I’m finalising this post on a frigid night in New England, looking out my window to 2 feet of fresh-fallen snow. So I’m writing with a slightly ironic bent about time travel and other worlds and feelings of fernweh and reentry, all simultaneously.
The day I touched down in Bogotá, the wackadoodle leadership of the country that issues my blue-bound passport kidnapped the president of Venezuela and was making googly eyes at Colombia. To be honest, I had zero idea how this trip was going to play out.
See Azul y Tranquilidad, Part I: Transport and Arrival. It ended up being fine… almost too fine – as if everyone around me was also on holiday and couldn’t be bothered to worry about the intercontinental political chaos playing out in the seas and land not so far away. I was here to partially shower off the emotional overload of the past months, and overdose on my much-needed vitamin sea. The ocean cures all.
Vacation mode activated!
So here I was, on a tiny dot in the middle of the Caribbean, an island surrounded by a barrier reef and a sea so sparkly that it over-earns its nickname of The Sea of Seven Colours. [Note: this BBC article was written about a month before Iota, a cat-5 hurricane, flattened Providencia. They are still rebuilding 5 years later.]
Rather than describe a series of days that acquired a comfortable tempo of sameness (wake-up, brekkie, diving, surface interval, more diving, banana bread, hammock, nap, wandering, dinner, sleep), I want to write about the feeling of the place. The déjà-vu spidey-sense I had from the moment I stepped off the San Andrés to Providencia plane and walked across the humid tarmac into the little island airport.
Déjà-vu.
I went to Belize for the first time in 1999. It was a few months after Hurricane Mitch had wrecked parts of Ambergris Caye, so I saw it before the rebuilding and the international tourists wreaked their storm surge on the island. Don’t mess with natural nature, an old Belizean said to me one late night, Belikin in hand, around a fire on the beach. After that first visit, I made a lot of trips to Belize and other parts of Central America. My Spanish was better back then, but that quote floats back to me a lot.
Arrival in Providencia felt like that time and place. The air was salty and warm, like a seaweed-infused hug. Frigatebirds circled in a brilliant blue sky. Motor scooters zoomed by. Palm leaves swayed in the sea breeze. As the taxi shuttled me towards the town of South West Bay (if a 15-sq km place is big enough for “towns”), I noted the lots still roped off and the houses and hotels still semi-smashed from Iota who visited Providencia in Nov of 2020 just as they were just recovering from Covid.
It felt like I needed to write about this place as a string of anecdotes and impressions rather than a rundown of experiences.
Colombian coffee and petrichor.
I don’t drink coffee, but the wonderful guest house I stayed at [South West Bay Cabañas] made a perfectly simple breakfast every morning, complete with a pot of freshly-brewed Colombian coffee and a side of steamed milk. I mean, how could one not indulge. The hotel was simple but comfortable and it didn’t even occur to me that my room didn’t have TV or cable until I re-read their website… apparently if you want that, you book a fancier room on the 2nd floor. But the hammock on my veranda, their resident iguanas, and the constant birdsong (hello, bananaquit!) helped me settle into a routine of afternoon siestas and walks to and from the dive shop on South West Beach. The accommodation was “just enough” and just what I needed… well, after I remembered that it’s hard to find a hot water tap in this part of the world, and that showers are best taken in the late afternoon to give the sun god time to warm up the rainwater in the basin.
And it rained, almost daily: those fierce tropical showers that last for 20 minutes and leave the air feeling thoroughly laundered and the greenery greener, depositing in its wake a rainforest-y petrichor that permeates the senses.
I took a walk one afternoon to see what I could find. About 7 minutes into my walk, the giant drops started to fall. “¡Ven aquí!” “Come up!” I heard shouted from a house. A little man invited me to his porch to sit with him and his family while we watched the rain come down. We watched the drops land as small water balloons. We looked at iguanas in the trees across the way. Wafts of spice emanated from the little kitchen. He told me stories about how the family hid in the bathroom for 12 hours while the hurricane blew the house down around them.
Exploring a pirate island.
Santa Catalina is a small island offshoot on the north end of Providencia. You can only get there by foot, over the “lovers bridge”, which welcomes you to the island with a colorful pirate greeting. Privateer Henry Morgan (THE Captain Morgan) was said to have used Santa Catalina as a hideaway, and some even believe that a portion of his treasure is still hidden there. So I took a day and wandered from Providencia’s “downtown”, through the remnant holiday decorations, and over the bridge to Santa Catalina. After a short walk along the water, you go up a steep staircase to a viewpoint with some cannons that date back to the 1600s and the pirates who occupied the island. Is the loot buried up here? Another staircase takes you down to Fort Beach and a view out to Morgan’s Head, a rock formation named for Santa Catalina’s illustrious buccaneer. I would end up snorkeling in these waters a few days later, getting views from all sides. It was quiet and lush…as I looked out across the water from next to a cannon, a pirate voice rumbled in my head, “arrr…that’s a great view!”
Where the birds go in winter.
On the walk where I got caught in the rain, I ended up taking a path that led behind a school and to a cove where fishermen tie up their boats for the evening. The last fisherman was throwing some fish guts for the frigatebirds to snack on. In the fray, I spotted some locals. By locals, I mean my locals: semipalmated plovers and sanderlings and ruddy turnstones. I stayed in that cove for a while, like bird paparazzi, and watched the frigatebirds and shorebirds mix and mingle. Frigatebirds are like a cross between a seagull and a vulture, with neck wattles that expand like balloons to impress the ladies during courtship rituals. So of course I was mesmerized…I mean, who wouldn’t be? The day turned into a bird-watching adventure… I logged some new birds, took too many photos, and fulfilled some of my bird-geek needs for the week. There were even a couple of our warblers there, like me, to warm their feathers.
And the best food is…
There’s a lady who sets up an empanada stand on the little road that goes up to the little supermarket, off the (only slightly less-little) road that goes down to the beach. The stand opens at some point in the late afternoon each day and closes when all of her goodies are gone. She sells empanadas filled with langosta (lobster), cangrejo (crab), pescado (fish), and sometimes pollo (chicken) as well as these little croquetas (fish balls). I stumbled upon her stand one evening, half-way into my trip and ended up eating her empanadas for dinner 3x in a week! And when I mentioned her stand to one of the divemasters at the dive shop, opining that she sells maybe the best empanadas on the planet, all he said back was, oh yeah. It’s funny when you discover a local gem that the locals (or guidebooks) didn’t even have to recommend.
I was on a mission to find a favorite ceviche de caracol (conch ceviche) while I was there. Even though I only tried 4 different iterations (every chef has their own twist on the classic), there was a hands-down winner: the “first restaurant on the beach” at South West Beach. They add a little tomato paste, and what tastes like tamarind, to make it unique. Of course I need to try to recreate it at home (though will probably try with shrimp!).
Every meal or snack felt like fiction: The empanadas. The coconut ice pop from a cooler on the back of a lady’s motor scooter. The ceviche. A coconut lemonade while watching the sunset. The banana bread from the panadería on the road to South West Beach…hot from the oven and served in tin foil, which keeps it warm an hour later. If there were awards given for simple, pure, magical food, the empanadas and banana bread would win the gold.
I went to Providencia seeking escape from the cold and immersion in the warm…in culture and water and food and welcome. It worked…and I could go back tomorrow.
I’m going to save the waterplay for Part III, as I’m still curating photos.