Bogotá smells delicious: fresh sliced pinapple and mango intermingle with grilled corn, hot coffee, melted cheese rellenas, and other unnameable foodstuffs wafting out of open doorways. The cobblestone streets even let off a cool, earthy smell unlike the sewer stench and general decay of any other big city in the world.

The air is thin. The clouds barely budge an inch until evening when the chill disperses their languor, revealing a calm, deep night. Teenagers gather in the plazoleta and narrow alleyways of Calle 2, sipping boxed wine out of colorful straws, laughing between blots of conversation. We pass by slowly, as if they’d ask us to join them if only they could decipher the childlike curiosity – the desire to belong on our faces in the dark.

Crowds shuffle slowly down Carrera 7, elbowing one another without malice to get a better look at the various goods laid out on the street’s parade of plastic tarps. Everywhere people are shouting their wares: “Tamales!” “Llamas!” “Fruta!” It’s a maddening collision of sight, sound, smell and incidental brushes with humanity. Which brings me back to my original point, Bogotá smells delicious.

once the cache of pilfered

jewels and money,

where the Spanish came

to bathe in gold ducats

and pull women’s hair.

Once the grand fortress,

once the unconquerable

treasure trove

of the 17^th century.

Now anyone can scale your walls.

Cartagena,

even your name sounds romantic.

Who could blame the lights

or cobbled streets –

the balconies adorned in wild bougainvilleas

for drawing the tourists in droves?

Who could have foreseen

the thousands of people

who would pose by your cannons

and enter your dungeons

before ordering overpriced cocktails

on the cusp of your northern walls,

overlooking the sea?

Everywhere we see

the disappointing decay

of Calle Media Luna…

which we have come to learn

means

half moon

and other times, croissant.

Oh, how the walls must wail

some nights,

deep in their mortar.

For the splendor lost,

the secrets untold,

the magnificent duty…

How they must wail too

for all the facades

that have risen up instead,

silencing the past.  

1/8/10

Part of me knows it won’t always be like this. Waking whenever we please, pulling out a book to read until we’re finally ready to get out of bed. Flipping channels on an old, 25-inch Sankey TV using a big toe because we can’t find the remote – stumbling across our favorite programs at odd times, in different languages.

We won’t always have the luxury of playing three consecutive games of cribbage during happy hour, waiting for the sun to set, smirking to one another about the underage American girls four seats over, ordering shots (with a chaser!) for themselves and strangers.

No, it won’t always be like this. Preparing a cocktail in our trusty blue water bottle to bring to you down at the beach in between surf sessions. Running errands in town before finishing another book underneath the horrifically loud ceiling fan. Shopping for cheap bags of rice and eggs for that evening’s dinner. Tickling our psuedo pet cat between the ears, dodging piles of trash on the road outside our condo complex. Where later you will return, shower, dress into a different pair of shorts and plop back onto the ramshackle sofa declaring, “What a hard day of work.”

It won’t always be like this but maybe somewhere down the line, something else - equally wonderful will step in and take its place so I can write about it. Just as I’ve done here.

Our hallway photo collage

Unfortunately, our bank accounts are still suffering from our spontaneous, impractical, one-hundred percent amazing trip, so the hallway must suffice for whatever wanderlust lingers. Which in my case, never really goes away, but is sated here and there every couple of years or so.

In lieu of having no new places to document, I’ve been going back and improving the existing blog: adding titles and tags, cleaning up categories, etc. It’s a poor substitute for actually digging in and exploring the world, but I know the next trip is never far away. Luckily, I have notebooks full of things we never published and never shared. Private moments, poems, drawings, conversations… So, until that next passport stamp or visa application, I give you the unreleased b-sides of our trip: the good, the bad, the strange, and the ugly. Enjoy.

Until then, we give you a list of our top five destinations from the six months we spent in Central and South America. Big, rural, majestic, gritty… These are places that caught our attention, prolonged our stay and kept us wishing for a teleportation device.

We'd like to award an honorable mention to the city of Mendoza, Argentina. Although it didn't make our list, it was awful close and we'd return to wine country in a heartbeat. They also had the best looking girls there, but that really only benefits Steve.

One of the most fascinating, passionate and vibrant cities in the world, Buenos Aires is definitely a destination we hope to return to soon. B.A. takes the best parts of Europe, slashes prices and adds a huge dose of joie de vivre. Infectious.