August 14, Barranquilla

I arrived back in Barranquilla last night and had bug larvae squeezed out of my legs and ass. I hadn´t finished telling G and M the story of my stolen phone when M sent me off to the shower after a gaze at my bitten up legs so she could heal them. I get out of the shower and she tells me that what I thought were infected mosquito bites were actually the swellings where an insect had injected larvae into my leg that hatches tiny worms that feed on blood. Ugh! She squeezed blood and pus out of my three bites until the little larvae balls - looks like what comes out of a white-head - appeared on the toilet paper she was squeezing my red skin with. She then broke open an antibiotic pill and rubbed the powder into my bites.

This is what couchsurfing is for! Imagine if I just kept waiting for the bites to heal! M says I was lucky I didn´t get a fever.

I seem to leave a little piece of myself everywhere I go, as if I am trying to divest myself of something that I haven´t yet found. So far I´ve lost my toiletries bag, a few pairs of earrings, the butterfly tank top that I love and use for swimming, my swimming bottoms, and latest, my notebook, with the writing I do when I can´t get to the internet. It is as if my journey doesn´t want to be recorded, not in photos (which I lost with my phone), not in pen.

I´m not quite sure what is wrong with me but maybe I am moving from place to place too fast. I was in a rush, hoping to get to Venezuela to visit S, but it´s not really a reasonable thing to do. She can´t leave Caracas and Caracas is far away from Colombia, either very expensive plane rided or very long bus trips. So I will stay in Colombia.

I will try again to summarise my adventures last week. After visiting the school children, N and I walked to the river for a swim. He further chopped up the pants I chopped up in Tayrona because they were so ripped and used those to swim in. The river had quite a strong current, so we attempted to entwine, kiss, and stay in one place by gripping onto rocks with our hands and feet. It was fun. And very refreshing: it was so nice to finally be in cold water! After our swim, N and I had almuerzo in town and that evening I took off for Riohacha, saying I would come back to Palomino on my way back to Barranquilla.

Riohacha is the city where Marquez´s telegraph operator went to work after rejected by Fermina Diaz. Whether Riohacha of now bears any resemblence to Riohacha of then, I don´t know, but it is a low, spread-out city of typical Colombian cement boxes with barred windows and doors and a nice, fat beach with painted palm trees. In Riohacha I was picked up by a charming 22-year-old, who I wasn´t totally comfortable with. I felt like he paraded me around, showing to his friends and neighbours that he had a white girl on his arm. He didn´t listen to me even when I managed to communicate with this boy with no English, and he talked incessently.

I don´t know why I agreed to meet him again that evening. I was upset that he hadn´t taken me right back to my hostel like I asked after our swim in the ocean, but he was so ingratiating I just let his will overpower me. We agreed to go dancing. Instead we made out at the beach and I took him home with me.

I left the next day for Cabo de la Vela, a tourist village on the La Guajira peninsula where the desert meets the sea and the land is occupied by the nomadic Wayuu people. Here I felt like I had travelled to the ends of the earth. It was all desert, barely-there salt-water ponds, scrub and scrappy trees, abandoned Wayuu stick houses. I went on a tour, saw a salt mine, travelling with 5 others, lovely people. I slept in a hammock in a hut on the beach and we went to two different beaches for a swim in the warm and surfless Caribe sea.

I returned to Riohacha after two days in Cabo and hopped right on a bus back to Palomino. As the four-wheel drive was driving through the central market on our return I saw my 22-year-old lover and hid. I didn´t want to see him again, though I admit to a nice night. On the bus I got a phone call from him. I couldn´t understand a word, told him I was on my way to Palomino, wondered when I could hang up and finally did when it seemed he was done talking.

More tomorrow.