Breakfast with Margot

If Mompos was a time, it would be those first moments of being awake on a blissfully lazy Sunday.

There's nowhere to be except right where you are, and where you are is perfect.

I'd describe the pace of the place as glacial if it wasn't so damn hot.

In any other town the buildings lining the bank of the Rio Magdalena would be the smartest, most expensive and completely turned over to tourists.

Not so in Mompos, where strolling along the river you're as likely to find an empty house, or crumbling relic as you are a cafe. 

I came across a few tables and chairs by the river wall, the only sign anywhere that I might be able to enjoy a morning coffee.

I was hovering around the entrance to the large colonial style house across from the seating, when a young man, who had been sitting on a bench not far away, approached me.

I asked him if it was possible to have breakfast, by which time a woman had appeared from inside the house, to try to help me out with some Spanish translation.

She was in her late 60s, wearing a flowery smock and it was apparent that she was neither Colombian nor long out of bed.

I took her for a guest at the house which, peeking inside, looked like it had a bar and rooms set around a lovely garden courtyard.

I'm not sure who asked who, but she joined me for breakfast.

Her name is Margot, she’s German, and as it turned out, not a guest but the owner.

Over coffee, Margot explained that her husband, Joseph, was Colombian and had been born in the house.

Margot and Joseph met in Washington, married in Germany, and settled in Montreal, where he worked as an associate professor of maths at the university.

Joseph's father, Roberto Nieto, had bought the house around 1900. He was a merchant, dealing manly in maiz, and also had farmland. Margot explained that what was now the bar area had once been Roberto's office.

When Joseph’s parents died, with him in Canada and his sister in Switzerland, the house was closed up for many years. 

Margot told me they had to pay a local person to sleep there to protect it from people slipping in through the roof to help themselves to Joseph and his sister’s inheritance.

This was the state of affairs until two years ago when their son, Martin, suggested turning the house into a small hotel and bar. 

After breakfast Margot proudly showed me around, pointing out the expensive repairs to the roof and the toilets they imported from Italy. 

Martin and his wife now live in Mompos for half the year and Margot and Joseph head there for three months each year to escape the biting Canadian winter.

I asked Margot if Mompos was always as quiet as I'd found it. She said it was a quiet week as many people had gone to the carnival at Barranquilla but that the town was shrinking because children were leaving their family homes for opportunities in Bogota, Medellìn and Cartagena, returning only for the Easter and Christmas holidays.

‘You can barely walk around here during the holidays,' she said. 

While Mompos does have a few hostels and small hotels, it seems completely, and refreshingly, ambivalent to tourism. ,

I think I'm one of about twenty tourists here at the moment and I've already started to exchange cheery holas with the locals I see repeatedly on my daily wanderings.

Lines are blurred here; a cafe could easily be a private house, ‘customers’ repeatedly turn out to be owners, the town hall is a former convent which you can wander around amidst the locals queuing to speak with the department for education. 

One of the most perplexing things about Mompos is the locals' love of the moto. It’s a tiny town laid out in a grid system that's 20 by 4 streets wide - a push bike would do!

Maybe they prefer the hum of the bikes over the sleepy almost-silence of the streets otherwise.

It took me 12 hours to get here by bus from Santa Marta, the journey should have taken about six, but that's Colombia for you.

The final hour or so is down a dirt road, a bus will get you here but no-one's thinking about making the journey a little easier, and that's why I love Mompos.

People are indifferent to tourism but so welcoming to those who do arrive. I dare say if I decided to stay, it wouldn't take long for me to become woven into the tapestry of the town.

And while I'm here, there's no list of 'sights' to tick off, no 'must eat' places, no  recommended tours. There's just an opportunity to wander and wonder.

To walk, to read, to laze, and to write.

Mompos may not be on the tourist map, but it is the place to be.