Sunday, December 14, 2014 Cali, Colombia At home with RG+MG
Arrived at the Cali bus terminal yesterday at 4:30am. I was rather disoriented, and was awoken from a pretty decent nap by the harsh cries of “Vamanos, vamanos!”
“Vama-wha?” my brain murmured groggily.
“Oh yeah. I’m in Colombia. In Cali. I’m home! Finally.”
But not a familiar home.
It’s been 7 long years since the last time I was in this
country, or on this continent.
I have been on the move for the last two months or so.
Left Four Winds Road, Portland, Maine, my parents’
place,
my old stomping grounds
Where I grew up
Along with Adam, and Seth, and our sweet kitty Tiger
[/Tigress Euphrates]
Who passed away in September
Who passed away in September
A few short weeks
after my dear friend Bar.
Friday 11/7/14, I went to Boston.
I slept at Peter Goldstein’s, and hung out with Lorraine
Fryer as well.
Holly came in from Worcester and met me for lunch by South
Station on Saturday, 11/8. Then I had to hustle to catch my flight out for
Philly.
Spent the night of 11/8 at Andrea / and her sister’s
place. Also spent a couple hours at the
fancy fish house she works at, getting booze and food and whatnot, as cheap as
I could manage.
Got up at ass-0-clock on Monday 11/9 to catch my flight to St.
Thomas,
to connect up with Sleeper.
Got free rum at the airport. Had our first meal at The Rum
Shandy.
He got the best fish tacos in the world. I got a really mean
veggie burger.
Had a couple drinks.
Adjusting to island temperatures, humidity, and the drinking
lifestyle.
Spent the next week exploring and swimming and free-diving
in the sea.
Met and swam with a couple of sea turtles down by the
nearly-deserted, mostly-local, university-owned BELLISIMO Brewers’ Bay.
Mmmmhmmm.
Also saw sting rays, coral reef, and all kinds of crazy
arrays of fishie fish at that beach.
Did some reading and writing. A wee bit of painting in the
nights. Played a couple games of Set with Sleeper when he made it home before
11 or 12 at night. (Happened a few times…)
Took some crazy long epic walks, from one side of the island
to the other.
In spite of Sleeper’s warnings about which places might be
dangerous, and better to avoid.
He also told me not to take rides from strangers, but that
didn’t entirely stop me either.
On Wednesday I found another beach, also mostly full of
locals, down by the airport.
I made friends with an old fella named Keith.
He and his really old
dad and uncle were staked out at the beach.
They put up a tent.
They looked like locals, and they were all wearing matching
red shirts, so I kinda assumed they worked at the beach or something. It looked
like they were picking up some of the trash and detritus other flippers had
left there, but actually I think they mostly just pushed it aside, out of their
way.
It turned out, they were preparing for a family reunion BBQ
there on the beach.
I found this out when I followed a scantily-clad old Italian
couple under the tent to seek shelter during a sudden torrential downpour (that
happens in the tropics, not infrequently.)
I had just come out of the sea, so I wasn’t too worried
about getting wet. If anything, the rain was just making me cleaner and less
salt-encrusted. BUT I had some stuff with me, in my beach bag, that was
probably better off not getting soaked through.
So I too went and huddled under the tent. After I had been
there, on his turf, for some minutes, Keith approached me and asked if I was an
Olympic swimmer.
Amused, flattered. Haha. No, I’m not an Olympic athlete. Not
even close. I just really like swimming. (If anything, I style myself more as a
mermaid type. I don’t swim for speed or even really for intentional exercise,
most of the time. I swim because I am
drawn to the water. I feel best and most comfortable when I am in it, or at
least on it, or at least NEXT to it. But preferably IN it.
I feel at home there.
I feel weightless. Graceful. Fluid. Flexible. As though I can do or be
anything. And go anywhere. And see anything.
The ocean is indeed its own world of endless possibility. One of the
many things that makes it so terrifying. Especially in the dark.
I also swim as much as I do, every chance I get, in every
kind of water, to remind myself how to survive a shipwreck (which, given my
goals, is not that unreasonable an eventuality to prepare for…) or so I could
escape from an island if I am ever to be marooned. And/or to increase my chance of meeting sea
turtles, dolphins, other merfolk, and the chance to ride a whale (really, the
only crucial item on my bucket list, as far as I’m concerned.)
In any case, Keith and I got to talking, and before long, we
were friends.
He told me about his impending family reunion, set to begin
in the next hour or so.
He gave me water, and beer, from their coolers. And a seat
to sit in.
I swam more, once the rain abated.
His family arrived. I
stuck out as the only non-matching member of the set, but I was immediately
welcomed in when word got round that I was a friend of Keith’s.
I shared in their BBQ.
I scared off an iguana that was sprawled up in a tree right above their
food table. They were worried s/he was going to “drop its mess” in the wrong
place, which would have definitely put a damper on the festivities. And you
know how I love a chance to climb trees…and hunt dinosaurs… ;)
I finagled an invitation for my cabin-boy,
second-in-command, ass. director/ old pirate buddy Swab to join me and Sleeper
at Sleeper's place in St. Thomas. He was working so much, he was never around, and
he was actually relieved that I had someone else to chill with, since he felt a
little guilty that he had to leave me to my own devices around 93% of the time.
Sleeps and I did an epic grocery trip to Cost-U-Less, that mostly
consisted of purchasing copious
amounts of rum [it is DIRT CHEAP down there, since they make it there…they
literally give it away at the airport and advertise free samples on the
streets…(Fiddler’s Green, I tells ya!)] so we bought 4 handles, of 4 different
varieties.
(One cheapish clear rum--$3.50!!!, 1.75L of the spicy stuff
for coke and dark and stormy’s; one Cruzan Mango and one Cruzan Pineapple.
MMMMMMmmmmm!!!!!)
Most of the rest of the groceries were fruit juices and
sodas with which to mix these delicious treats, and make them even more delicious!!! [Truly my tasty-potion brewing powers were in full bloom throughout my time in the VI. Though, I think the credit really goes to the ingredients. Can't really miss with the shite I had to work with. MMMhMMM!!!]
Swab arrived Sunday afternoon, 11/16. As promised, the very first place I took him
was to the beach, the one closest to the airport, where I had partied with
Keith and his family a few days prior.
We plunged directly into the delectable Caribbean Sea, and sang our
praises to Treesus, and to our mutual good fortune, and life choices.
Swab and I chilled like villains for the next several days,
as we are wont to do. He had to work some,
here and there, since he was not technically on vacation. In fact, he kept his bosses in the dark about
having left home at all, and since he works remotely, he was able to pull it
off.
We spent time at Brewer’s Bay, snorkeling and sunbathing,
early in the morning, then we set up back at Sleeper’s, or at the Rum Shandy,
so we could nosh and chill and listen to music and talk and goof around, and
Swab could attend to his work shite from time to time. A++ for white-collar crime!!! A+++ for the
Rum Shandy’s fabulous, fresh fish tacos.
MmmMMMmmmm!!! (I was on first-name basis with the day-time, weekday
bartender there by the time Swab arrived…)
We saw Sleeper pretty rarely that week. His boss was working his ass to the
bone. He claims that part of it is just
a factor of being new to the job, and that as he gets more experienced, the
tasks won’t take as long to complete. But I feel really bad for the dude. Certainly did not inspire me to rethink my
decision NOT to go to Law School or try to join the Real World of ADULTS with
fancy, time-consuming jobs.
Nope. Nope. It’s the
Pirate’s Life for me. For sure. There are at least a few things in life I am
willing to learn without doing it the hard way.
I can learn from the life choices of others, what I may want, and what I
for sure DO NOT want. I’ve always known,
for example, that being a Doctor or a Plumber or a Garbage Collector were not
in the cards for me. I’ve left most other
options on the table. But I knew for
sure those jobs didn’t appeal. I don’t
like yucky sights or smells. I don’t like blood or gore. I have a sensitive stomach, and an extra
helping of empathy. And I don’t like
studying science that much either…
That’s neither here nor there.
Swab and I stayed in the USVI until Monday, 11/24, a few
days short of Thanksgiving. I got a
morning flight, and he followed me several hours later.
Friday night we trekked through the backwoods mountainous
hillocks full of sketchy neighborhoods and hurricane-induced(?) ruins…to
attempt to see a new-ish Christopher Durang play that was being put on by the
island’s one and only community theatre [Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.]
We were rescued on our trek, a couple miles after our run-in with the
most terrifying sign I have ever seen in my life (“WELCOME” in
blood-red on a white wall, that we just happened to illuminate by flashlight
when we heard a car coming to get us nearby.
It was a moment straight out of a slasher flick—not that I would
know—and it was definitely horrifying, although me and Swab mostly were
laughing at ourselves, and the silliness of the whole thing.
A while later, a lady passed us in an old-car-graveyard
kinda neighborhood (also very spooky), driving a fancy-black-something-or-other, and offered to give us a lift the rest of the way to the theater, because
she was worried for our safety in that part of the island, and thought we
looked lost and out of place there. How
nice of her!
We finally arrived at the theater, only to find…the play had
been cancelled!!! One of the performers had broken her arm or something, and so
they had postponed the whole thing.
However, all was not in vain, in the end! There was a bar! And at the bar, was a tender! And the tender
mentioned, as we sipped our shared margarita, that he had lived in Key West for
9 years, and originally hailed from Miami.
He told us he had nothing good to say about Miami, or about what to do
there, except not to get shot or mugged.
But he did give me super useful “local” directions on how to get from my
friend Aaron’s place in Kendall, a southern suburban section of the Miami area, to Key
West, via buses that would wind up costing no more than 5 or 6 bucks for the
whole 130 mile journey…
[Instructions included: Have someone give you a ride to the
Walmart in Homestead. Get the bus from there to the Marathon. Go to the Brass
Monkey (bar). Ask where to get the
shuttle bus to Key West.] Any directions
that require me to stop at a Brass Monkey bar are all right by me. (I didn’t
actually wind up going inside the BM, because I didn’t have a reliable source
on what time my bus would rock up, and they only run every 3 hours or so, so I
was very keen not to miss one. As it was, I waited for at least two hours in
the hot, harsh sun, and learned more than I probably should have about the
homeless lady sharing my camp-spot by the bus-stop. The upshot?
In exchange for me getting her big, heavy bag of belongings onto the
bus, she paid for my bus fare.
Similarly, I tossed a buck to an Irish-American fellow with a keen taste
for cheap beer, in exchange for him running off to buy me a bottle of H20 when
he went off on his final pre-bus beer-run.
Gotta love the hobo barter economy!!
Although waiting for a bus for that long, when I was SOOO
eager just to GET to Key West and let my Pirate Festival experience finally
begin well-nigh drove me the rest over the edge to certifiably insane, I did
eventually make it onboard. Everyone on
that bus was some kind of drunk, crazy, sketchy or just down-right bizarre kind
of character. Made for interesting
people-watching, but not as restful a nap as I would have liked.
FINALLY!!! ARRIVED IN KEY WEST a bit before sun-down on
Wednesday, 12/3/14.
And what happened from there on out is definitely a story in
its own right. Stay tuned for some truly
wild Pirate Shenanigans!!!
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