“One of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy.” -Sir Richard Burton
After spending several consecutive months in Buenos Aires and then about a week in Bogotá, I had a craving for silence and repeated the perennial traveler’s slogan–I just wanted to get away from it all. And so, a hostel owner in Medellín recommended that I go to Santa Cruz de Mompox, also commonly known as Mompos, a colonial town of 20,000 that’s liminal in every sense of the word. Getting there from Medellín required getting a bus to Magangué, a ferry, a taxi, a canoe, and yet another car. The bridge had fallen out a month prior (“Just sunk slowly, like a movie in slow motion,” said a few locals), adding a few extra legs to the journey, each involving someone grabbing my backpack and throwing it into the next form of transportation before asking me for money.
“I could have done that.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“I’ve already got it—”
It’s better to just pretend like you don’t know Spanish and grab your own bag before you duck through the crowd to find a taxi headed towards Mompox. Of course, once I got there, the atmosphere was what you might call “zen.”
This is a place that’s known for–wait for it–its artisan rocking chairs. It’s as if Mark Twain, Gabriel García Márquez, and Italo Calvino had invented the picture perfect sleepy town that’s both right in the middle of Latin America and fully disconnected from this world. Mompox figured prominently in The General in His Labyrinth, the historical novel by García Márquez about Simón Bolívar. Remnants of Bolívar, who assembled an army of 400 men from Mompox to defeat the Spanish in Venezuela, are all over town: “If to Caracas I owe my life, then to Mompox I owe my glory.”
I spent five days wandering around Mompox, getting lost, sleeping in the hammock at the Casa Amarilla, and straining to imagine a time when the people there moved quickly enough to engage in a war. Like anywhere in the world, it’s far from perfect: the mosquitoes at night were particularly determined to wage war with my skin. Then there was the humidity. And the heat. I’d been reduced to a sort of sashaying saunter by the end of my stay.
Being able to enjoy whatever it is about a place that makes it unique, whether we’re in Mompox for the architecture and a getaway or in Paris for a conference: that’s why we travel. But no place on earth is perfect, and the second the honeymoon begins to fade and our shins have been transformed to puffy, blood-scratched mosquito motels, we get to leave. That, too, is why we travel. We get the good parts, and we get to leave before any of the bad parts sink in. Having hosted my fair share of friends in Buenos Aires since moving there, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the naive joy of being a tourist completely removed from their home. Everything seems wonderful (“Yes, I’m dehydrated, unsafe on this a roof…. I don’t know who any of you are, and I may have gotten my passport stolen, but I’m in the South Pacific!!!“) because you’re in the honeymoon stage. Always.
You think: stuff is cheap! My dollars buy many of this other type of currency! And even though the Lonely Planet may have mentioned something about a ‘country in conflict’ in its section on history, well, what country isn’t in conflict? No one is going out of their way to hear a grim economic ramble about the real cost of living there. You see a couple walking slowly, in colorful clothes, and think that they know about the good life. These are a people who can slow down and enjoy each minute. You don’t think to go up to them, where you may discover that his foot is infected, her shoes are too tight and they’ve forgotten where they’re going.
When we travel, we get the raw, direct experience without any of the hang-ups that accompany knowing something well. No one I cared about deeply in Mompox betrayed me. I never got in a fight with a friend or had my ego crushed in front of people I had to live with forever. I never had to see anyone I loved there go through a difficult time, or hear from the widows of the men who followed Bolívar into Venezuela. I just heard the part of the town’s history worth repeating.
