A little past lunchtime in the walled city. Heat like off a lamp in a reptile enclosure and a finger of sweat running down my back. The bodies on the street around us shuffling past, so close, too close and the sound of oil at a boil while our guide stands on his tiptoes on the curb’s edge, lobs his voice out over all of it, down to us.
“ These are fried plantains and cheese.” He’s saying. Somehow it is cool the way he’s saying it because he’s cool and that’s just the way things work for cool guys. He pulls sweat through his hair with a tattooed hand, adjusts his shades on the bridge of his nose.
I could flick a lit cigarette into a puddle of gasoline and walk away from the explosion in slow motion and not look half as cool as this dude does when he’s introducing us to cheese and fried bananas.
He hands me a sheath of paper that is becoming translucent and I hot potato it back and forth while he passes out the rest.
“It’s a very traditional snack here. You just tear it, yeah, like that.”
The Brit next to me has dug into his. My wife is digging into hers.
I dig.

It is a disk of smashed flat plantain, lightly salted submerged in golden oil. A single brick of cold cheese on top of it, stark white like my northwestern belly. I tear a corner off of the tostone, a chunk off of the cheese. On the face of it, it’s such a simple pairing that it almost seems ridiculous until you get it past your lips. All the low, hot and sultry of the plantain and the cold, sharp and creamy of the cheese. It’s fantastic.

The guide is paying the vendor with a folded wad of pesos. The vendor makes the deposit into his pocket with one hand, working the oil with the other. The guide waves us along, weaving through the crowds, talking over his shoulder.

“This city,” he says, “is very, very confusing. It was designed by military engineers who were just trying to make it hard to invade. Obviously, the walls” He says, waving his hand in their direction. “Some say that the walls go down 22 feet, to prevent tunneling.” He points to the end of the street. “But even if you got past them, the city itself was laid out to be confusing.” The block ends abruptly in the side of a house. “Every street looks like a dead end. Some of them curve around. The buildings are colorful now, which helps, but all of them used to be white.” He points around us in a circle and my brain cramps up trying to imagine how impossible this city would have been to get your bearings in without the wildly painted walls. Just a rat maze full of hostile defenders.

He leads us down an alley, across a street to a man with a pushcart, hacking through fruit with a wicked looking knife.
“This is what you do when you’re poor.” Our guide says, and it seems like he might know first hand.
“This fruit isn’t ripe, but people needed to eat now, so they made it edible.”
The man with the pushcart hands our guide a plastic cup full of green spears of guava. It’s been squirted with lime and dashed with salt and pepper. The guide passes them out to us and we gnash them by a busy street alive with the honking of horns.

The fruit is crunchy the way a carrot is crunchy. It isn’t what I thought it was going to be, but that doesn’t detract from what it is. Tangy, smoky from the pepper. I fumble around for a comparison, but nothing comes to me. It’s a wholly singular experience to my taste buds. Our guide waves us onward, our three-person tour snaking off behind him, weaving through the crowds. The tour company gave us instructions to meet him at a chocolate museum in the heart of the walled city and we found him there, leaning against the wall out front, looking like a young Colombian Johnny Depp. Don Juan Demarco, Johnny Depp. Dual Wielding Uzi’s, Johnny Depp. The Brit found us all right after. A single ginger British guy in a baseball cap with a slick looking pair of Raybans perched on his freckled nose. Somehow, even the ginger-Brit has a better tan than I do. I try not to think about it.

Standing in front of another cart now. Just a stove top on wheels basically, topped with what appears to be bricks of cornbread.
“These are a type of arepa, “ the guide explains as the woman with the spatula starts levering them up off the heat. There are two kinds in front of her and she gives us a half of each one on a napkin.

“One is sweet and other is salty,” which is mostly true. They’re both more savory than sweet to my American palette , but they’re also both delicious, so it doesn’t really matter. Texture like really thick, smooth mashed potatoes. The ‘salty’ one is run through with cheese and probably minced jalapenos and the ‘sweet’ one has a hint of maple syrup and that cheese that we had with the plantains, only hot and ropy.
We eat. We make noises. We walk

Boiling oil, maybe not too different from the kind they’d throw down on pirates in the 1500’s, only this oil has arepas rolling in it. The woman with the slotted spoon scoops them out for us one at a time, here on the edge of the walled city. The guide stands with his back to the traffic that divides us from Getsemani, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, pressed like a hand in a vice between the tourist draw of the walled city and the south-beachy playground of Bocagrande.

The woman with the spoon fishes our arepas out of the amber oil, gives them a shake to cool them then it’s onto another napkin. Mine has eggs and chorizo in it and it’s been fried so what else do you really need to know about it? It’s delicious, fill up all the cracks kinda food. According to the guide, this is a pretty regular breakfast for the working class people on the go.

“That is India Catalina.” Our guide says. He’s pointing at a statue of a woman in a simple dress at the mouth of the walled city, surrounded by roiling traffic. Her hands are at her sides, like before a hug.
“She was an indigenous princess who was captured by the Spanish in the 1500’s,”
He continues. “They brought her back to Spain and she taught them all about the indigenous people’s weaknesses and ways, then they brought her back and she helped them commit a genocide.”
“Fuck,” I say through a mouthful of arepa.
“Yeah,” he says. “She was kind of like a… Bad Pocahontas.”

We cross the wild street into Getsemani. There are murals here that stop you in your tracks. Vibrant, poignant works of art erupting off of a cracked wall. Our guide points to them as we walk. “This is about the fractured identity of the people who live here.”

A man hands us popsicles through a barred window. There is no sign over the window and for all intents and purposes, this is just someone’s house. Like many treats here (especially liquid ones), the popsicles come in a plastic bag. You have to peel the plastic down off of one end of it and hold it by the other side like a thick otter pop.

There’s absolutely no way to eat it so that it doesn’t look like you’re giving a mango colored man a spirited blowjob, and honestly, it tastes so good that I don’t care what I look like eating it. People notice, though. Eyes are averted. Somewhere in Getsemani, there is a man who just doesn’t sleep anymore. A man who breaks out in a cold sweat when he sees a mango.

We are on the last leg of our tour. The sun stretches through the trees and we are speckled by the shadow of it on a narrow avenue in Getsemani. The guide is describing the subtle pressure that is crushing the wind out of the families who live in this place.
“Take the utilities, for example,” he’s saying, “the way it works, is your utilities are charged depending on what number they assign you. Like, if your house is in a lower income neighborhood, you’re a 1. If you’re in a nicer neighborhood, you might be a 3. It goes all the way up to 4.” A dog trots past us, alone. Many dogs, out and about on their own here. “The problem is, the government can just change your number whenever they want. You can be in your little house, living the way you always have and then all the sudden they build a hotel down the street and someone comes and knocks on your door and says, ‘hey, you’re a 4 now.’ And your utilities just quadruple.” We pass a spattering of graffiti. ‘Resiste’ it says.

The last stop is a little coffee shop down a winding street. It’s dark and beautiful inside just like the smells wafting out of it. “ This is Cafe Del Mural,” our guide says. The mural it’s named after lights the wall behind him on fire. “ The coffee here is very good. I hope you enjoyed the tour.” We all thank him gushingly, my wife and the Brit and I. As he folds himself back into the street, he unloads one of those cool-guy waves that dorks like me remember. Effortless and fluid, like the rest of him. I could powerslide a muscle car through a factory with Raybans on and not look half as badass as he does when he leaves a tour group at a coffee shop.

When he’s gone, we all sit together, my wife and the Brit and I, in the relative cool of the coffee shop, sipping at very good coffee. The Brit just came from Brazil. He was robbed at gunpoint there by a boy on hard drugs with wild eyes and he ran away and the boy didn’t shoot. Later he asked someone if the robbers usually don’t shoot and he was told that often times they do. The Brit is amazed by how pleasant Cartegena is. How beautiful it is, how safe it feels. I wholeheartedly agree with him. I’m a bit of basketcase abroad, what with the dangerous job and all the military aggression, and I haven’t felt unsafe here once. Police on every corner, minding their own business. People on the streets, living their private lives. The vendors all smiling as they pass me a snack like they don’t know that I’m staying in one of the hotels that’s driving their utilities up into 4’s because it’s “so authentic”. Letting me take my pictures and ask my questions like it won’t lead to more people like me. Like I’m not just another bad Pocahontas.

In the dream, we keep leaving but we never get anywhere. In the dream, Melissa and I load up the car and we pull out of the driveway. There’s a cutscene and we’re in the Port of Tacoma in the near dawn and she asks me to get out. There’s another cutscene and I’m running alone through the port, barefoot now. I’m sprinting for the water’s edge. Airborne, windmilling towardthat polluted water, stained a baby blue by the morning sky. I ploosh into it and I’m deep down beneath it and Melissa is calling to me from the surface and when I dig my way back to it, I’m in the living room and Melissa is telling me I need to load the car. That we need to go. In the dream, we do it all over again.

Dreams like that change the way you see the world when you really do come to the surface. Sitting in the car on the freeway bound for the airport, waiting for the cutscene that will leave you barefoot running for open water. There is no cutscene. Just you and your wife and the road and a plane and new cities and new beds. Just travel and all the ways it wears you down and polishes you up.

We’re going to Cartagena, Colombia. One of those trips that fights its way to fruition at the end of a Northwestern winter. The clouds like a Tupperware lid, sealing in the darkness, the moisture. Sealing out the sun. Just a rippled sheet of foamy grey and the maddening drizzle going tick-tick-tick in the gutter. Three months of it and you think, sunshine. I. Need. Sunshine. But then, once all the planning is done and the arrangements have been made, it’s almost spring. The flowers are blooming and the temperature is crawling towardtolerable and Colombia feels like a long way away. Trip Advisor posts about robberies. Just the word Colombia on your lips gets strangers’ eyebrows jumping. But the tickets are already bought. Confirmation emails received. It might be a hectic trip and could be a dangerous trip, but it would definitely NOT be a refundable trip, so we were definitely going.

We slog our way through cruise season security at the airport, punch a bunch of caffeine and airport food into our faces and Alaska Airlines flings us across the country to Fort Lauderdale.

There is food that night, found hastily, walked to confusedly and shoveled exhaustedly. There is a brief trip along the canal in the perfect night air with the boat lights shimmering on the placid water and the smell of seawater on the merciful breeze. And yet, even when it’s pleasant, even with a mouthful of salty pork, or beer bubbles tickling my nose, even in twinkling lights with a sea breeze at my back, there is that feeling of disconnection. That vague sense of unrealness. Of running barefoot on a loop. That night we drift off to a fitful sleep in the semi-darkness. Late into the night, the sounds of Saturday night mayhem and youth in all its indecipherable wildness.

The next morning finds me wandering the streets in search of coffee. It’s too early again, and again I didn’t sleep well. I live a life of cutscenes. Up and down the street, trying doors, shuffling down the way. Starbucks in my hand. Starbucks in my mouth. We call an Uber to get us to the airport for the second leg of our flight. A man named Jeff whips a red Lexus around the corner and for all the moments between him opening his mouth to greet us and him screaming out his window at the airport, he is an East Coast Angel with a solid cheese halo.

He asks us all about our evening, points out some of the local attractions as they slip past the windows, New Jersey thick in his voice. My boilerplate question about best places to eat in his city elicits an extremely non-boilerplate answer.

“My buddy Brent owns the best Italian place in the city,” he says. He’s reaching for something in the center console. “Mention my name at the register and receive an appetizer valued at $18.99 free of charge.”

And I start to laugh, as he hands me a business card for the Italian place with his name in Sharpie on the back.

He sounds like Joe Pesci when he says it and even though he’s hustling at me, shamelessly, it’s not off-putting. We talk about Colombia with him. Tell him it’s not as dangerous as it used to be. That there’s peace, more or less, there now. He nods his head, but he’s not assuaged. Tells me to keep an eye on my valuables.

Say, “I’m going to keep my phone in my front pocket. I figure if someone manages to sneak something out of my front pocket without me noticing, then they earned it.”

He likes that. At the airport, we thank him and tip him. We’re walking to the security line and his voice goes booming through the terminal, Joe Peschi on a bullhorn. “YOUR PHONE‘S IN YOUR BACK POCKET!” He’s screaming through his passenger window. “WATCHOUT!”

Another airport, more caffeine and calories on the end of a tamp. We board a small, old plane with creaky seats and scuffed overhead bins. There are TVs on the backs of the seats that might as well have glass tubes in them. They flicker in and out in turbulence. I am squished into yet another center seat beside yet another gargantuan man. Like many of the discomforts of adult life, it’s no one’s fault and there’s nothing to be done about it. After a brief and sobering delay involving a stewardess with a family emergency that was most likely far more pressing than middle seats or spotty television, the pilot guides us to the runway and flings us across an ocean to Colombia.

We skate over a sheet of clouds that mostly covers Cuba and Jamaica, start to spiral down to Cartagena, through the fluff to the country below. Holding onto our armrests listening to the old plane groan and rattle, the giant to which I am stuck turns to us and says, “First time in Colombia?” He says it in Spanish and Melissa gathers it up carefully and tells him it is.

“It‘s very nice,” he says. “Be smart. Take off your watch. Don’t walk around on your phone. Don’t keep your wallet on you. Keep bills loose in your pocket.” He mimes pulling a wallet stuffed with cash out of his pocket, pretends to sort through imaginary money, wags his finger at us.

“Don’t do that,” he says. He takes a pull from the plastic cup of whiskey that he filled from a bottle that he took out of a duty-free bag, says, “Don’t buy anything. It’s all fake.”

We nod like disciples and the plane makes a sound like OOF coming down on the ground in a whole new world. “Have a good time,” he says.

Stepping off the plane is like stepping into soup. There are clouds overhead, but neither of us is upset about it because they protect us from this foreign sun that made the earth so hot. The sounds of car horns and alien birds.  The vague pangs of apprehension.

I am awake.

Customs gives us a cursory jostling and then releases us into the world. At the curb in front of the airport we hail a cab, agree to pay him 3 or 4 dollars for the 15 minute ride from the airport and then he lurches off the curb with us, tearing through the streets of Cartagena. The traffic is a tornado that has passed over a junkyard and we are in the grip of it. Our driver flicks at the gear shift, spins the wheel. He honks the horn for everything and for nothing. It is a greeting and a warning. Here, you hear horns that are so worn out they hardly make a noise anymore. A hoarse hooting beneath a battered hood. People step out into the streets on 8 lane roads, froggering past busses, between bumpers. On two separate occasions, I see people texting while driving a motorcycle helmetless. Our driver drifts between lanes, honking all the while. He veers around a man pushing a cart full of mangos in the street, forces a motorcycle between two busses. The cycle honks. The busses honk. The mango cart pusher whistles like a train horn, drowns them all out. We slip past squat houses with wrought iron gates. We hurtle by concrete tenement buildings with laundry drying on the balconies. Massive palms, dogs and cats all in a blur beyond those smudged cab windows. We pull up at the hotel, sweating from the heat and from the ride. He takes our money and lurches off into the fray, again.

The concierge at the hotel buzzes us through a gate into the lobby and we drop all of our needy luggage in the sparkling oasis of air conditioning and silence that is our room. The sheets are white and the tiles on the floor are sandy blocks with seashells pressed into them. There’s a TV on the wall and a pool on the roof and we’ve had a long day.

“So,” Melissa says, “What do you want to do?”

Outside, there is a man screaming sweet nothings about the mangos on his cart. A flock of alien birds rip past the window.

“Let’s go out there.”

May 13th, 2018. You fire “Restaurants” into the search bar of Yelp, “Cartagena, Colombia” into the location and the mighty Goliath of half-assed evaluations from underqualified users heaves a sigh and falls silent. No suggestions, No reviews. Google offers some help and TripAdvisor has some advice, but ‘comprehensive’ is not a word that I would use to describe them. Footpaths in a vast forest. Aerial imagery over deep woods. We do our best. The hotel burps us through its gates and we point ourselves in what we hope is the right direction and walk.

Wide-eyed through bustling streets with narrow sidewalks choked with people. Houses like a pastel crayon box with flags spread out between them. A man wants to sell us a hat. A lone dog barking at an iguana, who doesn’t seem very concerned about it. Out of our neighborhood beyond a park and a tangled mass of traffic We find the entrance to the walled city. It was built in the 1500’s by the Spanish to keep pirates out. 20 feet thick in some places, bristling with old cannons that point out to the ocean. Within those walls, streets like spaghetti on a plate, designed by military engineers to disorient any invaders who actually managed to make it ashore. Your sightlines are limited to the end of whatever block you’re on. Streets meander north and then wander their way back around to the east.

There are no spaces between the buildings, no vantage point to get your bearings. Fortunately for us, pirates have become far less of a bother, and so the security is a bit more relaxed. The government ordered that all the buildings be painted a variety of colors (which helps with the feeling of claustrophobia) and now there are landmarks abound. We zig and zag our way past businesses and restaurants full of colorful goods and memorable features. 10-foot tall doors with lion’s head knockers and courtyards bursting with tropical fauna. A bar named KGB with a Russian flight suit in the window and a massive pastel cathedral. All little pins on a winding map and by the end of the day, I can look at a spot on an aerial photo of the city and navigate us there without consulting it again. We arrive at a place on the north end of the walled city called Quero Arepo, grab up seats by the door.

The waitress brings us laminated menus and Melissa orders eloquently in Spanish that she has worked for years to perfect. The waitress nods at her, turns to me and I sputter,

“I… Need… This…. One…” in a collection of broken syllables like a man who should have a bandage around his head. An amused smile splashes across her face and then a burst of language from which I pluck the word for “drink”.

“I…Need… This … One.” I point at a beer on the menu and if she wanted to, she could insist I was already drunk and ask me to leave and anyone who heard our little back and forth would have a really hard time persuading her that I wasn’t. Instead, she takes our menus and heads into the back.

“Quesiera.” my wife says through the palm over her face.

“Huh?”

“‘Quesiera’ is a more polite way of asking for things in Spanish.” She says.

Dually Noted. The waitress brings the beer that I ‘needed’ and I gulp at it because it is cold and nothing else is. A breeze oozes in through the door. A horsedrawn carriage clomps up the street with a  man giving a tour from behind the reigns of it. A few minutes later, our food comes out. It’s spectacular. Fried dough wrapped around a mound of chicken, beef, cheese, and avocado.

I moosh it into my face with the same grace I used to order it. The salt and the fat and the tang of it. The crunch and the chew and the soft of it. I am present for every bite. For every step along the streets. For every word past my lips. For the wind on my skin at the top of that ancient wall. For the sunset over the Caribbean. I am awake. No cutscenes. No loops. Just a notebook in my back pocket and a whole new city to fill it with.