Finding Macondo

I don't read the words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I feel them.

His work impacts me more than any other author, to the point where sentences give me goosebumps, make me catch my breath or let out a burst of laughter.

When I read his work, I feel understood. I feel seen. He describes the torture, joy and frailty of being human with compassion, humour and an insight that transcends context and time.

Coming to Colombia has been always been about finding Gabo, as he's affectionately known here, walking the streets he walked, seeing what he saw, feeling what he felt.

And to truly find Gabo, I needed to find Macondo.

Macondo is the fictional setting for Gabo's astonishing 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a town that rose up from the banks of a swamp and prospered, before descending into chaos and being swept away on the wind.

It tells the story of the spectacularly ill-fated Buendìa family, tortured for more than a century by inevitability and circumstance.

The fates of the family and the town are irrevocably woven together from the first page to the last, recounting the history of not only this place and these people, but Colombia itself.

I'm fantastically ill-equipped to tell you what Gabo was trying to convey through the novel, and having just re-read it, I'm still not much closer to understanding it.

All I can tell you is that it describes what it's like to be all at once the jailer and the prisoner of your own mind.

It's said that Gabo's inspiration for Macondo came from the town of Mompos, buried deep in the Colombian countryside.

It's a town that once had high prominence thanks to its position on the mighty Magdalena River, but that sank into obscurity when silt deposits diverted the established trading routes elsewhere.

It remains in splendid isolation, a relic from another time that moves with the tranquil pace of the Magdalena, neither rushing towards or away from its fate.

Unlike Macondo, it's still standing, though it's standing still.

Its people are very much of the present, but they live in the streets, gather in the squares and worship in the churches of the past.

Mompos simultaneously exists now, and then.

I'm happy just to be here as a contented meanderer, watching the town play its tricks with time.