Postcards to Iowa

The Back of the Postcard

People don’t travel to northern Colombia for the villages.

They travel for the flamingos.

At least, that’s what I thought as we climbed into our guide Ben’s SUV for the two-hour drive from the Caribbean coast to Santuario de Fauna y Flora Los Flamencos. I’d seen the brochures with impossibly pink birds standing in shallow lagoons, and I imagined that by the end of the day I’d have hundreds of photographs and another unforgettable wildlife encounter to add to the growing collection from our trip through Colombia.

Years later, I still remember the flamingos.

They’re just not what I think about first.

Instead, I remember the heat. It settled over Los Camarones before the morning was even fully awake, wrapping itself around the village with a heaviness that made movement feel optional. Derek and I hadn’t slept much the night before. The crashing waves outside our room had somehow been loud enough to keep us awake, both of us were congested from what we assumed was some jungle allergy, and we started the day feeling much less adventurous than our itinerary suggested. By the time we arrived, the temperature was already climbing toward the mid-90s, and even standing in the shade offered little relief.

Los Camarones isn’t a place most travelers would ever stumble upon by accident. The small fishing village sits just inland from Colombia’s Caribbean coast in the department of La Guajira, where generations of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous Wayúu families have built their lives around the sea. Fishing sustained the community long before tourism arrived, and today the nearby flamingo sanctuary has become one of the village’s few additional sources of income. As we walked through the dusty streets toward the lagoon, the town felt almost deserted. Most people had wisely retreated indoors to escape the oppressive heat, leaving behind an unusual stillness that made every footstep feel louder.

Standing there, I found myself noticing something I hadn’t expected. I wasn’t looking at the village as another stop on our itinerary or another opportunity to take photographs. Instead, I became acutely aware of how dramatically different our lives were from the lives unfolding around us. I thought about where I lived, the conveniences I rarely questioned, and the assumptions I carried without realizing it. It wasn’t guilt exactly, nor was it pity. It was something closer to perspective—the uncomfortable awareness that what feels ordinary to one person can seem unimaginably fortunate to someone else.

Travel brochures rarely prepare you for moments like that. They promise wildlife, waterfalls, sunsets, and unforgettable adventures, but they seldom mention the quiet recalibration that happens when another way of living challenges your own. I had come to Los Camarones expecting to remember flamingos. Before we’d even reached the water, the village itself had already given me something far more lasting to think about.

By the time we reached the edge of the lagoon, the village had already begun to reshape the day I thought I was going to have. A weathered wooden boat rested on the sand, fishermen moved quietly along the shoreline, and the Caribbean stretched out behind us in a way that made the entire landscape feel suspended between sea and desert. Everything about the place felt unfamiliar, not because it was dramatic, but because it operated according to rhythms completely different from my own.

As we wandered along the beach waiting for our boat to return, I noticed old fishing boats slowly being reclaimed by the elements, weathered nets piled beside simple homes, and pieces of the village’s history scattered along the shoreline. Nothing had been designed for visitors, and that may have been what made it so beautiful. It felt like we had wandered into someone’s everyday life rather than a destination carefully arranged for tourists. The experience required something travel often asks of us but rarely announces in advance: the willingness to be a respectful guest rather than a consumer of experiences.

Then our guide pointed toward the water.

At first, I could barely make out the boat in the distance. As it drifted closer, however, my confidence began drifting in the opposite direction. The boat was far smaller than I had imagined, carved from a single tree trunk generations earlier and sitting remarkably low in the water. I remember wondering how all of us—and our cameras—were possibly going to fit inside it. Every instinct I had developed through years of carefully planned travel suddenly wanted more information. How deep was the water? Were there life jackets? How far were we going? What happened if the wind picked up?

The funny thing about travel is that it has very little interest in answering those kinds of questions.

Sometimes the only option is to climb into the boat.

Looking back, I realize that was probably the lesson I needed most. This trip to Colombia had already challenged my tendency to over-plan and over-research every detail before saying yes to an experience. Visiting the flamingo sanctuary had been a last-minute decision, one made with surprisingly little information beyond a brochure and our guide’s recommendation. Normally that uncertainty would have made me uncomfortable. Standing on the shore, watching that narrow wooden boat approach, I could feel the familiar desire for certainty creeping back in.

Instead, I climbed aboard.

As the boat pushed away from the village, my attention shifted almost immediately from fear to curiosity. The lagoon was surprisingly shallow—only a couple of feet deep in many places—which somehow made the journey feel less intimidating despite the gentle rocking beneath us. Wind skimmed across the surface of the water, fishermen waved as we passed, and birds lifted effortlessly from the reeds before disappearing toward the horizon. There was very little conversation. The engine hummed quietly, and the farther we traveled from shore, the more the silence itself seemed to become part of the experience.

Then something happened that no itinerary could have predicted.

Without warning, a fish launched itself out of the water and landed squarely in my lap.

For a split second everyone froze before dissolving into laughter. The fish flopped wildly across the bottom of the boat while I instinctively reached down, scooped it into my hands, and tossed it back into the lagoon before I had time to think about what I was doing. The entire moment lasted only a few seconds, but it somehow captured everything I was beginning to love about travel. The experiences I remembered most were almost never the ones I had planned. They were the ones no one could have scheduled, researched, or reserved online.

As we continued gliding across the lagoon, I found myself wondering whether that was the real gift of uncertainty. It wasn’t simply that unexpected things happened. It was that uncertainty created space for surprise, and surprise has a remarkable way of making us pay closer attention to the world around us.

After nearly an hour on the lagoon, our guide pointed toward the horizon and asked us to look carefully. At first I couldn’t see anything. The line between water and sky shimmered in the afternoon heat, and every distant shape dissolved into the landscape before my eyes could focus. Then, almost imperceptibly, tiny flashes of pink began to emerge. What had looked like another stretch of shoreline slowly resolved into hundreds of flamingos standing together in the shallows, so far away they seemed almost imagined.

The distance turned out to be part of the experience. We didn’t race toward the birds, nor did our captain try to maneuver us into the perfect photograph. Instead, we approached gradually, respecting the strict regulations designed to protect the sanctuary. If a boat startled the flamingos into flight or ventured too close, substantial fines could follow. Watching our captain carefully navigate the lagoon, it became obvious that the rules weren’t viewed as an inconvenience. They were part of an understanding that this place belonged to the birds first and to visitors second.

Our guide explained that the boat itself carried its own remarkable history. It had belonged to our captain’s grandfather and had been carved from a tree naturally resistant to water, then reinforced with fiberglass so shells and rocks wouldn’t damage its hull. The tree species is now protected, making boats like this impossible to replace. What had first looked to me like a fragile, outdated vessel was, in reality, one of the community’s greatest assets. For generations it had carried visitors across the lagoon, quietly supporting one of the village’s few reliable sources of income while asking very little from the landscape in return.

The closer we drifted, the quieter everyone became. There was no announcement that we had arrived, no dramatic reveal, just the gradual realization that we were surrounded by wildlife behaving exactly as it would if we weren’t there. Flamingos preened their feathers, searched the shallow water for food, and occasionally lifted into the air before settling somewhere else in the lagoon. Watching them in their natural habitat felt entirely different from seeing them in a zoo. There were no barriers, no scheduled feeding times, and no carefully designed exhibits. We were simply visitors, fortunate enough to witness a moment that would have unfolded exactly the same way without us.

One of my favorite memories came when a group of flamingos suddenly took flight. Until that moment, I had never really considered that flamingos flew. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I had unconsciously placed them in the same category as turkeys—birds capable of little more than wandering around on the ground. Seeing hundreds of them rise together, their wings revealing flashes of black against brilliant shades of pink, was both breathtaking and slightly embarrassing. Travel has a funny way of exposing the gaps in our knowledge, often replacing assumptions we didn’t realize we held with moments of childlike wonder.

As we turned the boat back toward Los Camarones, I found myself thinking about how differently the day had unfolded than I had expected. I’d come believing the flamingos would be the story, yet they had become only one chapter in something much larger. The village, the fishermen, the century-old boat, the conversations with our guide, and the quiet realization that another community could measure wealth very differently than I did had all reshaped the experience before we ever reached the birds. The flamingos were extraordinary, but they weren’t what made the day unforgettable. They simply gave me a reason to discover everything else.

By the time we returned to Los Camarones, the afternoon heat had become almost oppressive. The breeze that had carried us across the lagoon was gone, replaced by still, humid air that seemed to rise from the ground itself. Lunch tasted especially good after several hours on the water, and fresh ceviche paired with an ice-cold beer felt less like a meal and more like a reward. We lingered for a while before beginning the drive toward our final stop of the day, a hike to Quebrada Valencia. I hadn’t even realized the waterfall was included in the tour, making it feel like an unexpected gift at the end of an already remarkable day.

The drive offered one final reminder of how differently life unfolded here. Outside small shops and restaurants, children approached visitors carrying handmade bracelets and small souvenirs. Our guide explained that many of them should have been in school, but for some families the income those children earned was too important to lose. It wasn’t a choice made lightly. It was the kind of decision poverty forces people to make, where education and survival are weighed against one another in ways I had never needed to consider. I remember feeling grateful that our guide shared this reality with us instead of allowing the village to become just another picturesque stop on a tourist itinerary.

Not long afterward, we pulled over so I could visit a pharmacy. Between the sleepless night, lingering congestion, and relentless heat, I was convinced I needed something to help me sleep. What I assumed would be a simple errand quickly became a comedy of gestures and broken Spanish. Neither I nor the pharmacist understood enough of the other’s language to communicate what I was looking for, and after several increasingly creative attempts at acting out “decongestant” and “sleep aid,” she confidently handed me Xanax. Thankfully our guide stepped in before I accidentally solved the wrong problem. Looking back, it’s one of those wonderfully human travel moments that still makes me laugh, a reminder that misunderstandings often become far better stories than smooth transactions ever do.

When we finally arrived at Quebrada Valencia, the trail disappeared beneath a dense canopy of tropical forest. After spending the day surrounded by heat, dust, and open water, the jungle felt impossibly green. We crossed small streams, watched columns of leafcutter ants carrying pieces of foliage many times their own size, and listened as the sound of rushing water gradually grew louder with every step. The hike itself wasn’t particularly difficult, but after the long day it felt restorative simply to move through the cool shade instead of beneath the relentless Caribbean sun.

The waterfall appeared almost suddenly, cascading into a clear pool surrounded by smooth rock and dense vegetation. Without much discussion, we climbed in. The cold water washed away the sweat, the sunscreen, and the exhaustion that had accumulated over the course of the day. It also provided something harder to describe. After spending hours absorbing new places, new conversations, and perspectives that challenged my own, floating beneath the waterfall felt like the first opportunity to simply be quiet. There was nothing left to photograph, nothing left to learn, and nowhere left to be. For a few minutes, it was enough just to exist in the cool water and listen.

As the sun began to sink lower in the sky, we hiked back to the car and made the drive to our hotel. We were exhausted in the satisfying way that only travel seems capable of producing, the kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much but from paying attention all day. We showered, found dinner, raised a glass with Ben and the friends who had convinced us to take this last-minute tour, and replayed the day’s stories long before they had become memories.

People still ask me about the flamingos, and I understand why. They were extraordinary. They were beautiful, impossibly pink, and every bit as magical as the photographs suggest. But when I think about Los Camarones now, the flamingos occupy only one corner of the memory. I remember the village before the birds. I remember the fisherman whose century-old boat carried us across the lagoon. I remember the children selling bracelets instead of sitting in classrooms. I remember a fish unexpectedly landing in my lap and a pharmacist offering me Xanax when all I wanted was a decongestant. I remember a waterfall that arrived exactly when I needed it and a community that quietly challenged the assumptions I hadn’t realized I was carrying.

Travel is often marketed as an opportunity to see extraordinary places. More often than not, I’ve found it’s an opportunity to notice ordinary people whose lives unfold very differently from my own. The flamingos may have been the reason I came to Los Camarones, but they weren’t the reason I still think about it. Years later, what I remember most isn’t pink. It’s perspective.