Durán Falk Mateo, Just Keep Swimming

JUST KEEP SWIMMING!

Written By Mateo Durán Falk

Ihad just finished sixth grade, vacations had just started and my cousin Daniel had just arrived from Bogotá, and he was staying at my house. We were enjoying our holidays playing at my home with my siblings. Then belatedly that day, my parents arrived from work; surprisingly, with some vital information to share with us; the atmosphere broke the silence, and we were extremely nervous and anxious. We had utterly no idea of what the notice was going to be, and then, after a short while, they told us that we were going to be traveling to a special place in exactly one week, but they did not tell us where. My cousin and I thoughts for almost an hour about all the places we could visit, and we ended up supposing that we were going to Bogotá because my siblings and I had never visited it before.

During the week before the flight, I spent a lot of time with my family, and my cousin and I; were instigating my fathers with a lot of questions about the place we were going to visit, the only one who answered was my dad, but he gave us clues that we could not understand. My dad is an amusing man, but also strict and organized, like my mom; they are both spectacular human beings; always give everything for their kids, and they teach us valuable things every day. They provide us with love and confidence and guide us to develop into the respectful people that we are going to be in the future. The night before the flight my parents told us to prepare our luggage, but there was a little problem, we did not know what kind of clothing we needed to take so we took shirts, Jeans, Shorts, hats, scarfs, jackets, flip-flops and everything that we managed to get into the bag.

The next day we arrived at the airport, and as we were little kids, we didn’t know how to read the signals, so we didn’t know where we were going. Few minutes After boarding the airplane; we were already dying to know our destination.

Then we decided to ask somebody on board. My cousin lied to my parents that he was going to the bathroom; but he wanted to find out about our itinerary. When he came back, he had a massive smile on his face, his green eyes were shining, and his loud voice was cracking; he sat down next to me; and told me in a shallow voice that we were going to San Andres. A small, beautiful island known for having some of the prettiest beaches in Colombia and for having a beautiful and colorful ocean; some people call it the sea of the seven colors.

I knew these things Since I had visited it before. Additionally, I made a presentation at school about touristic places, and also because my parents held their honeymoon ceremony in San Andres, and the stories that they told me were amazing. I tried to stay quiet because I had no intention of disturbing anybody. Still, my joy was so great at that moment that I was not able to compress everything that I was feeling, and I just had the loudest belly laugh, and we talked about the things that we could do once we touch down.

When we arrived at the airport, we get off the plane; a hellish heat hit us, we felt sticky and without energy, but the excitement was still there. We got to a large and beautiful hotel, we entered the corresponding apartment, and we noticed that it had only two rooms. We were six persons, and we decided that there were going to be two persons per room, and the other two lasting would sleep in the living room, my surprise was little when they told my cousin, and I; that we are sleeping in the living room. That first day we didn’t do much, we arrived late, almost at seven p.m., so we just ate and went to sleep. The night was awful on the first day, and we were two skittish kids trying to sleep alone in a vast living room, the sounds and the lights of the streets got us to imagine some of the worst things. We decided to fight the fear for hours, but we were not able to defeat it. After a few hours, our eyes just

closed, and without more energy in our bodies, we fall asleep until the next day. 7 a.m. of the second day and my dad start screaming, “wake up, wake up everybody,” we woke up immediately, shocked by all the noise that my dad was doing. The same situation occurred again and again until the last day. On the second, third, and fourth days on the island, we just went to the tourist places and famous restaurants. Still, Daniel and I wanted something else, we wanted adventure and adrenaline, we wanted to explore the ocean and its secrets, so we decided that we were going to explore the island ourselves, with no grown-ups around.

The fifth day was the day. We had already planned where we were going and what we were going to do. Around 5 p.m., we told my parents that we were going out to explore on our own,

“Alright, you do you,” said my mom,

“We’ll wait for you right here; please return early,” she added.

We cross the door, and we started our way to a new adventure; we were very confident but, we were also scared because we were in a place we didn’t know. We got to the main street, where we found a lot of shops and stores, we had some money in our pockets. Hence, every once in a while we visited the stores that seemed interesting, people looked at us, I don’t know if it was because we were two young little kids with long blonde hair alone in the streets, or if it was because we were doing something we weren’t supposed to, but either way, I was frightened. We kept walking, and at some point, we arrived at the beach, we took our sandals off and put them on the bags with the stuff that we had bought, we bought a football, a pair of sunglasses, some shirts and a pack of Coca-Cola, we found a dry trunk on the sand. We sit on it to rest for a

moment while we took our beverages, we played soccer for a little while and then drank another round of Coca-Colas. After we finished them, we continued walking again, but this time; we went back to the other side; as if we were returning to our apartment; and on the way, there was a disco. It had already been at night, a lot of people were there waiting to enter the disco; we walked pass in between all of them; and somehow, for some reason, I lost my sight on Daniel, and I started to scream his name out; until I found him. After that event, we got terrified, so we decided to return to the apartment, as we were near to it.

The day before the flight back to Cali, my family took us to a place called La Piscina where you can see different types of fishes and feed them. But it is a courtyard pool, and we wanted to explore more, not just one piece of the sea, so we stayed there for almost 1 hour and then Daniel told me “hey, Mate. Come here”, I listened to him and followed him, he showed me the rope that divides the space in which we could swim and the area in which we are not supposed to swim. He asked me, “what if we cross it and explore the real ocean?” and I answered him in the only way that you could answer a pressing question like that, “YES! Of course,” I responded.

We swam under the rope and took a last glance at my family before the expedition.

Five minutes later we were all by our own in the blue world, and we saw sea creatures that we had never seen before; beautiful coral, stones that looked like buildings and we were so into the adventure that we did not perceive the time, we stopped for a while on a little, rustic dock that we found. We took off the swimming goggles, we were exhausted, but nothing was stopping us, we were having a great time, we dove into the sea. We began swimming and exploring again without noticing that we had been there for more than an hour, we just kept

swimming, we didn’t even know where we were. Still, we kept going until I saw a jellyfish between us two.

Jellyfishes had never been my preferences, as I am terrified by them, so when I saw something like a little pink bubble beside me I stopped and called Daniel pointing at the fishes, with an intense fear growing in my body, theoretically, peeing myself, and when Daniel noticed the jellyfish, he also stopped, and jellyfish passed us; while we were waiting for it to get far enough we heard someone shouting like crazy, we wanted to know who it was so we approached the shore, the sound of the man screaming got louder until we saw a gray-haired man far away; we listened carefully to his echoed voice, and we noticed that he was looking for us,

“It is my dad, let’s go,” I said, he yelled back at us “kids come here, right now.” we swam back and ran into his arms, and he asked us if we were crazy, we had stayed there for almost two hours, and we got far from our parents. When we got back home after a silent and awkward return, my parents called us and told us that we had to be careful while being in the sea because there are lots of dangerous animals. We could get lost; we understood what they were telling us.

The last day we woke up early, earlier than usual and we started to do our luggage, we felt sorry for what we had done. We were doing everything trying to make everyone forget it, but it was impossible; even though no one got hurt, we felt very guilty. Still, that feeling decreased with the pass of the days until we stopped thinking about it, but we already knew we were not going to do anything like that ever again.