Inspiration: Poetic Postcards from Colombia
Raymonde-Cécile Interlegator is a writer. She travelled through Colombia with Célestine last summer. She published Instants d’années, her autobiography, with Éditions L’Harmattan, in which she recounts her journey of resilience. Born in 1947 into a Jewish family traumatised by the monstrosities of war, she was immediately able to read, in the faces and landscapes of Colombia, the ancestral wounds of a country marked by civil conflict.
She offered us a few written traces of her journey. We thank her deeply for her moving and truthful words, and for her tribute to our art of travel.
1. POETIC POSTCARD FROM BOGOTÁ
Bogotá, a high-altitude city of clouds and shadows. Mountains like dark masses watching over the city, sloping streets with lit walls edged in graffiti, glass towers where the sky is reflected and lives pile one upon another, vast and orderly markets, squares full of waiting, filled with pigeons and passers-by. Neighbourhoods of red brick, façades washed in colour. One hears a sharp wind descending from the hills, hurried conversations, musicians—a guitar, an accordion, an Andean flute…
Night falls quickly, and so the city lights up.
2. POETIC POSTCARD FROM THE AMAZON
The Colombian forest, a vertigo of humidity, a raw labyrinth where vines clutch at the air. The heat, a heavy beast settling into shifting shade; life shivers, whistles, bursts forth. Murmurs of sap and songs of nameless birds. The wind, muffled by the watchful trees, motionless, arms stretched toward a sky that refuses itself; their roots dig through the earth, tearing at the invisible. Leaves by the millions, throbbing, whispering. The rivers lap and stretch into slow streams of night, glimmers of forgetting. Indigenous villages, huts of trembling leaves. Born of an ancient fever, faces tattooed by the wind speak a secret language to our foreign ears; men, at times a fleeting silhouette between two trunks—fishermen, hunters, travellers… We move forward, we go deeper, we guess more than we truly see…
Amazonia. A word, a space, an immensity. A universe of green and water.
3. POETIC POSTCARD FROM MEDELLÍN
Medellín never sleeps. A throbbing, shouting city of countless cars, horns, colourful buses dented and smoking. So alive with its crowded streets, endlessly crossed and recrossed, with its chaotic, clamorous markets of makeshift vendors, with buildings wrenching themselves from the ground—high, low, dilapidated, modern, stacked together—wealthy districts with pink gates and gardens too green, poor neighbourhoods tangled together in contrast, clinging to the façades of narrow lanes, voices in disorder, in chorus, in anger, laughter, fleeting blurred faces… invisible violence, assembled memories, fragments of feeling when the dream dissolves and memory begins to fray… What remains with me is that tango evening, at once warm and mysterious, a milonga I may well have imagined—who knows?
We cross these cities as we cross history. We leave fragments of ourselves there; we gather memories in return.
Everything that was there yesterday may disappear tomorrow in the glow of a promise that evaporates.
Colombia, a country swaying between hope and uncertainty.
4. POETIC POSTCARD FROM COLOMBIE CÉLESTINE
“Célestine is a breath, a vibration, a parenthesis between two worlds. She is there, light and elusive, like a feather carried by the Andean winds. Celestial, without being distant. Columbine, without being entirely well-behaved.
She draws itineraries the way one weaves a poem: a step here, a detour there, a burst of laughter at the corner of a colourful street. She knows forgotten paths, whispered stories, secrets that only clouds and rivers know how to keep.
She plays, she dances, she surprises. One imagines her gentle, yet she is mischievous. One follows her, and already she disappears, leaving within the hollow of the heart the taste of an unforgettable elsewhere. Célestine is not simply a travel agency. She is a promise, a murmur between the Andean mountains and the Caribbean beaches, a glance exchanged between history and the present moment.
“Here, in Colombia, every step tells a story, every village bears a memory, and every river sings an ancient poem. We do not merely offer itineraries; we open pathways, hidden doors into the soul of a country that is vibrant, complex, unforgettable.”
To travel with Célestine is to refuse hurried, impersonal travel. It is to enter the rustling silence of tropical forests, to share a meal with those who weave the land with their hands, to listen to legends whispered in the shade of colonial patios.
A tribute. Authentic, an invitation. Unusual, a key for those who know that true travel begins where tourism ends.
Colombia is not merely visited. It is lived. It is felt. It is dreamed. It offers itself to you like a precious secret.”
Raymonde-Cécile Interlegator, March 2025.
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