Haero's "Bichi Sour." "Hold you in his arms, you can feel his disease."
The clothes dry in the sky.
Coffee, fruit. Red berries, very sour, perfect.
Bread pudding, before it was served to beautiful Colombian women.
This is where I cook my food. I have been here all my life.
This oven was modified to steam bread when it is not baking pizza. Two open courtyards vent heat.
This is my living room today. It has a very relaxed feel to it. I can sit on the couch and read and write.
This is my bicycle inside the hostel. I fixed the front fender today and raised the saddle. No front panniers.
A lake where motorcyclist relax and make love to their women.
A kitchen where pizza is made for a restaurant and where I cut and eat fruit.
A tree near a black family's residence.
A road for a bicycle, a motorbike, a car, a bus, a lorry
Hillside.
Sugarcane and mountains.
The ride was easy, as M had instructed. 60 or 70 kilometers, flat, plano, no hay montanas, they visited my vistas on either side of me, accompanied by sugar plants, my height yet growing in arm reaching dimension I cannot match. The nightlife of Cali was instructive, but too strong for me now. The women seem to lead their men; they are feminine and sexual with no hang ups.
On the rooftop in Cali, breakfast, then work with a slow internet connection. The bicycle required minor adjustments with the panniers--they may have been built in reverse by the bike shop; I will compare them to M's bicycle at Claudia's.
Yes, the ride showed me sugar cane and distant mountains. Many cheered me, one Mercedes SUV slowed down, the rich women wanted to know about my journey, damn the traffic they were holding up."Estas loco!" Perhaps, but not because of the bicycle. I am crazy to give my life to a cubicle. I am a sane man enriching his soul by my riding this bicycle in Columbia. I understand what M was getting at, I understand his anger and rage. And then I understand how quickly it must have dissipated for him, how as I complained about American women, he began to diminish in his observations: "I have no experience with them any more; I don't see Americans, there are no American tourists down here, there are no American women tourists."
And it is only my second day, yet I feel the freedom of Bulgaria, I feel the freedom of Budapest--I feel the freedom I do not feel in Europe and America. Understand I am stating feelings, accounting for them--I was free at these times and in these places, and I am aware of what the Bulgarian woman told me: "You can be free anywhere. I have been free everywhere." I understand this, and I accept this from this woman, this woman who took over her dead husband's trucking business in London. I won't here it from anyone else. I only discuss freedom with Bulgarian widowers. Others must listen to me in silence.
On the ride to Buga I considered how strange the ride of languages must have seemed for the first travelers. One's man's opinion, stated firmly, began as a difference in pronunciation. Later, he insisted his take, his shape on the world, be his reality. He did not compromise. He did not see the other person's perspective. He mother-fucking did not 'have an opinion,' as in the castrated qualification, 'in my opinion.' No, he had to shape the world, not because no one else would, but because he was compelled to shape the world. And so began his culture and language, and so too, war, so too conflict, so too the great creative beauty in killing other men. New ideas slaughter other men; there is blood in genius and creation, and no such man is 'confident.' Such a man feels dread his whole life.
Upon arrival in Buga, I found M's recommended outpost. There German was absent but the cook and the other owner were present. I went to the market, bought pineapple, kiwi, berries, and cut them in the kitchen and spoke with the chef of his art, his pizza, his oven, his sauce, dough, his feelings of Colombia. Two girls from Cali drank cocktails and beer, I practiced my Spanish for 30 minutes, they were sweet and shy and laughed and blushed and put pillows on their legs and held hands. They were out of place and I was shocked they were Calenas. Light skinned with striking innocence. It reminded me of the lost modesty I last saw in Bulgaria, it reminded me of R's restraint, her beauty, her innocence, her chastity. It reminded me of what I find special in women. Their names were exotic, but in my state of weary travel, all names leave me. I did not drink with them. I left them to themselves in their decent glow of unmolested beauty.
I have mountains ahead of me. It will only get tougher here. How can I ever return to America? What type of fucked up morality would call my attitude escapist, who on earth sees it their right to imprison me?
