(Parque Nacional de Tayrona, Colombia)…It was only a few years ago that this beautiful park on the northern coast of Colombia, close to Santa Marta, was utterly off limits. Even in the mid-part of the last decade, the park and jungle’s leafy valleys were the haunt for guerrilla movements, notably FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia). The original residents, the Kogi, retreated high into their dominions in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Maria. They have come down to the beaches again, if only to keep an eye on the fledgling tourism developments, which thankfully here consist only of a park rangers' headquarters (see photo) with a basic restaurant and a shack selling water by the only beach not pummeled by Atlantic Ocean breakers.
This is the land of Nobel Prize for Literature winner Gabriel García Márquez, and the lengthy drive between the commercial capital hereabouts, Barranquilla, and the park are riddled with references and sign to and of him. The last time I visited Colombia (2000), it was considered too dangerous to visit Aracataca, his birthplace; this time around, I simply did not have time, but a hot soak after my Tayrona adventures brought me very close. Next time! The huge marsh of La Cienaga, which means "The Marsh" in Spanish, is his country, too, as is the desert promontory of La Guajira, home of the Wayúu Indians and the small city of Riohacha. I would fly out of Colombia from that place on a small plane headed to the near but totally different tourism experience of Aruba.
The walk through the Parque Nacional de Tayrona was easy and pleasant on the way to the beach. Small rivulets were crossed, and I caught glimpses of such wonderful birds as the Collared aracari, Lance-tailed manakin, rufous-and-white wrens and a type of hummingbird called a White-tailed starfrontlet. The sound of crashing in the jungle undergrowth could have been anything, most likely small rodents, such is the way sound is carried here. After a handful of miles, the path drops down to the type of beach film producers would crave for to represent the beginnings of the planet. Huge rocks reminded me of the opening lines of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude -- rocks that he wrote bordered the "bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs, [where] the world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
Waves crashed high, and a lone horseman with a dangling machete rode through a tidal pool to complete the scene. Eventually, the park headquarters building is reached, and it was here for lunch that the clear skies and large sun disappeared behind brooding cloud. As the rain came down, a Kogi child emerged from the jungle and sat down opposite us. I thought in clichés, of primordial swamps and our distant ancestors. A donkey shaded itself beneath a large red beach umbrella, and a white horse stuck its head out from huge palm fronds.
The rain did not cease and grew harder. We needed to head back, and it was with a little nervousness. Lightning hit the beach ahead of us, and I longed to get back into the forest. I picked my step up and started climbing to get around the series of rock boulders that came down to the sea in regularly spaced out formations. Eventually my group got back under cover, only for me to pause under a reed canopy and feel the hairy attention of an adult tarantula on my shoulder. I flicked it off, which I do not think I would have done if I had paused for another second to consider what it was. The small streams we had crossed on the way up were now raging torrents that crossed the path and had grown to eight or ten times their original size. More water sliced across the trail in the opposite direction. On the second torrent, all hope was lost to keep shoes and socks dry. T-shirts stuck to the skin. I was having a great time.
Shivering back at the bus we dried the best we could. One of our group of four had the keys to a rudimentary natural hot springs of a friend of his (he had never been) that was somewhere near to the hamlet of Orihueca, just the other side of the Aracataca rail line. It was dark, and we fumbled along in the car trying to find the entrance. At one stage the army appeared from nowhere – just like the white horse – and asked what we were doing. Explanations believed, they pointed to a dirt lane, and after opening some old gates, we turned on the headlamps and jumped into the warmth of the springs. Above us bats the size of dinner plates flew around, and an unseen train rattled along on its way to my Timbuktu of Aracataca, no more than 10 kilometres distant. I lent back in the silent pool and considered that what the train contained was not fruit but the dead bodies of the banana workers massacred in the famous scene in García Márquez's fictional town of Macondo.
(Ferrara and Comacchio, Italy)…The north eastern parts of Italy, just before the country takes a swing right towards Venice, were a revelation. Two towns stood out, Ferrara – cold in winter, baking and occasionally gusty in summer – and the lagoon-side Comacchio, famous for eels. Both were easily accessible from Bologna, which has direct air service from London.
The surroundings of Ferrara are quintessentially the Italy of fictional character Don Camillo, the erratic priest always at odds with his Po Valley town’s Communist mayor Giuseppe Bottazzi – a plot line that reminds me of the later Graham Greene novel Monsignor Quixote. Don Camillo country is best represented by being very flat and studded with tall, square church clock towers, which can be seen from miles around. We espied many both before we reached Ferrara and especially afterwards.
Ferrara in August was warm and still. Our steps were languorous along the very long Via Carlo Mayr, which revealed striking, tall town houses and ended at part of the city walls by a park. The centre of this university town has two large piazzas, one facing the cathedral and leading beneath a huge arch to a smaller square with a market, the other on another side of the cathedral, with outdoor restaurant tables and shops in arcades. As we sat dining, half the town seemed to be blowing away in the wind, which might be the same bora-type gales that can whip pedestrians off their feet in Trieste.
A first port of call was the Palazzodei Diamanti on the Corso Ercole I d’Este, along another hot, straight street where a crossing bicycle perhaps a quarter of a mile away disappeared and then popped back out again in the heat haze. The palace gets its name from the 8,500 diamond-shape, pinkish concrete knobs that speckle its exterior. Built in the 15th Century, it now houses an art gallery and university buildings, but it can be visited. It is pleasing to the eye, but perhaps I was more excited to find nearby a cash dispenser covered in cobwebs and specks of tree seeds that – if it had cash inside – would dispense Italian lire, not European euros (see photo above). What a find for 2012, 13 years after lire and its comical number of zeroes were consigned to the rubbish heap. But there it was, not dismantled or hidden behind new bricks.
The Castello Estense, or Castle of Saint Michele, sits in the middle of the city and a water-filled moat. It was the scene in 1385 in which the Ferrara locals – the Ferrarese – tore to bits the official they heard responsible for numerous years of nonstop, severe drought. Actually, the city rulers at the time, Niccolò I and Alberto, sensibly decided to sacrifice the first person below them they presumably would not miss, one Tommaso da Tortona, but this was child’s play compared with the public torture in the main square earlier that century of Giovanni d’Este, the bastard brother of the same Alberto, and the public burning of Costanza dei Quintavalli, who both were also accused of diverting normal weather patterns. No wonder the wind has not since ceased howling. The Po carries on flowing gently by, though.
The B-class road towards the Adriatic Sea curves around the marsh and rice fields of the Valli di Comacchio. A spot of pilgrimage for us on the way was the very small town of Anita, which supposedly was the place of death of Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro, the at-the-time pregnant wife of Italian hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was actually born in Nice in today’s France. Born in Brazil of Azorean heritage, Ana Maria, or Anita for short, probably succumbed a little farther around the lagoon, some five kilometres away, in Mandriole, but perhaps do not try telling that to the locals in Anita.
Comacchio came as a surprise. It has a touch of Venice about it, sans the 250,000 daily tourists. A wooden lookout looks over the lagoon and the occasional eeling boat, while behind are a couple of canals built by the Emperor Augustus in the century before Christ. The most notable bridge here spans three canals, the two-towered Trepponti constructed in 1638 by another Giovanni, Pietro de Lugano. This is where Ferrara’s River Po finally makes its way to salt water.
We wandered along several canals – it does go by the moniker Little Venice – to a number of small restaurants that serve that increasingly rare commodity, eels. Quite tasty, and we were told the biggest cardinal sin of cuisine here is to cook them in oil. Be warned! In October there is an eel festival that hopefully coincides with eels starting to make their journeys from the lagoon all the way to the Americas and the Sargasso Sea. An unusual sight is the Anders Lassen Statue, by the aforementioned lookout, which commemorates a Danish soldier who died here in the last days of World War II.
