In the lands of the coffee, from the book, Searching for treasures
Highway between Huehuetenango and Guatemala,City, Guatemala
“I was thinking about that while riding on the bus from Medellin. I was wondering just how complicated it could be, you know, simply to get from one place to another. Even nowadays, we have highways, motorized vehicles, and all the modern conveniences, yet, it still takes such a long time to move around these sierras. So, I keep wondering what it must have been like before when they didn’t have paved roads and cars or buses to drive on them. As I was sitting on the bus and just going through all these curves and mountain passes, I would think about how they could get around in between these high lands…”
“It sure wasn’t easy, my man, quite tough, in fact. It was setting one foot in front of the other and putting your soul on the line too! That’s the way we Paisas are, what can I say? It’s not that we are better than the rest, not at all. The thing is that we were forced by the circumstances.”
“See here, heroes aren’t born by their own choice. The truth is that they are thrown headlong into the mess, on top of it all! That’s a truth you can take to the bank! There were great poverty and plain, bare unfulfilled necessities in those times, and that was that. In a way, I suppose we also enjoyed fighting the odds and not letting them beat us, no Sir!”
“But getting back to matters at hand, in those days, traveling was done on foot. You wanted to get somewhere… you walked! Imagine this, one day, my Dad was going from Manizales to Medellin. Meanwhile, my Mom was traveling from Medellin to Manizales. Would you believe that they met in this roadside inn at a place called La Felissa? This was more or less halfway between the cities. My Daddy used to say that he would have loved to have gone all the way to Medellin. At the very least, he would have liked to get to see it, if only once in his life…!”
“What did you say, Jon Jairo. I didn’t catch it all. You’ll have to forgive me, but my Spanish is not as good as I would like it to be.”