Boyd Tonkin recalls a recent pilgrimage to the former home of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Cartagena and marvels at a writer whose fantasies helped define a country and continent
Last September, I might easily have died in Cartagena de Indias. Our domestic flight had riskily taken off from the Colombian capital Bogota – to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a “remote, lugubrious city where an insomniac rain had been falling since the beginning of the 16th century” – even though the airport at Santa Marta, its destination on the Caribbean coast, had shut because of a tropical storm.
The deluge over Santa Marta, hardly surprising for the season, continued. In mid-flight the jolting plane diverted to the port of Cartagena. There, on the tarmac, a passengers’ revolt forestalled the pilot’s crazy plan to return straight away to Bogota. By this time, the airport had closed for the night, and the biblical downpour had moved down the coast to soak and shake us. We rescued our baggage almost by force from the hold and ran from the plane, to find that a sharp-witted lady in the terminal had kept open the hotel reservation desk.
So it was that, within an hour of fearing that I would perish as a downpage news item somewhere along the tempest-racked Caribbean shore, I retired to bed amid the colonial-era grace and grandeur of the Santa Clara convent, now a luxury hotel. I woke to a sumptuous breakfast in the flower-filled courtyard in the company of the charming Mateo, the house toucan. No one in a uniform had
