill to our hammocks, where we found that rustic camping is not rustic camping at all--but merely the lives of the people who live here. This was our ¨hostel¨: hammocks dispersed through a green field, hung between palm trees. Heavy mosquito netting under which guests slept so as to avoid painful bug bites by gigantic local insects. Grass huts under which old ping-pong tables became dinner tables. To shower, I followed a man to a large tub of cold water (complete with bugs who had floated in to their untimely death, leaves, dirt, and other debris that had wafted in with the wind), filled an old paint bucket with what he called "Agua Dulce!" (aka, sweet water!), and dragged it, sloshing water over everything, to a wooden stall at the back of the campsite. There, I picked out an appropriate coconut shell and, shall we say, went to work with the coconut shell, pale of water, and soap. Needless to say, with all the showers I´ve had since arriving in Colombia, it always seems that the majority happen without the luxury of indoor plumbing.

After showering, I couldn´t find a dry mosquito net to tie up over my hammock (only finding tangled nets in damp piles near the beach), and so decided to instead lather my entire body in smelly bug repellent. Laura, Neil, Johanna and I picked out a cabana to have dinner under, and we clicked on the lonely lightbulb that hung from the palm fronds above us. (Power only works after dark, and let me tell you, there isn´t much of it anyway!) We dined on arepas (fried corn cakes with cheese--totally healthy), and talked with the employees who had left their pueblos and given up their poverty-stricken lives to work for 5.000 pesos a day at La Sirena (that´s close to $2.40) Imagine my sadness, thinking about how much we complain at home to receive less than $10 and hour and how much more we always desire.

Shortly after finished our dinner (baked by the owner herself over an open fire!), we met the other backpackers and figured out how each of us had come to this point in our lives. Around us were other travelers rocking in their hammocks, reading books with their bare, sandy feet draped over the sides. We sipped on our freshly-squeezed maracuya and milk juice (which is a bitter fruit that tastes a little like a lemon), and slept early, under the stars. In the morning, one of the men brought each one of us a large coconut with a spout chopped out, so that we could smell the Caribbean and sip on its sweetest natural juices.

It is moments like these, weekends like these, that remind me I´m alive, and very much so.