It’s a good thing I friended our Bogota tour guide on Facebook, or I might not have known he was featured in a New York Times article about the city this week.  Here’s what it said about him:

“Cyclists here often seem as abundant as cars, streaming down equally abundant protected paths. Bogotá is credited as the first city to host a Ciclovía — and it still does, shutting down large swaths of street every Sunday for bikers, pedestrians and even acrobats.

“Itching to get on two wheels, I joined a three-hour ride that offered a fascinating look at the city through the eyes of our guide, Michael Steven Sánchez Navas, a graffiti artist and passionate enemy of inequality. He told us about Justin-Bieber-gate, when the Canadian singer tagged a wall under police protection just a few months after the police had shot and killed a popular graffiti artist — and inadvertently sparked a street artist uprising.”

If Michael told us that he, himself, was a graffiti artist, I missed it.  But it fits.

—

Back to Medellin.

The four of us sat around the lounge drinking coffee and waiting for our guide to arrive.

“Mota!” Roxana exclaimed, beaming at me from across the table.  Mota, short for marmota, meaning marmot, because I sleep a lot.  Roxana’s pet name for me.

Roxana and I met at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health where I was the director of development and she was the development assistant—a position for which she was way overqualified.  We soon spent our weekly meetings talking about our personal lives.  I was a hot mess.  My son was in jail, homeless, or missing much of the time due to his addictions.  I had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and was injecting myself with steroids every day.  I had such extreme vertigo at times that I couldn’t open my eyes or sit up.  I wasn’t able to focus on my job and my employment was precarious as a result. I either had insomnia or slept for 12-hour stretches.  Thus the marmota moniker. Roxana was like a mother to me during those dark days.

Finally, to everyone’s relief including mine, I was fired.  I went back to grad school, got a part time, completely flexible grad fellowship, and started to travel.  First I went to Mexico for a week to study Spanish.  It was such an exhilarating experience that I went back for three weeks, then three months.  My MS symptoms disappeared.  Eventually I was told there had been a mistake, that I didn’t have MS after all.  Now, I’m not saying that MS is just a symptom of stress.  Most people with MS really have MS, an extremely serious condition.  I got lucky and was misdiagnosed.

“When you first came to Scotland,” Lynn said, as we discussed how we had all met each other, “Richard was sure you had survived cancer or some terrible accident, because you had such zeal to see and experience everything. And you took all those pills.”

“Oh, those pills were just supplements that gave me expensive urine,” I said.  “And Richard wasn’t far off.  I did live for two years with that MS misdiagnosis. I thought I would be in a wheelchair within five years.”

That was 18 years ago.  When Roxana went through her divorce, I got to mother her.  Now that we’re both in good places we mostly talk about books, movies, politics, our families, and of course, travel.  She works two jobs and has built her own translation business so I don’t get to see her as often as I’d like.

I was excited to spend two whole days with Roxana and Lynn, and for them to get to know one another.

I had met Ricardo over one of many excellent dinners in Peru, where Roxana had been my excellent guide.  He reminds me of an old-time movie star like Cary Grant.  He’s smart, funny, and well traveled.  He worked for the Peru Tourism Board for years and is now with Regus , which rents out office space on an as-needed basis.

Our guide, Daniella, arrived.  She was a serious young woman, but she lighted up when she learned Roxana and Ricardo were Peruvian.  She was going to Peru the following week, so our guide would be getting tourist tips from her tourists.