Palenque

Right out of Africa! An Africa away from Africa! Palenque was definitely worth the painfully slow bus ride to Cartagena’s bus terminal (one hour to travel six kilometres?!) and roughly an hour-and-a-half more on another bus, which stopped and advanced frequently causing our ride to be somewhat jolty. Our driver’s visibility was heftily compromised by the beautiful multicoloured textile covering the top half of his windscreen and his side windows. Very nerve wracking if you ask us! What with the speed of the motorcycles filtering in and out and across scattered queues of heavy, clustered traffic! Every so often there would be stray dogs risking their lives just to cross the road and, even more frequently, loud vehicle horns to keep us alert!
Once we arrived in “Palenque” as the driver had told us the bus was going to, we descended and were approached by a few lads with motorbikes telling us that they’d give us a ride. But of course the distance was easily walkable, even in the tropical midday heat, so they were just more people out to scam the tourists! It turns out that being cynical doesn’t always pay off as during the first steps through the even smaller village of Palenquito, Jon asked an old lady who was cooking a delicious smelling broth in the garden the direction and distance to Palenque itself. It was still five kilometres away, which by normal standards is doable but quite a stretch in this heat, but fortunately, one of the guys came by on his motorcycle and on we crammed; the driver, Simon and Jon. We don’t like motorbikes at the best of times, but we warmed to this and the ride towards Palenque was frankly awesome! It was so good that we arranged to meet the same driver later to take us back to the bus stop.
Meanwhile, Palenque. A mixture of brightly coloured buildings and small bamboo huts with walls reinforced with dried out mud, topped with straw roofs plus an immediate sense of Hispanic absence was a lot to take in for a first impression. It was wonderful!

Our faithful Lonely Planet guidebook says that anthropologists have carried out investigations in the village and have found that the African descendents here are most closely related to Africans from around the mouth of the Congo, East Africa.

This was the ‘first free town for black people in the Americas’ and this is still proudly represented by a statue in the tiny village square of Benkos Bioho breaking his chains. Benkos escaped captivity in Cartagena and established Palenque, 70km away, in 1603. It’s easy to see today just how proud the villagers are to be from there and their friendliness is really heart-warming. Most of the people living here are farmers and it’s very amusing to see almost-microscopic piglets scurrying quickly from place to place, in between the feet of donkeys, and around the domesticated dogs.

A beer or two was enjoyed inside a homestead of a local and these nosey parkers were blown away by the way of life inside; chickens running freely in the square foot yard and bedrooms almost like what we saw in Bangladesh - large, probably made for a few people to share, and surrounded with mud walls.

People who weren’t farmers were cooks of some kind and we noticed small cooking fires in the some tiny mud gardens with alien aromas wafting to the street. One lady collected some sweet coconut goods that had just been made and balanced them on her head in a metal bowl, and off she swayed down the street to start selling.

Life here looks hard, but the people look happy and perhaps the only bad part of our day was having to leave the town.