Susan Vasquez

Walking Pasto, Colombia

Many of us came from other places. But how often do we return? For forty years my husband and I had planned to someday, somehow return to Pasto, Colombia, a place we once called home. The city is so far off the North American travel radar that I wondered if we, having known and loved this place years ago, could find our way back.

It is possible to go. There are paved roads passing through. Airlines fly to a near-by airport. But I remember the isolation, the unpredictable roads and the difficulty of getting there. I remember the Trans-America Highway, which runs past the town, being closed twice a day for the parade of cows going to and coming back from the grassy pastures along the sides of the Galeras Volcano. I remember a very small city with a Colonial-style town center and unpaved streets running up toward the hills that circle the town.

Could we tolerate the travel that it takes to get back to our old home? The roads can be dangerous. I had ventured out many times by bus and remembered well the steep drop-offs and the hair-pin turns. Though I never experienced anything of the sort, travelers are now advised against nighttime journeys in this region because of robberies and kidnappings.

It was time to find out how far we were from our younger selves, who had reveled in this place so long ago. Pasto, Colombia.

We hire a taxi at the airport. Many of the turns in the road on the long ride to town are familiar. The most significant, just before we get into town, appears ahead and I feel like I am 24 years old again. I know this spot.

But then we take the turn, and a huge city reveals multi-storied, cemented, squared-off apartment complexes littering the hillsides. Suddenly I am lost, and I wonder how on earth things have changed this much. I have been gone a long time.

The taxi leaves us off in the historic center. This part of Pasto, I know. I heave my rolling suitcase over the familiar cobbled roadway and walk up to our residencia. The colonial façade is exactly the style I remember, sitting along a street that is exactly the same as I walked forty years before. I push open the double wooden door and am welcomed into an interior courtyard. We leave off our travel gear and head to the streets.

The annual Blacks and Whites Carnival (Carnaval de Negros y Blancos) is taking place all around us. I walk the streets with hundreds of other Pastusos and am enveloped with a sudsing of white foam. Yesterday, black oil paint would have been streaked onto my face by the fingers of gleeful strangers. Today, la cumbia – the music of Colombia – blasts from boom boxes and everyone – EVERYONE – holds spray containers of white foam, randomly dousing each other with the wet white powder. No one gets angry at this overly-intrusive act of joyful aggression. I walk among the crowd and begin to relive my past.

Down the street, we see a familiar corner, and head that direction. I walk up to the super-market where we shopped. Not the central park monument or the large colonial buildings surrounding the main square, but the place where I bought bread draws my attention. It has the same concrete steps, the same railing, the same street sign. But the store has a different name: ‘Sarin’s‘, is now ‘Exito‘.

On the sidewalk, I buy bottled water from a woman who might be the daughter of the flower salesperson from forty years ago. I walk farther along the street and come to the corner where I used to turn on my way home.

Along the way, I recognize the two-story wooden building with the garage-like doors. I remember the two-toned colonial home that was on the street before my own. But as I walk to where I thought I used to live, things seem to have changed. My house isn’t where I thought it had been. I walk to the next block, but it’s not there either.

I retreat to the town center, where only the names of the stores have changed. Here, I can view the town as I remember it from the safety of the residencia‘s tiny balcony. The festival goes on in the streets below me, now with a thousand friendly revelers, and I have a momentary feeling of having found my old home.

I have five more days to find the exact house where I lived. But as I step closer to the edge of the balcony – music so loud my head pounds with the beat, the cobbled streets now completely white with the powdery wet spray – it doesn’t seem I need to feel any closer to my once hometown of Pasto.