Extract from "Something Is Being Whispered In My Ear"

by Isabel Cuesta

Puerto Asis is a small town in the south of Colombia.

The great-granddaughter of the woman of the Uitoto tribe would come to visit her grandparents every year in her school vacation.

With her brother she would fly with the tiny airplane from Bogotá over the Cordillera Oriental of Colombia, which is the last tail of the Andes, or Antis, as it is called in Quechua, the original home of the Inca Empire.

The Andes stretch from Patagonia all the way across Chile parallel to the Pacific Ocean, constituting a natural border between Chile and Argentina, continuing its way across Bolivia and Peru, across Ecuador and then entering Colombia where it bifurcates at the Node de los Pastos in the Cordillera Occidental and Central.

From the Cordillera Central another arm of the Andes emerges creating the Cordillera Oriental. This last arm of the Andes ends in the Colombian peninsula of La Guajira at the Caribbean Sea.

Flying south from Bogotá to Puerto Asis one is flying over a sea of green vegetation, so full of colour that the waves of those shades and the humidity of the earth resonate inside the body, well into the deepest layers, where the memories of indigenous ancestors reside.