Timeline of Important Events, part II

Theres been ten days since the end of camp, when we all assembled in our final circle on the bug infested grass and there were tears and there were proclaimations of love and thanks and sorrow and hope. Surrounding us was the colour green, swirling botantic, fresh and broken only by flecks and patches of colour; the white trunks of the eucalypts, the dirt road, the bright flowers of red and blue. Our chugging hearts, the desperate hugs, this familar scene. All of us, fast inventing futures in our tired minds. The arms were loosened, last wet kisses, and we were on the bus. Away, to Medellin.

Since then the group has been shrinking daily, people being shaved away by buses and aeroplanes, to school and families, from 27 of us to just me. Today, in the multilayered Bucaramanga station I watched as Jorge and Ana's bus backed out into the soft rain, their faces smooshed to the glass, fingers pulled into sideways vees like presenters on the Colombian music television show Cool Play. This is loneliness. It's been three days with just the three of us, three days in the small town of Barichara, but this time seems longer to me than the whole time the camp lasted. It only seemed right that they join me for the rest of it. But now it is only me.

But first, lets backtrack. In Medellin we celebrated the eve of Colombia's independence by dancing with whistles and flags in a large and famed nightclub crammed full of cowboy gear. On the bartops were teams of professional dancers, gorgeous women with elliptical plastic breasts and sparkles on their skin, thick jawed men built like tree trunks, and midgets chucking headstands. After an hours sleep we head southwards, thirteen of us now, to the Zona Cafetera, our minivans hugging the lush hills stacked with coffee plantations. We bathe in thermal springs, our bodies light and soft in the steam and sulfur and the jungled mountains hugging us tight as the afternoon light glows then fades. We hire a mariachi band to perform two tender songs to us under the looming statue of Simon Bolivar in the empty Pereira plaza. At the Parque Nacional del Café (like a coffee themed Disneyland for 6 year olds, without any actual attractions) we form a guerilla organisation, las FACEP (Fuerzas Armadas Contra el Patacon), committed to ridding Colombia of one of its more bland foods, the mashed plantain patty known as Patacon. Jorge accepts my 5000 peso dare to approach patacon stores and announce our groups intentions to overtake them and "take all the patacon hostage," much to the confusion and amusement of the store ladies. One reaches for the money she is counting out and tucks it away, worriedly.

The highlight of the coffee zone, though, is Valle de Cocora, where tropical looking wax palms rise tall out of the thick white cloud which blankets the forest. We take horses along the valley, over gushing streams and vibrant meadows, the hills on either side eerie and beautiful, the cloud spectral and the tall palms emerging slender, like roman candles. The farms end and we are engulfed by jungle, where we dismount and explore a waterfall before trotting back along the valley as the sun disappears and we pile 16 into an open backed jeep back to town. Darkness now, and the fields along the roadside are coated with, literally, millions of fireflies, glittering like static in the black grass.

We took the nightbus to Bogota. We had to choose between companies, and the one we didn't take rolled into the capital behind us with a shattered window. Woah, we said, and Jorge asked a little girl what had happened. It had been a direct bus to Bogota, but a man had wanted to get off along the way. When the bus driver refused the man took the little red hammer and just smashed the emergency window out, which as you might imagine left many passengers pretty cold for the remaining journey over the high passes of the Andes.

When it was just the three of us left we headed northwards again, to San Gil, and to Barichara.

Entry Two

Entry Two in the "What Chris is Doing In Colombia Over the Next Month" creative writing competition.

by David Parsons of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Chris boards the bus wearing a new shirt: tree-frog green, greyshort-sleeves, and an italicized elephant screen-printed in flat blue above his washboard stomach.

The mall was cool, air-conditioned, made him uncomfortable. His new ranchero hat keeps the sun from his eyes as the sun shines in the window; it reminds him of the mall, and this he does not like. It comes to mind now: why, he wonders, doesn't he like the hat reminding him of the mall? He thinks on it, and begins to like the memory. The small, semi-private internet cubicle at Marión with a keyboard he could hardly navigate for the accents and a photograph of the swiss alps with the word SUISSE in red letters on top; buying Mexican candies in a small Colombian hardware store because the shopkeeper told him, "Son los mejores, mi amigo."

Memory is like that, he realizes, as he watches the others board the bus and lurches as the yellow bus -- "East Mississippi School Bo rd: Bus 14"emblazoned in black on one side, the "a" conspicuously missing -- begins the short ride back to camp. We remember things as we like to. His distaste for the cool consumerism of the mall will metamorph into an appreciation of the differences of pop-culture that come with language and geography changes: he will remember smiling as he heard a deep masculine voice ringing out, "doble-ve doble-ve doble-ve punto coca-cola punto com," as a radio commercial played over the speakers of a clothing store. He will realize that he can't be sure whether things happened as he remembers or whether they may as well have happened because he remembers.

The lush green foliage, the smells of corn and smoke from roadside vendors selling food to people inside noisy buses and trucks, the sound of horns honking and spanish pop-music -- they all seem to float by as his mind weaves them into his story.

Together, here.

One week into the camp; its shopping day and I'm taking refuge from the big shopping mall in a stationary supply store called Marión which has, as a logo, an elephant that looks like its been italicised. It's the only place here with internet, and so I have dashed here first thing, like some kind of desperate smack addict while most of the rest of the camp eat chorizo or watch the Italy-Germany game or shop for bluejeans.

All goes well so far. Last night was the first serious simulation type game of the Seminar and was themed around prejudice. It involved teams of four or five running between stations manned by people who were not very nice to certain people, especially one guy who was highlighting the issue of women hating by making the girls peel oranges while shouting at them and then forcing me to shove three (minature, granted, but still) oranges into one girls mouth in order to give us the next clue. All agreed it was a good activity, albeit scary and confronting. Yes, I realise this CISV thing sounds weird to those from outside it. That? is because it is weird.

But fun, y'know, too. Our camp site is gorgeous, surrounded in green hills where horses graze and green fireflies speckle in the fruit trees in the black night. Geese slide across lillypadded lakes, which are surrounded by Australian eucalypts and strange pom pom trees which look like monster cheerleaders. By day we run barefoot through the soft grass, kick footballs, smack volleyballs, search for Colombian fruits that you can break open (the insides look like fish eggs) and eat with teaspoons. At night there is a log fire, bottles of beer, salsa music, the loaded massages of young couples on the verge of becoming young lovers. There are 27 of us altogether, and for the first time on one of these seminars (this is my third in 18 months) I really feel like we are one group. There is noone at all that I cannot stand. And, of course, there are individuals within that group who are wonderful, beautiful, inspiring. Jorge from Mexico, always excited and curious about art and politics; the soft and smiling Brazilian Ana, confusing the boys and possibily herself, a monument to all that is great about teenagehood; Sara from Sweden, a gum chewin', tobacco-lipped, headrollin' type of hiphop girl with whom I have developed a secret communication method using English words written in a hybrid Arabic/Persian script (her family is from Iran) with which we compose broken letters about the cute boys at the camp and urging each other to have fun cleaning the bathrooms.

Actually, now it's time I left, the bus is nearly departing and I haven't done my neccessary shopping (deoderant, candy, a ranchero hat if there's time) so I bid you all farewell for now. Greeting from Antioquia, Colombia, and I hope with everything I have that you can all safely say that you, like me, are pretty much at peace.

Entry One

Entry One in the "What Chris is Doing In Colombia Over the Next Month" creative writing competition.

By Molly Greene, 15, of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

Chris rises at dawn, drinks a glass of water and eats some Vegemite. On a rice cracker. He is prepared for a new day at a lovely seminar camp. Unfortunately, he discovers he can't discover or recall where he left his favorite shirt, dyed in the Himalayas by Wiccans in the most delicate shade of saffron. It is the only shirt that matches his parachute pants, the only clean pants he has. "Good grief," he thinks to himself. "Whatever shall I do?" At this moment a water spirit appears in the doorway. "Christopher, matchy-matchy is out, as everyone knows," the water spirit announced. She had long spidery hair carefully clothing her scale-y body and Christopher wondered how a naked water spirit could be advising him regarding style."What are you doing here?" he wondered aloud. "There isn't water for acres." "Ahh, foolish lad," she replied wisely. "The true water is found in the mind." At that moment, Chris knew what had befallen his favorite saffron shirt. "You!" he cried. "You have my shirt." "Nay, nay," she whispered. "The shirt too is found in the mind." Chris, usually a mild soul, began to lose his temper. "Beastly wench," he hissed. "Return my shirt to me immediately.""Only if you answer me one question: Why is the ocean blue?" She looked a thim smugly because surely no one knows why the ocean is blue. However, Christopher knew. "The ocean is blue because it reflects the sky, which is also blue." At that moment the water spirit disappeared, replaced by the saffron shirt, which Chris wore for the duration of the seminar camp and grew to love more and more every single day. The end.

Please send further entries to standardlinedelivery@gmail.com in order to fill the void in posts over the coming months.

One Week Report, Illustrated.

(Figures 1 and 2: Antony Gormley artwork titled "Asian Field", exhibited at Pier 2/3 as part of the Biennale of Sydney, 2006. Gormley got a village in China to make these critters out of local clay and then assembles them in various galleries around the globe. There are over 180 000 figures in all. The art of setting them up and transporting them is the most impressive part and it was truely one of the most beautiful art pieces I have ever seen.)

(Figure 3: The main Cathedral in Bogotá, with cloudcrested Andean peaks behind it. Bogotá is a city with many pigeons, gracious old churches and girls with big asses in tight jeans. It has this crazy cool transport system which is called Transmilenio, which is like a metro system but with special buses, with their own traffic lanes and stations and it's very cheap and crowded and wonderful.)
(Figure 4. Downtown Bogotá street. Bogotá also has many lovely streets and small children who, very cleverly speak Spanish. Both are present in this illustration. What you can't see is that in Bogotá there are well dressed and altogther finely presented young people dancing well to Latin music in many many swanky nightclubs. It was at one of these such places that I danced next to the famous ex-child actor Carla Giraldo who, years ago, played the title character in the Colombian telenovela "Lolita" and recently posed naked and discussed her bi-sexuality in a mens magazine. She was indeed, kissing girls in said nightclub. I attempted the salsa and didn't do so well.)
(Figure 5: the tips of the mountains that overshadow Bogotá on the eastern side. At least three people told me to use the mountains to keep orientated in Bogotá. So I did. Bogotá is at about 2500 metres above sea level and it is possible to suffer some effects due to the altitude. I didn't, unless you can count the strange and vivid dreams I was having each night, which come to think of it I also had while trekking in Nepal. I've mentioned the Guus dream in a previous entry, but others involved me seeing four people from the upcoming Seminar camp being ripped apart by a bus and also me sucking, briefly, the tongue of a fifteen year old girl and worrying that my breath smelled. Both of these dreams resulted in my waking up and wondering if they were real or not for at least 30 seconds.)

(Figure 6: A cloud above the campsite, in el Retiro, near Medellin. The campsite, which we visited today, is incredibly beautiful, with ponds and geese and green trees everywhere and a cosy house with big windows and a wood fireplace. The nearby town is just as wonderful, with little dim cantinas gathered around a cute main square, packed with old men with moustaches drinking aguardiente and eating chorizo. I'm actually not sure I've ever been to a country so consistantly attractive before in my entire life. Anyway, I leave to the camp site on Monday, so this may be my last entry for some time. Enjoy the rest of the World Cup, readers, and remember me in your autobiographies. All the best. )