CLOSING A CIRCLE

Today, exactly four months and eight days after I had left Chia near Bogota, I came back to spend the Christmas with my Estonian friend Eve, her Colombian husband Ernesto and their three beautiful children. Their youngest daughter, Matilda, was not born yet when I was last here, but now she is already celebrating two months on this planet. This morning I was invited to have three different cakes in honor of the occasion - talking about good timing!

So, yes, I am back, and am myself most surprised to such a turn of the road. It is the third time within one journey that I come to Colombia- first time something like that happens!

December 18th
I felt Colombia's warm and welcoming embrace as I crossed the border from Venezuela to Arauca two days ago. The border-guards took sincere interest in my journey, conversed with me for over half an hour, took pictures, gave me 10 000 pesos for the trip, and most importantly stamped my passport for sixty days, though I think I was only allowed thirty more this year. Within five minutes they arranged for me a ride out of town to a good hitchhiking spot. The driver pressed 5000 pesos into my hand and to my somewhat surprised reaction, said with a smile that the border-guards had told him to help me out with what he could. I was too astonished to say anything but thank you. From that spot one older man named Jonh Jairo gave me a ride on his bicycle(!) - carried my pack to the spot with the military people, bought me a drink, allowed me to take a shower in his place.

John Jairo, I counted to be my ride number 418 from Estonia, helps me carry my pack to the next hitchhiking spot

Young lads from the military after learning about Estonia, the seasons and our Christmas tradition, arranged another ride for me - Don L. from Tame, who I think was involved in providing the guerrilla with alcohol: we made a very suspicious stop in one dark place, where we opened the front of the car and the floor of the trunk and the back seats to take out tens of liquor bottles that then little indigenous children helped to carry away into the woods. And then there was a bomb on the road and we had to wait while the military deactivated it. "A cultural experience it is indeed," I told Don L. who said it to be a very hard job that one of his. He would have to make a long trip from Tame to Arauca and back, altogether 310 km every single day of the week, besides, with all the military checkpoints that ask you to open your trunk together with all kinds of questions, it must be pretty nerve-wrecking as well, I thought with sincere compassion. Don L. never spoke about what happened in the woods, and I did not ask, so it is just a guess from my side whom this liquor was for.

Don L. invited me first to dinner and then I camped in his yard. For some reason, I had no doubt trusting him - Don L. was a good person. Despite the thing that had taken place in the woods and the fact that some people owed him a lot of money - this I understood from one encounter with "a friend" as Don L. called him. And despite, that his house had a high thick wall around it, and a steal gate, just as high, which looked pretty odd - the whole front entrance to his place as it stood in the street with all the "normal" houses that had "normal" entrances, I had no doubt in Don L.'s sincere intentions to help me out.

Later talking to my friends Eve and Ernesto in Chia, I learned that it is really hard for the local people to take "sides" and talk about "right" and "wrong" in those parts of Colombia, known also as the "Red zone", as most have their friends and/or relatives among the "hidden warriors", known also as the enemies of the country or the guerrilla, who dwell in the woods and swamps of the republic. And then how can one fight against them if they are your loved ones. So they co-operate, because it is not easy to hide in the woods and fight at the same time.

December 19th
It was a beautiful road I walked that morning, though with very little traffic. When I got tired of walking, I chose a picturesque spot to rest my back from my load, play flute, read a book, eat cookies that the nuns had given me on my brief visit to their house when I passed San Felipe again. I was sitting on my pack, drawing, when I heard a man's voice call me. His name was Jose and he had just closed the fence behind his cattle, so now he and his horse were allowed a moment of rest. His look was wise and peaceful. And when he spoke, then he did it slowly and there was peace also in his voice.


"Why are you travelling the world?" he asked me after listening to my story.
"I like meeting different people." I answered, "I enjoy hearing their stories. They make me think. And I like that."
"I am sixty five," said Jose who probably took my answer as a request, "yet my companion, the lady I live with, is just nineteen. Strange, I was always very shy to even talk to girls; I grew up in an orphanage, did not have good clothes to put on when we went to a party with my friends, was not as eager as they were to get the girl to go with them, yet I was always luckier than them with women. I have five children, the youngest of them is not even one year old, the oldest is nineteen, they are not with me. And the girl who is with me now, I did not force her to come, not at all, it was her decision," said Jose almost apologetically, "We came away from Neiva to live here - the family bothered her a lot about this affair of ours and she does not want to go back," he continued.
"It is a good thing that you are doing," said Jose, as if it were a conclusion to his tale, "you are strong and I see that you have the guts to go very far - it is your gift. I wish you all the best along your way!"
He then put a hand in his pocket and gave me all the coins he had there, quite many, I did not count, just looked at them when he had put them in my hand as if I had never seen Colombian money before. And when Jose left, I was still thinking if the wisdom in his eyes and the peaceful tone of his voice were really coming from that story of his, or was there another story that he had never told me, which had given him those riches. Perhaps that untold story came from the mountains and the fields in which he roamed as he was riding his horse looking for his cattle. Perhaps his heart kept that story a secret even from himself, for what is put into words becomes definitely smaller.

I soon caught a ride with a truck going to Bogota. The driver Nelson who had promised himself never to pick up hitchhikers again after one of them had robbed him, nonetheless pulled over to help me out. "I do not know what made me change my mind," he said.

Nelson, my ride from Tame to Bogota that I travelled for twenty hours with, arranging my pack on the roof of his truck

Road from Tame in the department of Arauca to Sogamoso in Boyaca, although very scenic, did give us some rain and my bag got wet

Nelson told me that he had been attacked by the guerrilla six times on that road we were going, and I saw that he was a bit nervous driving it, but then after that long and empty stretch ended, he calmed down and told me how to make a difference between the military and the guerrilla who have the same clothing. The answer: by the shoes and haircut. The guerrilla generally do not shave nor do they wear military boots. Nelson also spoke of one other hitchhiker he had once picked up - one Doña M. carrying a big pot. The lady had escaped from the guerrilla with her elder daughter after they had killed her husband and two children. The pot was the only thing that Doña M. had from her mother and thus did not want to leave it behind.

When I hear a story like this, it is quite difficult to imagine that the tale is in fact someone's life. How unfair it is to the parties in that drama to write about it with such ease and in so few words. Perhaps that was the reason thad Doña M. never told Nelson what happened, but he learned it later from her daughter.

Despite the hesitation Nelson had had picking me up, he soon said he was proud that he could give a ride to a foreigner travelling around the world. It was becoming a pattern. The border guards, John Jairo with his bicycle, Jose they too had said the same words.
"I think no-one will believe me if I told them about you," Nelson said.
It was quite funny but also very sweet at the same time to hear a driver be concerned if I, to remind: the hitchhiker, was bored, if the music he had was not bothering me, if I wanted anything, and then when offered something like a traditional warm drink called here agua panela, and I would say yes, he would bring it to me with bread and cheese and then ask if I wanted anything more. I really felt treated like a queen.

"We will be coming to Bogota around 2 AM in the morning", said Nelson at one point, but realizing that I could not come to my friends' place at that hour, stopped the car right before Chia and said we could take a break until 5 AM. The truck had to be in Bogota by six, otherwise it would not be able to pass before nightfall. We parted around half past five in Chia and Nelson could arrive in due time to Bogota.

Looking for Eve's and Ernesto's place in the streets of Chia I met a woman who embraced me because had seen me on television - I can't believe that after all that time she recognized me, then one guy went and bought me three breads and the shop keeper gave me two books and then when I finally had rang the doorbell of my friends' place and was let in, there were the three cakes. I felt I had come home, I felt rewarded.