Magdalena

Rio Magdalena, Colombia

November, 2011, Minca- Colombia

Rio Magdalena

I’d been exploring the botanical gardens around Colombia. Now I was heading to Santa Marta and the Caribbean coast. I planned to visit the Tayrona national park as well as get a glimpse of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the snow-capped peaks of the world’s highest coastal mountain range.

The Magdalena is the 1500km long main artery of the country. I’d read that pollution, drought and dams had been factors in it losing ninety percent of its fish stocks since 1975. It was once a way to penetrate the interior of South America. Some of the locals called it the ‘Yuma’.

I sat in foothills that looked to the distance, where the Magdelena met the Caribbean sea. Behind me, the Sierra rose almost six thousand metres. I watched the numbers tick over on the eleventh month of the eleventh year of the new millennium. It was 11:11 AM and 11 seconds. Somehow my life had brought me here on this date.

Jungled hills gave way to a cactus-filled coast.

I had the ability to measure time, but who really knows when it started? Being in this place of hummingbirds and waterfalls made it clear to me that time is just as important no matter where we are. Every second is just as significant as the one before it and the one after it.

I thought about when the forces on Earth pushed the Magdalena on its first journey through the landscape and what Colombia would be without it.

To the natives it was Caripuana or “great river” and Arli, the “river of fish”. It was a place to carry out exchanges and barter from canoes; the Yuma, “river of friends”.