After a little wait I met up with Mayra and Yenny. I noticed straight away that Mayra was really cute. We got speaking a fair bit of Spanish on the first night there and we drove round to Sergio's place. He is a friend of hers and the ex of Yenny. Yenny did not want me to stay there, but Mayra insisted. They asked me my plans and I said I was moving on the next night. They suggested I stay two and come with them to San Gil on wednesday. As that was going to be my next destination I agreed. Seemed like a decent plan and I can be easily persuaded at times. We went out for some drinks after we dropped off the stuff at Sergios and later on Mayra and I got chatting till about 4am on anything and everything. She had a fiance from Germany which was a little odd given her age and we discussed that. I demonstrated my absolutely sucky salsa skills and my moderately passable for a gringo merengue. We talked on Uribe and even though he had made the country safer, he had failed to benefit the vast majority of farmers who had been displaced from the conflict. Three days later this would have greater significance for me. Mayra had also said she wanted to have some fun before moving to Spain and I took that as a tacit invitation to try something. That night we just chatted though.
It felt kind of odd, because it was the first time in two months that I had physically couchsurfed. Not since Lago Atitlan in fact. If messenger fails to load for the fourth time I am going to break this computer. Well whats left of it thats not already broken. Mayra had uni in the morning and I came to the conclusions at the end that this meeting had not turned out quite as she had expected and that maybe she had seen me as someone to set up with her friend Yenny. After her uni she met me at the flat and we headed out to the town's water park but it was closed. Then we went to a very pretty flower park and walked and talked. Though her directional skills were awful. I kept teasing her as to whether she actually lived in this city. The company was very easy and we headed to the colonial town of Giron to get some lunch. We did not see that much of it and the time flew over lunch. We almost missed her afternoon lessons at uni from the effortlessness. I sat in on a couple of university lectures. The first was on social movements and went too fast for me. I tried to hang on to some fragments of the debate, but my fingernails are not strong enough. There was a big debate about giving blood in the middle of the class, because here it is donated for free, but you have to pay if you want blood after an accident. Afterwards we had an IT class and I just played around online. Following this we went and got some arepas and then took some beers to the roof of Sergio's apartment with his girlfriend Lily. They cosied up with each other and Mayra and I got chatting under the stars on the roof. Soon we were kissing and playing on the roof. Was quite good fun and a nice end to the evening. We had to turf in around 2am as we were off to San Gil in the morning.
I woke up and it was Darrens birthday so I sent him a happy birthday message. Still need to grab a phone number to call him from. We all met up at the bus station. It was Mayra, Yenny, Jenny and me. Jenny was quite excited to get to Sean's birthday party (he's the Australian guy who runs a hostel in San Gil. She had hooked up with his cousin last time and was hoping he would be there this time). Mayra and I chatted and played all the way to San Gil. Its very comfortable in her presence and I seem to have developed an ability to make people very calm around me, even if I am a hyperactive ball of energy. Did not really get to see anything and I had to book into a different hotel to the others as needed a private room. San Gil is a pretty little town, what I saw of it and Bucaramanga is a biggish modern city with some prettier parts. As you can tell I did not do loads of traditional sightseeing here. I had found out on the way that Sean was obsessed somewhat with Mayra. She seems to have a strong affect on guys and seemingly has never actually liked someone who did not end up liking her. Its a nice record to have. When I eventually met Sean he was a little coldish with me. Unusual for an Aussie. Only afterwards I found out he had declared his undying love for Mayra and asked her what relationship we had. She had told him we were flirting and he had then asked if we could refrain from flirting that night. As Tim once said so gracefully while hammered 'thats like telling people you can't have christmas cards at christmas'. Its funnier when you watch him say it before jamming a broken beer bottle into his forehead, trying to avoid cutting his mouth. One day I will incorporate some of the funnier stories from home into this blog. Its going to be amusing if I get into politics in any serious way and all this stuff comes back to haunt me or at least humanise me a bit. So this night had elevated from awkward to excruciatingly uncomfortable. I was handicapped in my personality, which damages any contributions I can make, Sean's cousin did not make it so Jenny was disappointed and the party was in some pretty gardens in town but failed to really ignite. I was bored and awkward. Then the girls decided to go and work on their university presentation. That's always a bad sign at a party when work trumps it. We headed back to their sort of hostel to pick up their stuff and it felt good to be out of the pressure cooker there. Mayra and I got hammocks while the others worked and tried to perfect the art of timing swings with kisses. Its a harder practice than it seems, so I just grabbed the other hammock and pulled them together for ease. I asked Mayra if she wanted to head back to the other hotel, but she could not on moral grounds, her fiance and Sean's feelings. Hmm a three way rebuff is quite the achievement on my behalf lol. In the end we went to the abandoned place where Sean was letting them stay for free. He had said there was no additional space which was not true and clearly said to scupper me. I stayed for a bit and then left. Sean came round later on and he and Mayra had another chat where she said she was thinking of just being single to end all the stress. Possibly a wise decision as my time in San Gil felt like a very awful soap opera or maybe one of those telenovelas.
In the morning I was woken up by Mayra in my room with a kiss. Not a bad way to start the day. The others were heading back to Bucaramanga to work on some stuff and I stayed in town but would head back to meet Mayra for one more night before I headed on to Bogota. I had written that I needed some downtime before my head exploded and was going to see Jopke tomorrow. Was good, because we can talk freely on anything really as we know what the other one has been doing around this country. Dom informed me he was coming and I said I would see him in Bogota the next day. I walked around the central park in the morning. Its really pretty and covered in Spanish moss like Savannah. It reminded me of the south and that always cheers me up. I even went for a walk into the hills and found an old theatre in the wilderness and a rope bridge over the river that I sat on to reflect for a while. I think this country must have been creeping on me steadily by this point to pick somewhere where I eventually want to settle for a few months. I had put my washing in with the hostel and that was where I would lose my jeans. Ended up picking up some multivitamins and the worlds smallest pair of toenail scissors. Then I did some writing. It was one of those practical days. Mayra had suggested I go and do some sports with Sean, but I did not want him in charge of any safety harness of mine. I got talking with Laura (the Finnish girl) and her friend will let me stay in Merida for free in a nice place on the hill with a swimming pool. Seemed like a good idea and I suggested to Mayra she come with me for a few days and depending on visas she may well come along. Will see.
I took a bus back to Bucaramanga and was running tight on time when I checked into a cheap place downtown. I met Mayra at the cathedral and we went for dinner and cakes. Bumped into Sergio on the way and he seemed upset I had not stayed with him this time. I suggested that it was just easier for me to get a place as had not planned on coming back. Meant I did not see Villa De Leyva, but I will go this sunday when I eventually finish up with Bogota. We went back to her place afterwards and had to keep the noise down. Ended up watching some of her youtube performances and a documentary she had made about the displaced people of Colombia. She said she was surprised that I had been interested in her and on the roof the other night had reckoned I hooked up with everyone. The latter is not true and I believe the former may have been a fishing for compliments. But either way how can you not fail to like someone who is charming, good looking, good company and who shares a scary amount of traits and interests. Both of us even want to run our own countries. Bilateral relations should be greatly improved. We hung out on the roof and chatted some more before I walked back across Bucramanga to my hotel. For no discernible reason I satyed up watching 2 Fast Too Furious until half past four in the morning (I had seen it before and its not that good, but it does contain Eva Mendes). I got up later than I should have done unsurprisingly and sent Mayra a letter. I got a bus to Bogota for 45,000 pesos which seemed to be the cheapest on offer, I then ate the worst hot dog I have ever eaten (and there are some good candidates in there). It was a very long bus ride but I slept for virtually all 8 hours of it. Needed that shotgun sleep for the night to come. It was Bogota and the place I may call home for 2-3 months.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Colombia Part 4: Taganga, Cartagena and Mompos
Right a few things first. The first is that I hate this computer. Its so slow. I just watched it reboot when asked to load up msn messenger and then sat on facebook and watched it type one letter at a time like rhythmic clockwork. So slow. One letter every 2 seconds and you don't even get the excitement of guessing what comes next since you just typed it. Well maybe not just. After the last of the sentence is completed eight hours after you typed it you may well have forgotten what you wrote or given up your will to live. Secondly my middle finger on my right hand is bust from playing football earlier. Makes typing hard and typos possible. Thirdly I am feeling melancholy this evening. Was up for clubbing and had the wind knocked out of my sails by ending up watching a film by Paul Verhoeven I believe about how the Nazis treated the Dutch during the final years of World War II. Nothing like that to fire you up for some rumba in Bogota. Was a mistake. Should have just gone drinking. At least we discovered boxed wine is only 9,000 pesos for a box. Thats enough for me for a night easy.
Right I promised character development last time, but I really can't be arsed. Suffice to say at the end of the hike I realised Itay was a nicer guy than I had guessed and really interesting. Would have been good to get to know him a bit more. Jo worked with jaguars in Bolivia for a month. That was kind of cool. He used to walk them or more accurately they used to walk him and he had to avoid being pounced on by the cats. Man this Seal song sucks. Ah better. A bit of killer. Early 90s techno. Retro writing. American Laura was having a whole one year trip paid for by Havard as development for her degree. Those were the most interesting facts. The others were all nice, but had nothing uniquely interesting enough to warrant rattling off any more additional pages than I have to. The ride back took ages. Typical Colombian time keeping. We wrap up the hike at 11am and the journey back is around 40km by car so naturally we get back at 5pm. They eat up their own time as well as ours. One of the jeeps even broke down and then we were treated to some perverse logic. Wilmur had to get on the roof of the bus over the bumpy rickety track, because there was no space. Now the fact that there was one space in the jeep never seemed to occur to anyone. Then when we got down and through the military checkpoint and got onto a normal, safe road. The kind of road you could ride on the roof, Wilmur decides to disembark and ride in the jeep. Jesus and he was our guide. I did find out from Jopke in Bogota that one tour group had not paid their fees and the group were forced to run downhill, while paramilitaries burst from the bushes and executed their driver. While we were stalled at a military checkpoint, Dom offered one of the little kids a sweet if they would take the other sweet as a sweetener for the army guards. It turned out sweet and amusing, even if it could have gone very wrong. We got back eventually and checked into the same place as last time, but in a better and cheaper place. Then just as we were leaving and after I had come back with pizza for Dom, in walks the Israeli girl from Panama. Very random. Dom was too crocked to go out and I joined the others for some drinks. My internet had informed me I had 16 unread messages and multiple other crap that had destroyed my inbox while I was on a six day hike. Some unexpected messages however and I learnt Jopke would be in Bogota and said I would come down for the friday. The night in Taganga was ok. Did randomly bump into Jack from Panama City as well though. Funny three seperate lots of us all in Taganga and not realising the others would be there. He had been delayed from joining us by the breakdown of their boat in the middle of the San Blas islands. Shit this finger is bust. Hmm this slow version of Crazy is a bit shit. oh maybe not its just gone funky. Enough Seal after this one. Met another American girl I knew from Cartagena and everyone seemed to get plastered. The music in El Garaje is mediocre at best as it bounces from salsa, to the Rolling Stones, to Jam Rock, to electronica. Weird mix. I just walked out in the end because I got bored and went back. The Israeli girl rocked up later on and had been arrested by the always uncorrupt Taganga police. They had accused her of having sex on the beach and the guy she was with of having some drugs. Neither was true apparently and they had to pay a 100,000 peso fine. She was also arrested a little later that week for possession of marijuana apparently. Those police are so corrupt.
In the morning I went out and grabbed breakfast for myself and Dom. Got chatting with the Israelis and eventually we made our way for Cartagena. Dom was still injured at this point but made it to Cartagena. This journey takes longer and longer everytime I attempt it. Its like they are going for the world record for incomptent slowness. In Barranquilla in the middle we flirted with a local girl, who was asking me whether I wanted a small bottle of coke like her. I had to get Dom to translate as none of it made any sense to me. In Cartagena we shared a taxi with a cute girl from Cali and he took us to the wrong place. So naturally rather than driving round the block he decided to reverse all the way down the road backwards into head on traffic. Ah Cartagena, you are so nuts. Dom was injured and I was knackered so we opted for Hotel London and gto a room for the night. I was offered some dodgy porn in the corridor, which was about as eventful as this night got. Ah it just felt weird to be sucked back into Cartagena even if it was for one night.
In the morning Dom's condition had not improved and he decided to stay behind to rest. I opted to push on and see some more places as I was getting the urge to see more than the coast, considering I had been in Colombia for well over half a month at this point. I took transport from Cartagena to Magangue and was a little concerned that I did not have enough time to make it to Mompos. Lonely Planet was again wrong, but I am not sure how many boats there were after my half past three boat from Magangue so I would leave early just in case. I had been mulling over the fact that I don't believe in thinking of the past. Jopke had mentioned that it was a curious disposition for a historian. That's true. I had concluded that not thinking on the past meant you would have no regrets though. Because usually if people dwell on their other choices, they will naturally compare the current reality with the other choice and that choice will naturally in their heads have gone ideally. So its not really a fair comparison. There was apparently also an annoying man on the bus next to me, but he could not have been so bad, because I could not remember him. He was always on the phone, polishing his briefcase weirdly or stopping the bus for a piss. From Magangue I took a boat to Bodega. There was a really pretty yellow church off to the left and I have no idea what it is. I have put that the boat was at its limits, but I am not sure what I was thinking. I remember the river being wide and muddy, like by the mud volcano and that it was fun to be back on a boat. It is the premier mode of transport, except for maybe quad bikes and trains. There was a military checkpoint set up on the river. For what I don't know. Well I suppose security is an issue. The military man asked me to open my bag. I asked if he wanted the small one or the big one. His answer was that one. What one. That one. The small one. Yes. Why can't he just say the small one when I asked him. The Spanish is somewhat incomprehensible around Mompos though. I realised now that the film I was watching today contained subtitles as it was in Dutch and I understood most of it. At Bodega we had to take a collectivo taxi to Mompos. Some random long yellow snake flashed across the front of us and we were stopped and given a military patdown. Well I was anyway. At least you know they have a lot of people out for security. I stayed in Mompos in the Casa Amarilla and they overcharged me, but came and refunded me later. I like Colombia. The honesty is touching.
Mompos itself is a beautiful colonial town. It would have been great for Semana Santa, but I am glad I at least got to see it on the way south. Was meeting Mayra in Bucaramanga the next day and moving on so otherwise I would have stayed longer. There was a yellow church that looked like a cake, small cobbled streets running like veins through the city and no electricity when I got there. I did not realise this for 3 hours, thats how little you need it round there. The locals sit out on the riverfront in rocking chairs wiling away the hours. There was a great Moorish church and a purple one that was very pretty. It was fun to wander around this town, but the river was special. It had so many weird phenomenons. I climbed up this decrepid bell tower in the middle of the town, filled with muttering bats. You can see out over the beautiful tiled roofs of the town and on the other side is the river. Sitting on the riverfront at night as the sun goes down, reading Mark Twain is awesome. Feels like being back on the Big Miss onlynot at the same time. The river itself is a mystery. Small fish leap from the waters in groups, while silent lightning dances in the background, giving a mysterious air to the evening. The electricity kicks back in just as the sun drops and the street lights flicker to life to take on the burden in the town. Its as if everyone and everything does just enough work, but never rushes. The river is so crystal clear a vista it resembles a painting by Canaletto. Then the sun dims and the edges blur into a Constable. Finally as the sun dips down, tired from its exertions you see the work of Monet, the lines blurring and dancing into impressionism and the impression it leaves is one of immense satisfaction. Then another bout of lightning crackles silently away to itself and its as if nature itself won't allow a sound to infringe upon this intimacy.
In the morning I got breakfast before heading out. I have listed the gold-mica quote from Twain's Roughin It. To paraphrase it he finds some Mica that shines so brightly that he believes it to be gold. He is told by an old prospector that gold in its natural state is quite dull and all that glitters is not gold. Then Twain states despite this education he still fails to apply it to mankind. He often mistakes men of Mica as men of Gold, while the truly great go on unnoticed. Only those that have no value feel the need to polish their own reputation. If I can write half as many great things as Twain I would be a happy man, for he is so inciteful and cuts to the core of humanity. Genius knows no time constraints. He's also very right. When I was less confident I came across more so by trying far too hard. Now I just relax into my skin. I got an expensive 20,000 peso ride on a truck to El Banco. It was a hot, dustym bumpy three hour ride. Interesting scenery as you pass through the untravelled middle of the country. When I got to the bus station I was accosted by two guys. Both claimed their bus was going next, one was slightly cheaper and both insisted the other was a liar. Hmm a dilemma. How would I know who was telling me the truth. I decided to state that I would pay whichever price went first but I would only pay it when the bus leaves the station. One guy backed down off that. Ah nice to split them. He clearly could not keep his ruse. This bus journey was incredibly long at 8 hours more or less and I was so late getting to meet Mayra. I had a few missed calls and a text that I could not reply to, due to lack of credit. Colombian phone companies came up with the ingenious ruse that phone credit should only last for seven days and then you need to buy some more, regardless of how much you had left. I should really charge it here. I saw a crap Nic Cage film about predicting the future, although it had no sound. Then I slept a bit. I read some part of Twain where he repeated the story he had heard on the overland coach over and over again in print to hammer home how bored he was of the repetition as well. Ironically at this moment the DVD was stuck on the title screen and repeating the same line over and over again until it almost killed the driver. The line was 'And the winner is our very own Lucinda Glass' or some such. Over and over and over and over and over and over etc etc. She may well have been the winner, but I can assure you that the rest of us on the bus were definitely the losers. Then the driver switched over to shitty Mexican music and I hated him for his taste. One more pearler of wisdom before we arrived. 'Necessity is the mother of taking chances'. So true. I was now in Bucaramanga.
Right I promised character development last time, but I really can't be arsed. Suffice to say at the end of the hike I realised Itay was a nicer guy than I had guessed and really interesting. Would have been good to get to know him a bit more. Jo worked with jaguars in Bolivia for a month. That was kind of cool. He used to walk them or more accurately they used to walk him and he had to avoid being pounced on by the cats. Man this Seal song sucks. Ah better. A bit of killer. Early 90s techno. Retro writing. American Laura was having a whole one year trip paid for by Havard as development for her degree. Those were the most interesting facts. The others were all nice, but had nothing uniquely interesting enough to warrant rattling off any more additional pages than I have to. The ride back took ages. Typical Colombian time keeping. We wrap up the hike at 11am and the journey back is around 40km by car so naturally we get back at 5pm. They eat up their own time as well as ours. One of the jeeps even broke down and then we were treated to some perverse logic. Wilmur had to get on the roof of the bus over the bumpy rickety track, because there was no space. Now the fact that there was one space in the jeep never seemed to occur to anyone. Then when we got down and through the military checkpoint and got onto a normal, safe road. The kind of road you could ride on the roof, Wilmur decides to disembark and ride in the jeep. Jesus and he was our guide. I did find out from Jopke in Bogota that one tour group had not paid their fees and the group were forced to run downhill, while paramilitaries burst from the bushes and executed their driver. While we were stalled at a military checkpoint, Dom offered one of the little kids a sweet if they would take the other sweet as a sweetener for the army guards. It turned out sweet and amusing, even if it could have gone very wrong. We got back eventually and checked into the same place as last time, but in a better and cheaper place. Then just as we were leaving and after I had come back with pizza for Dom, in walks the Israeli girl from Panama. Very random. Dom was too crocked to go out and I joined the others for some drinks. My internet had informed me I had 16 unread messages and multiple other crap that had destroyed my inbox while I was on a six day hike. Some unexpected messages however and I learnt Jopke would be in Bogota and said I would come down for the friday. The night in Taganga was ok. Did randomly bump into Jack from Panama City as well though. Funny three seperate lots of us all in Taganga and not realising the others would be there. He had been delayed from joining us by the breakdown of their boat in the middle of the San Blas islands. Shit this finger is bust. Hmm this slow version of Crazy is a bit shit. oh maybe not its just gone funky. Enough Seal after this one. Met another American girl I knew from Cartagena and everyone seemed to get plastered. The music in El Garaje is mediocre at best as it bounces from salsa, to the Rolling Stones, to Jam Rock, to electronica. Weird mix. I just walked out in the end because I got bored and went back. The Israeli girl rocked up later on and had been arrested by the always uncorrupt Taganga police. They had accused her of having sex on the beach and the guy she was with of having some drugs. Neither was true apparently and they had to pay a 100,000 peso fine. She was also arrested a little later that week for possession of marijuana apparently. Those police are so corrupt.
In the morning I went out and grabbed breakfast for myself and Dom. Got chatting with the Israelis and eventually we made our way for Cartagena. Dom was still injured at this point but made it to Cartagena. This journey takes longer and longer everytime I attempt it. Its like they are going for the world record for incomptent slowness. In Barranquilla in the middle we flirted with a local girl, who was asking me whether I wanted a small bottle of coke like her. I had to get Dom to translate as none of it made any sense to me. In Cartagena we shared a taxi with a cute girl from Cali and he took us to the wrong place. So naturally rather than driving round the block he decided to reverse all the way down the road backwards into head on traffic. Ah Cartagena, you are so nuts. Dom was injured and I was knackered so we opted for Hotel London and gto a room for the night. I was offered some dodgy porn in the corridor, which was about as eventful as this night got. Ah it just felt weird to be sucked back into Cartagena even if it was for one night.
In the morning Dom's condition had not improved and he decided to stay behind to rest. I opted to push on and see some more places as I was getting the urge to see more than the coast, considering I had been in Colombia for well over half a month at this point. I took transport from Cartagena to Magangue and was a little concerned that I did not have enough time to make it to Mompos. Lonely Planet was again wrong, but I am not sure how many boats there were after my half past three boat from Magangue so I would leave early just in case. I had been mulling over the fact that I don't believe in thinking of the past. Jopke had mentioned that it was a curious disposition for a historian. That's true. I had concluded that not thinking on the past meant you would have no regrets though. Because usually if people dwell on their other choices, they will naturally compare the current reality with the other choice and that choice will naturally in their heads have gone ideally. So its not really a fair comparison. There was apparently also an annoying man on the bus next to me, but he could not have been so bad, because I could not remember him. He was always on the phone, polishing his briefcase weirdly or stopping the bus for a piss. From Magangue I took a boat to Bodega. There was a really pretty yellow church off to the left and I have no idea what it is. I have put that the boat was at its limits, but I am not sure what I was thinking. I remember the river being wide and muddy, like by the mud volcano and that it was fun to be back on a boat. It is the premier mode of transport, except for maybe quad bikes and trains. There was a military checkpoint set up on the river. For what I don't know. Well I suppose security is an issue. The military man asked me to open my bag. I asked if he wanted the small one or the big one. His answer was that one. What one. That one. The small one. Yes. Why can't he just say the small one when I asked him. The Spanish is somewhat incomprehensible around Mompos though. I realised now that the film I was watching today contained subtitles as it was in Dutch and I understood most of it. At Bodega we had to take a collectivo taxi to Mompos. Some random long yellow snake flashed across the front of us and we were stopped and given a military patdown. Well I was anyway. At least you know they have a lot of people out for security. I stayed in Mompos in the Casa Amarilla and they overcharged me, but came and refunded me later. I like Colombia. The honesty is touching.
Mompos itself is a beautiful colonial town. It would have been great for Semana Santa, but I am glad I at least got to see it on the way south. Was meeting Mayra in Bucaramanga the next day and moving on so otherwise I would have stayed longer. There was a yellow church that looked like a cake, small cobbled streets running like veins through the city and no electricity when I got there. I did not realise this for 3 hours, thats how little you need it round there. The locals sit out on the riverfront in rocking chairs wiling away the hours. There was a great Moorish church and a purple one that was very pretty. It was fun to wander around this town, but the river was special. It had so many weird phenomenons. I climbed up this decrepid bell tower in the middle of the town, filled with muttering bats. You can see out over the beautiful tiled roofs of the town and on the other side is the river. Sitting on the riverfront at night as the sun goes down, reading Mark Twain is awesome. Feels like being back on the Big Miss onlynot at the same time. The river itself is a mystery. Small fish leap from the waters in groups, while silent lightning dances in the background, giving a mysterious air to the evening. The electricity kicks back in just as the sun drops and the street lights flicker to life to take on the burden in the town. Its as if everyone and everything does just enough work, but never rushes. The river is so crystal clear a vista it resembles a painting by Canaletto. Then the sun dims and the edges blur into a Constable. Finally as the sun dips down, tired from its exertions you see the work of Monet, the lines blurring and dancing into impressionism and the impression it leaves is one of immense satisfaction. Then another bout of lightning crackles silently away to itself and its as if nature itself won't allow a sound to infringe upon this intimacy.
In the morning I got breakfast before heading out. I have listed the gold-mica quote from Twain's Roughin It. To paraphrase it he finds some Mica that shines so brightly that he believes it to be gold. He is told by an old prospector that gold in its natural state is quite dull and all that glitters is not gold. Then Twain states despite this education he still fails to apply it to mankind. He often mistakes men of Mica as men of Gold, while the truly great go on unnoticed. Only those that have no value feel the need to polish their own reputation. If I can write half as many great things as Twain I would be a happy man, for he is so inciteful and cuts to the core of humanity. Genius knows no time constraints. He's also very right. When I was less confident I came across more so by trying far too hard. Now I just relax into my skin. I got an expensive 20,000 peso ride on a truck to El Banco. It was a hot, dustym bumpy three hour ride. Interesting scenery as you pass through the untravelled middle of the country. When I got to the bus station I was accosted by two guys. Both claimed their bus was going next, one was slightly cheaper and both insisted the other was a liar. Hmm a dilemma. How would I know who was telling me the truth. I decided to state that I would pay whichever price went first but I would only pay it when the bus leaves the station. One guy backed down off that. Ah nice to split them. He clearly could not keep his ruse. This bus journey was incredibly long at 8 hours more or less and I was so late getting to meet Mayra. I had a few missed calls and a text that I could not reply to, due to lack of credit. Colombian phone companies came up with the ingenious ruse that phone credit should only last for seven days and then you need to buy some more, regardless of how much you had left. I should really charge it here. I saw a crap Nic Cage film about predicting the future, although it had no sound. Then I slept a bit. I read some part of Twain where he repeated the story he had heard on the overland coach over and over again in print to hammer home how bored he was of the repetition as well. Ironically at this moment the DVD was stuck on the title screen and repeating the same line over and over again until it almost killed the driver. The line was 'And the winner is our very own Lucinda Glass' or some such. Over and over and over and over and over and over etc etc. She may well have been the winner, but I can assure you that the rest of us on the bus were definitely the losers. Then the driver switched over to shitty Mexican music and I hated him for his taste. One more pearler of wisdom before we arrived. 'Necessity is the mother of taking chances'. So true. I was now in Bucaramanga.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Colombia Part 3: Ciudad Perdida
I have brought my tail up to nearly 2 weeks now, so a six day hike should eat into the deficit a little more. I am listening to Promentary from Last of the Mohican as well, but its 2am and the alcohol is wearing off. Still this soundtrack rocks. It was sunday morning and we were off to Ciudad Perdida. The roll call included the aforementioned 5, an Israeli guy (Itay), one German guy (Jo), two German girls (Laura, Dafne), one English guy (Charlie), one Candian girl (Michelle) and and old Colombian couple (don't remember their names and they never really hiked with us, because he was slower and left early and she went by horse. But they did make it so fair play to them. We used to use the time when we overtook them as an indication of our walking pace. We took a rollercoaster jeep ride over rough terrain to the onset of the trek. Most of the groups tended to be all guys so at a 6/5 ratio we were fairly healthily balanced. I got to know Steph and Charlie a bit in the jeep as we were all bundled in the back with Dom. The first day was fairly easy hiking. Dom and I reckon its possible to do this hike in three days overall. One day each way and a rest day in the middle. We stopped after a short stroll at a bathing place where everyone had a swim. Afterwards, Jo, Eric, myself and Dom pushed ahead (as would prove to be the case always. I ended up actually walking with the guide for brief parts of a couple of mornings. So we effectively walked it unguided as the trail is fairly obvious). We ended up taking on a very steep long hill with the horse and some dogs. We did some bonding over awful jokes and the statements that the dogs understood Catalan and shat in my path because Dom had ordered them to. The three of us (Eric had stopped to wait) made base camp about 50 minutes before the others and I had a dog threesome acting as a fluffer. While one of the dogs leapt up onto my lap, the other saw it as a perfect opportunity to take her from behind. Was an interesting scenario. We played a small ball game and at this point we realised the hike was going to involve a lot of sitting around. I had not brought a book, would regret it and we settled into some weed smoking (courtesy of Itay) and some games of Shithead. Then we retired into hammocks and I got a slightly better sleep than last time.
I got up early and brained myself on the hatch flap. I did not bother with a shower and we had a shit soup before setting off hiking again. The trail is very picturesque and winds through some impressive mountain scenery. Apart from a couple of steep hills on day one and day five its not that strenuous and could easily be undertaken by anyone. It makes me suspicious that my fears on the Inca Trail are founded and that they have set a thoroughly slow pace for the non hikers to cruise it. We passed a school and descended to a rest stop (there were far too many of these). We were then offered the chance to go and see a Coca (cocaine factory). Rumour had it that this was really just a shed where they gave instructions on how it was made and then offered a sample. Hmm did not sound appealing for the extra money. I would not sample it, I have seen many sheds, my Spanish is not good enough to follow technical stuff and I could easily read it online. So myself, the German girls and the Candians opted out. We set off again and Eric and I stormed off ahead with one of the horses. It was too slow however so we decided to overtake it to see if it would hold our pace. It just stopped. It was only progressing because it thought we were driving it. Ah well. We abandoned the horse with only a little trepidation, though this was greatly increased when we never saw the horse again. One native hut told us this was where we were sleeping and so we stopped only to be misinformed when Carlos the cook caught up with us. We stopped forever at this river while we waited for the others to catch us and met another group consisting of Israeli guys and one Englishman. Because they had no women in their group, they elected to hang with us for ages and smarm on the girls a bit. We could not be arsed with the native village, because it felt cheap after the Darien and Jo and I stormed off ahead. We were caught by Dom just as we made the lodgings. They had a good natural swimming pool with very strong currents at the second place. The three of us went for a swim and did some bouldering. We were joined by Eric and when we made it back to camp we were informed there was a bed problem and two people had to volunteer for hammocks. Two people had said they would do it if noone else wanted, which should have solved the problem. But it turns out they did not want to really volunteer and seemed to be just trying to be magnanimous. Then typically English deliberations started to come out. I remembered problems I had with my countrymen. Oh well I had a bed and in the end only American Laura had to take a hammock. We played some Yanif and Jackson Five, before flying through a bottle of Aguardiente that Itay had brought with him.
Day three. This hike got repetitive. Blaze off ahead of the group. Arrive early. Wait around. Eat average food. Play cards. Sleep. The other group who had shared the shelter with us had some good looking French girls and a stunning Colombian. Its remarkable how your standards shift when you are out in the middle of the jungle. Eric and I shot off ahead in the morning and got up to the native village. They had hidden their tv and just turned off the radio. Ah nothing like hiding from the gringos all the modern conveniences eh. I played peek-a-boo with one of the kids and then others started taking photos. Our guide Wilmer said we could not walk off ahead because we would not know which of the three trails to take. He could just have told us, but of course that would have been too easy. When he eventually had to show us, he told us not to go any further than the river. Dom and I shot off ahead as we were bored of slow hiking and wanted to do some proper walking like on Chirippo. We got to the river after a fapid fire scramble. Well we were supposed to wait, but there were some of the native food carriers there. They said the trail went left and we would have to cross the river seven more times. Cool. We took the risk and shot off on our own. Then we came to the river again. And now we were stuck. Wading and probing the river sides we could not decide on the correct trial. Eventually I figured we would have to abandon the hunt, but just then the food carriers came stroming along. They veritably flew along, even with their burdens. They just glided over the surface and you could see by their footsteps how easily they moved. I forded the river and tried to catch them while Dom scrambled back. I found the other trail, lost the guys, but realised I could track them by bits of water or mud left as markers on the stones. This was fun. Tracking native guides along the trail to the lost city. I scrambled along until we lost the trail at the river again. Dom had caught me and there was a native house on the other bank. They pointed us in the right direction and we were off and running again. We picked up the tracks again and followed them to the river again. Now it suggested they crossed here, but I had found an alternate trail on the right. Both me and Dom thought we saw trail markers in both ways. I forded the river but could pick up no trail there. Damn. We had to wait. Nope. We decided stupidly to gamble and take the trail. By now we were deeply gambling in the FARC territory of Colombia with rapidly diminishing water and ideas. This trail was overgrown and I reckoned it was an old trail they used to use (that was apparently correct). We took it over all the rickety obstacles. I fell off the trail twice (once through a log ala Darien) and Dom fell once. We had some difficult scrambles and found some abandoned snake skin. Eventually we descended to the river again and saw some stone steps on the other side. It had to be Ciudad Perdida. What other reason would there be for stone steps in the jungle. We had made it and found the city ourselves. We only did four river crossings as well, because the last four were negated by the old trail. It is obviously possible to walk directly down the river from the first fording point and just look for the steps up on the left. That would definitely be the simplest option, though not necessarily the most fun. We saw Carlos approcahing from behind at this point and realised it must be correct (We did not know until later that Wilmur had sent Carlos to find us after we had pushed on at the river). These stairs were the antithesis of the Stairway to Heaven. 1900 brutal stairs in total at the end of a strenuously paced hike. We eventually trundled up them and waited for Carlos. He arrived and took us to the camp past the masses of military that patroled the site to keep away any threats to tourists. We walked up through the site and it was a very beautiful vista. The green circular platforms had been skillfully restored and the whole place was elevated in the middle of the valley. It would suffer from the cold in the night, when the clouds of fog would roll in and descend into the camp. We briefly explored the site alone, before heading up to base camp and having an ice cold shower directly from the waterfall behind the site. About an hour and a bit later we could see the others arriving at the site. We decided to go walk and greet them and were warmly greeted by Wilmur's 'I´m going to fucking kill you'. I think it was safe to say that he was a little pissed at the fact that we shot off without him and had basically hiked off into the jungle on our own. We demonstrated a little bit of trepidation in returning to the camp, but he said nothing more so I am guessing that Carlos must have explained the situation to him. Charlie, Dom and I decided to go out around the ruins and thw two of them took loads of photos while we were eaten alive by the mosquitos. Charlie sat down on one of the stones for a photo and then fell off with the stone. Shit we had broken Ciudad Perdida. It was like humpty dumpty as we scrambled to lift the big stone back into its rightful place in the ruins. We then got chatting with some of the soldiers there. They seemed really cool. It was a contrast to the police in Taganga who I had always been warily observing to try to work out which of them had robbed our friend. They were all corrupt, but the truly dangerous ones were the violent ones. The soldiers scrambled to trade items with us. They offered us a gun for one of the women. Dom did mention to them that with a gun they could just really take what they wanted. We then ended up video taping them dismantling and remantling their guns to see who was fastest. They fired off blank rounds to give Dom a bullet and they discharged gunpowder and set it alight to burn out some images. It was a fun distraction and at least gave us something to kill some of the excess hours. Then we got back to camp and had to kill some more time. So what did we do. We played cards of course. Now at this point I will bring up the sleeping arrangements for that night. There were a few private beds (all taken) and one giant communal six mattress bed for seven of us. As last one up I dipped out on a mattress. And I lost out on the blankets. I was to sleep exposed in just shorts and a t-shirt. This night was hell on earth. I struggled to get to sleep and then the bitter cold started to knife through me. There was a sheet covering the mattresses and I scarmbled under that. It took the cold from life threatening down to brutally uncomfortable. It was also pinned down on either side by Eric and Dom, which meant that it crushed all of my limbs very uncomfortably and allowed me no room for maneuvour. I think I slept no more than 15 minutes that night. It was without doubt the shittest nights sleep I have ever had and Jo remarked quite accurately that I looked dead in the morning.
The morning of day four I was like a dead man walking. We took the tour of the site in the morning and it was quite informative. Stand out facts are the apparent truth that there were no weapons for the Tayronas before the Spanish arrived (that sounds like bollocks). Also women in the tribe even today are married off when they start menstruating. If a man ends up with a barren wife he is allowed to choose another woman and the barren woman is used by all of the members of the tribe as practice for their own wives. Sort of like being pimped out really. I was destroyed at this point and took a short siesta. Then I decided to push on ahead rapìdly with Eric and Jo to guarantee a bed at the other side. Dom had been suffering from some sort of foot fungus on the trip and this was the day it began to get really bad and he struggle with the hiking. After some seriously good hiking (the others barefoot, me using my shit shoes that always get water duty for the last time), we took the river route this time and stormed back to camp. We met some of the soldiers part way and got the ubiquitous hostage photo where we are held at gun point. We got back to the camp from day 2 and had a quick swim. Current was weaker, but so was I. I grabbed a bed and as there were only seven for that night staked my claim. Laura also got one of them as she had been left without a bed last time. I figured we had the strongest claims. Then I slept till dinner, woke up and found out some people had wanted to speed up and get back in five days. We needed nine. We had five including my vote that was given in my absence. Oh well. Drama for nothing and I went back to sleep.
We were up the next morning for breakfast and off again. Dom and I stormed ahead despite his bad feet. He left me for dead up the hill climb as he always did. There was to be no polka dot jersey for me on this hike. German Laura had fallen and injured her back at the river crossing but we were unaware of this at the time until Jo caught us. We were trying to get hold of the champions league results on the way back as well, before eventually finding out that Arsenal and Manchester United had both gone through. I got to the top of the monster hill in the end and decided to run down. I caught Dom and walked with him. A bit further on Jo caught us and ran on past. It would be the first time I did not reach a point of the hike as a frontrunner. I realised I have barely gone into detail on any of the people or things on this hike. Thats because I am too lazy to bother and the internet connection has died, so I have to save this on word and upload it in the morning. Pain in the arse. We went swimming at the place where people stopped for the Coca plant on the way up. This required freezing cold refreshing water and pulling yourself back out of the water up a rock face with some ropes. I borrowed Jo's knife and carved up my foot where I had cut it and possibly got infected while swimming on day 2. The others got a bit squeamish over me driving a knife into my wound to bleed it clean. It rained again while we played cards that night and we had been very lucky to avoid the rain on the actual hiking days. We all slept in hammocks again and I still had no blankets. I had seen more snakes than blankets on this hike, but I had also become a very handy Yanif player.
The final day of the trek began with a race downhill. I started firing on all cylinders and decided to really push it as it was now the last leg of the trek. I ran nearly all of it and completed the last stage in 45 minutes. I managed to get 2 well deserved beers and an hours rest before the other guys straggled along. I also fell off rocks into the river twice but my shoes are none the worse for it. Everyone exhcnaged e-mails at the finishing line and I had four beers and some fish in the end. I think i will end the actual hike here and do some character fleshing of the other hikers in the next part. Otherwise it would be very short. Overall the hike was only strenuous in two places, was set over far more days than was needed, but it is definitely worth visiting. It has some stunning scenery along the way and the ruins themselves are in a spectacular setting in the middle of a valley. Apologies for any typos as it is now 3.20am and I am typing with the keyboard on my legs because I am slacking.
I think I missed a couple of bits so will just whack them on the end. Now I had to cut and paste anyway I will also use this as a chance for some character fleshing in rapid fire. Actually no I wont as just been distracted. Oh well on day 5 on the way down the hill Jo and I ended up posing with some soldiers in the ubiquitous hostage situation pose, but I left my bottle of Pepsi in my hand so it lacks that authenticity, while seeming more like a promotional ad. Also one of the Mexican guys went missing, but after a big search by the soldiers he turned up in the wrong camp.
I got up early and brained myself on the hatch flap. I did not bother with a shower and we had a shit soup before setting off hiking again. The trail is very picturesque and winds through some impressive mountain scenery. Apart from a couple of steep hills on day one and day five its not that strenuous and could easily be undertaken by anyone. It makes me suspicious that my fears on the Inca Trail are founded and that they have set a thoroughly slow pace for the non hikers to cruise it. We passed a school and descended to a rest stop (there were far too many of these). We were then offered the chance to go and see a Coca (cocaine factory). Rumour had it that this was really just a shed where they gave instructions on how it was made and then offered a sample. Hmm did not sound appealing for the extra money. I would not sample it, I have seen many sheds, my Spanish is not good enough to follow technical stuff and I could easily read it online. So myself, the German girls and the Candians opted out. We set off again and Eric and I stormed off ahead with one of the horses. It was too slow however so we decided to overtake it to see if it would hold our pace. It just stopped. It was only progressing because it thought we were driving it. Ah well. We abandoned the horse with only a little trepidation, though this was greatly increased when we never saw the horse again. One native hut told us this was where we were sleeping and so we stopped only to be misinformed when Carlos the cook caught up with us. We stopped forever at this river while we waited for the others to catch us and met another group consisting of Israeli guys and one Englishman. Because they had no women in their group, they elected to hang with us for ages and smarm on the girls a bit. We could not be arsed with the native village, because it felt cheap after the Darien and Jo and I stormed off ahead. We were caught by Dom just as we made the lodgings. They had a good natural swimming pool with very strong currents at the second place. The three of us went for a swim and did some bouldering. We were joined by Eric and when we made it back to camp we were informed there was a bed problem and two people had to volunteer for hammocks. Two people had said they would do it if noone else wanted, which should have solved the problem. But it turns out they did not want to really volunteer and seemed to be just trying to be magnanimous. Then typically English deliberations started to come out. I remembered problems I had with my countrymen. Oh well I had a bed and in the end only American Laura had to take a hammock. We played some Yanif and Jackson Five, before flying through a bottle of Aguardiente that Itay had brought with him.
Day three. This hike got repetitive. Blaze off ahead of the group. Arrive early. Wait around. Eat average food. Play cards. Sleep. The other group who had shared the shelter with us had some good looking French girls and a stunning Colombian. Its remarkable how your standards shift when you are out in the middle of the jungle. Eric and I shot off ahead in the morning and got up to the native village. They had hidden their tv and just turned off the radio. Ah nothing like hiding from the gringos all the modern conveniences eh. I played peek-a-boo with one of the kids and then others started taking photos. Our guide Wilmer said we could not walk off ahead because we would not know which of the three trails to take. He could just have told us, but of course that would have been too easy. When he eventually had to show us, he told us not to go any further than the river. Dom and I shot off ahead as we were bored of slow hiking and wanted to do some proper walking like on Chirippo. We got to the river after a fapid fire scramble. Well we were supposed to wait, but there were some of the native food carriers there. They said the trail went left and we would have to cross the river seven more times. Cool. We took the risk and shot off on our own. Then we came to the river again. And now we were stuck. Wading and probing the river sides we could not decide on the correct trial. Eventually I figured we would have to abandon the hunt, but just then the food carriers came stroming along. They veritably flew along, even with their burdens. They just glided over the surface and you could see by their footsteps how easily they moved. I forded the river and tried to catch them while Dom scrambled back. I found the other trail, lost the guys, but realised I could track them by bits of water or mud left as markers on the stones. This was fun. Tracking native guides along the trail to the lost city. I scrambled along until we lost the trail at the river again. Dom had caught me and there was a native house on the other bank. They pointed us in the right direction and we were off and running again. We picked up the tracks again and followed them to the river again. Now it suggested they crossed here, but I had found an alternate trail on the right. Both me and Dom thought we saw trail markers in both ways. I forded the river but could pick up no trail there. Damn. We had to wait. Nope. We decided stupidly to gamble and take the trail. By now we were deeply gambling in the FARC territory of Colombia with rapidly diminishing water and ideas. This trail was overgrown and I reckoned it was an old trail they used to use (that was apparently correct). We took it over all the rickety obstacles. I fell off the trail twice (once through a log ala Darien) and Dom fell once. We had some difficult scrambles and found some abandoned snake skin. Eventually we descended to the river again and saw some stone steps on the other side. It had to be Ciudad Perdida. What other reason would there be for stone steps in the jungle. We had made it and found the city ourselves. We only did four river crossings as well, because the last four were negated by the old trail. It is obviously possible to walk directly down the river from the first fording point and just look for the steps up on the left. That would definitely be the simplest option, though not necessarily the most fun. We saw Carlos approcahing from behind at this point and realised it must be correct (We did not know until later that Wilmur had sent Carlos to find us after we had pushed on at the river). These stairs were the antithesis of the Stairway to Heaven. 1900 brutal stairs in total at the end of a strenuously paced hike. We eventually trundled up them and waited for Carlos. He arrived and took us to the camp past the masses of military that patroled the site to keep away any threats to tourists. We walked up through the site and it was a very beautiful vista. The green circular platforms had been skillfully restored and the whole place was elevated in the middle of the valley. It would suffer from the cold in the night, when the clouds of fog would roll in and descend into the camp. We briefly explored the site alone, before heading up to base camp and having an ice cold shower directly from the waterfall behind the site. About an hour and a bit later we could see the others arriving at the site. We decided to go walk and greet them and were warmly greeted by Wilmur's 'I´m going to fucking kill you'. I think it was safe to say that he was a little pissed at the fact that we shot off without him and had basically hiked off into the jungle on our own. We demonstrated a little bit of trepidation in returning to the camp, but he said nothing more so I am guessing that Carlos must have explained the situation to him. Charlie, Dom and I decided to go out around the ruins and thw two of them took loads of photos while we were eaten alive by the mosquitos. Charlie sat down on one of the stones for a photo and then fell off with the stone. Shit we had broken Ciudad Perdida. It was like humpty dumpty as we scrambled to lift the big stone back into its rightful place in the ruins. We then got chatting with some of the soldiers there. They seemed really cool. It was a contrast to the police in Taganga who I had always been warily observing to try to work out which of them had robbed our friend. They were all corrupt, but the truly dangerous ones were the violent ones. The soldiers scrambled to trade items with us. They offered us a gun for one of the women. Dom did mention to them that with a gun they could just really take what they wanted. We then ended up video taping them dismantling and remantling their guns to see who was fastest. They fired off blank rounds to give Dom a bullet and they discharged gunpowder and set it alight to burn out some images. It was a fun distraction and at least gave us something to kill some of the excess hours. Then we got back to camp and had to kill some more time. So what did we do. We played cards of course. Now at this point I will bring up the sleeping arrangements for that night. There were a few private beds (all taken) and one giant communal six mattress bed for seven of us. As last one up I dipped out on a mattress. And I lost out on the blankets. I was to sleep exposed in just shorts and a t-shirt. This night was hell on earth. I struggled to get to sleep and then the bitter cold started to knife through me. There was a sheet covering the mattresses and I scarmbled under that. It took the cold from life threatening down to brutally uncomfortable. It was also pinned down on either side by Eric and Dom, which meant that it crushed all of my limbs very uncomfortably and allowed me no room for maneuvour. I think I slept no more than 15 minutes that night. It was without doubt the shittest nights sleep I have ever had and Jo remarked quite accurately that I looked dead in the morning.
The morning of day four I was like a dead man walking. We took the tour of the site in the morning and it was quite informative. Stand out facts are the apparent truth that there were no weapons for the Tayronas before the Spanish arrived (that sounds like bollocks). Also women in the tribe even today are married off when they start menstruating. If a man ends up with a barren wife he is allowed to choose another woman and the barren woman is used by all of the members of the tribe as practice for their own wives. Sort of like being pimped out really. I was destroyed at this point and took a short siesta. Then I decided to push on ahead rapìdly with Eric and Jo to guarantee a bed at the other side. Dom had been suffering from some sort of foot fungus on the trip and this was the day it began to get really bad and he struggle with the hiking. After some seriously good hiking (the others barefoot, me using my shit shoes that always get water duty for the last time), we took the river route this time and stormed back to camp. We met some of the soldiers part way and got the ubiquitous hostage photo where we are held at gun point. We got back to the camp from day 2 and had a quick swim. Current was weaker, but so was I. I grabbed a bed and as there were only seven for that night staked my claim. Laura also got one of them as she had been left without a bed last time. I figured we had the strongest claims. Then I slept till dinner, woke up and found out some people had wanted to speed up and get back in five days. We needed nine. We had five including my vote that was given in my absence. Oh well. Drama for nothing and I went back to sleep.
We were up the next morning for breakfast and off again. Dom and I stormed ahead despite his bad feet. He left me for dead up the hill climb as he always did. There was to be no polka dot jersey for me on this hike. German Laura had fallen and injured her back at the river crossing but we were unaware of this at the time until Jo caught us. We were trying to get hold of the champions league results on the way back as well, before eventually finding out that Arsenal and Manchester United had both gone through. I got to the top of the monster hill in the end and decided to run down. I caught Dom and walked with him. A bit further on Jo caught us and ran on past. It would be the first time I did not reach a point of the hike as a frontrunner. I realised I have barely gone into detail on any of the people or things on this hike. Thats because I am too lazy to bother and the internet connection has died, so I have to save this on word and upload it in the morning. Pain in the arse. We went swimming at the place where people stopped for the Coca plant on the way up. This required freezing cold refreshing water and pulling yourself back out of the water up a rock face with some ropes. I borrowed Jo's knife and carved up my foot where I had cut it and possibly got infected while swimming on day 2. The others got a bit squeamish over me driving a knife into my wound to bleed it clean. It rained again while we played cards that night and we had been very lucky to avoid the rain on the actual hiking days. We all slept in hammocks again and I still had no blankets. I had seen more snakes than blankets on this hike, but I had also become a very handy Yanif player.
The final day of the trek began with a race downhill. I started firing on all cylinders and decided to really push it as it was now the last leg of the trek. I ran nearly all of it and completed the last stage in 45 minutes. I managed to get 2 well deserved beers and an hours rest before the other guys straggled along. I also fell off rocks into the river twice but my shoes are none the worse for it. Everyone exhcnaged e-mails at the finishing line and I had four beers and some fish in the end. I think i will end the actual hike here and do some character fleshing of the other hikers in the next part. Otherwise it would be very short. Overall the hike was only strenuous in two places, was set over far more days than was needed, but it is definitely worth visiting. It has some stunning scenery along the way and the ruins themselves are in a spectacular setting in the middle of a valley. Apologies for any typos as it is now 3.20am and I am typing with the keyboard on my legs because I am slacking.
I think I missed a couple of bits so will just whack them on the end. Now I had to cut and paste anyway I will also use this as a chance for some character fleshing in rapid fire. Actually no I wont as just been distracted. Oh well on day 5 on the way down the hill Jo and I ended up posing with some soldiers in the ubiquitous hostage situation pose, but I left my bottle of Pepsi in my hand so it lacks that authenticity, while seeming more like a promotional ad. Also one of the Mexican guys went missing, but after a big search by the soldiers he turned up in the wrong camp.
Colombia Part 2: Cartagena and Taganga
We had rocked into Cartagena around midnight. The timing was not great. No time for a kicker on the only weekend day we thought we would have in the city. The hostel was not our first choice and we had several hawkers trying to charge us money for showing us places that we already knew. Waste of space. We tried to sort out rooms, while one local stretched his arms through the bars of the hostel to profer us information for cash. Initially they showed us one room, then another which Tom took and a final one which Dom took. The ironies of fate on room selection for who you meet is always significant. I went down to take the original room, but now suddenly it was not avaialble and I was whisked off to another place. Here was my new bed, complete with a pair of shoes, bag and stuff. "Its occupied no?" "No" "There are shoes under the bed" "Oh yeah". So they brought me back to the original place. It was occupied by two Dutch girls and two guys from England. One of the English guys was a kite surfer and had his equipment under my bed. Twas no problem. One of the Dutch girls started chatting with me and asking if we were coming out that night. We had just rocked in from Tayrona and were in serious need of a shower. Somehow we got chatting on drugs, possibly due to the large number of dealers in the streets. Though its nowhere near as bad as Havana. She asked if I would take cocaine and I said no probably not. She told me that they have a Dutch saying that you need to sniff the culture, but I always figured I am too wired for that confidence drug anyway. Apparently that would make me one of only a few people in Colombia who did not take cocaine. From further appearances that would seem to hold true. Everyone seems to be on some sort of cocktail. Its kind of like London really, only more people here are a little more fucked up. The others headed out and I got changed and joined Dom at a reggae bar nearby. Drinks in bars and clubs in Cartagena are expensive and we had arrived way to late to start off with a kicker. So we headed to the club and creamed through some money on beer. The bands were goodish and I got dancing with a local girl who was not impressed by my salsa. It would not be the first and it certainly won't be the last time. She stated "its easy, just like this" and proceeded to hammer through about 10 movements a second. So easy. I tried and failed. She said just dance it how you like. I figured that was a sensible suggestion and got to it. The night was kind of counterproductive, but we were worried it would be the only chance to sample some of the Cartagena nightlife. When I got back the other slowly trickled in and the conversation flowed spasmodically until everyone turfed in. Ah yeah there was one interesting story from Simon (kite surfer) about him and a Yankee who had been to hot dog vender, got quoted different prices, refused to pay, the vendor swung and the Yankee knocked him clean out. They ended up with a 100,000 peso fine from the police in the middle of the park. Cartagena also reminds me of a mini Havana, with a lot less hassle and maybe a fraction less charm.
I have written this next sentence down verbatim. "Sorted stuff out with my bank eventually, although not without pain." This sentence has since been proven to be optimistic and false. I do not now believe it is possible to fix things with my bank. For over 3 months I have been asking them to change the correspondence address for my credit card bills. Finally I got apoplectic and slaughtered them over the lack of service. They assured me that the address would now be changed within the week. Problem solved. Then a letter appears at the new address (which is where my normal card is registered) saying they can't send mail to that address without authorisation from me that its a correct address (which they have had at least twice). How can they send a fucking letter to an address saying that they can't send anything to that address because its not registered. Its mind boggling. They just sent correspondence there. They send all my other correspondence there. It exists on their system. My god the level of retardedness is unrivalled in the history of anything. Accomodation in Mompos was sold out. Could be a problem for Semana Santa. On the plus side there was a reggae fest that weekend in Taganga up on the coast. Might be worth checking out. I decided to walk the town. Firstly I went all the way round the outside of the old town walls and then climbed them and walked all the way back round, but this time from a position of vantage. Its very pretty. It kind of looks like Campeche, but with a bit more too it. Though the city does not really have loads to do in the day. They have loads of multicoloured colonial buildings and the old wall turrets are dotted with bars here and there. You can see why they say its a very romantic city. I managed to grab myself a haircut on the way back and found out that Yoana's hostel was booked up. That evening I got back and caught up with the other guys. It seemed that Tom was still determined to move on at some point and the others had been out doing their various things. I got back to my room and only one of the Dutch girls was left. Jopke was her name. We got chatting about people we had hooked up with on the trip and had decent chemistry. Then the others brought in some beers and Jopke got some rum as she was off into the middle of the north east wilderness the next day. The four of us got drinking in the room and decided to head out even though Jopke had a bus at 5am the next morning. Somehow we lost the two guys and after heading to the castle walls we decided to go for drinks on the beach. There was some random hobo there with his dog, but we ignored him and settled for a log near the waterfront. We chatted for a fair bit and then hooked up on the beach. At some point we lost the bottle of rum and thought the cup we had borrowed from the long suffering doorman had been swept out to sea. Eventually we abandoned the beach and headed back to the hostel. Luckily for us we had the room to ourselves, so after we woke up the long suffering doorman, we headed back in and had some more fun, although she was quite clear there would be no one night stands. Ah well it was still an enjoyable, random night and we did not sleep much before we had to grab a taxi for her in the morning. I woke up the doorman again and got him to call a cab. Jopke ended up taking one from the street anyway and the doorman was left to explain why there was noone for the taxi. Meanwhile the cat had got stuck up on the roof somehow and had to be rescued. The cat was clearly a moron, because it would then go and do identically the same thing the very next day. Idiot cat.
The next day we got up and the first thing I have written is 'huge iguanas'. Interesting start to the day. We had decieded to head out around town again and had gone to Castillo San Felipe. This place had huge iguanas swarming all over the walls. The entrance fee was more than we wanted to pay so we skirted the perimeter and the others decided we would scale the side of the castle with freehand climbing. Fuck me. Not a great idea for my vertigo. I got halfway and came down because I felt uncomfortable. Then Tom and Dom both scaled it. Tom said he believed we were in the castle. Hmm so it was only one wall. I tried it again. I worked low down with some footholds and got about halfway. The wall must have been 50 feet high maybe. High enough to do some damage. Then two thirds of the way up I lost footholds. Dammit. I would have to use just my upper body strength and after nine months of no weight work or swimming I did not fancy my chances. I went for it, slipped, looked like a fool and then just about scrambled up. I did not want to have to do that again. Ah I was up. Thank god. And then we realised we were only in a turret area. Crap. We could scale the internal wall easily but there were guards posted at the top. We would have to go back down. Arse. This was worse than going up. I wanted to go second as I did not want to be left up there. Having to hold my weight while I slid blind for footholds is not something I want to repeat again. It was awkward and took serious concentration. Still your strenght is rapidly increased from the iron will of fear. We resolved we might take this on again at night if there were no guards and completed our circumnavigation. We snuck into the museum, which put us beyond the guard lines, but not beyond the ticket booth sadly. We went back to the old town to walk around. As we skirted the walls we came across a cracked up local woman stretching naked on the castle walls as you do. Tom and I decided to walk all through the old town, which is a very worthwhile walk. Dom set off back for the hostel. We grabbed some food, got eyed up by some random cute local girls. I was feeling a little sick from lack of sleep and headed to bed for a bit. Then we woke up and headed for the old town. Dom was in the mood for a big night as they had done nothing the day before, but I was too creamed. We would dovetail like that throughout Cartagena. When one was in the mood, the others were not. We headed back to the hostel and Tom and I ended up drinking pointlessly in the hostel while listening to a stupid drinking game that revolved around 'English is a Roman language' (which is a fargin lie anyway). My arsecrack it is, is how I succintly put it in the diary. We were all turfed in from the courtyard and the Danish guy went out for drinks. He was a prick. I don't dislike many people, but this waste of space just drank all night, slept all day and acted like a dick. They seem to be the chief three aims of his life. Ah you have got to be kidding. The Irish guy was here again. Now this Irish man had an amazingly good looking Colombian girlfriend and can't speak a word of Spanish. He looks like a crackhead from the streets of Soho. And he seems braindead. And he just wanders around in a daze. Man these Colombians really do like the Estranjeros. He was in my Santa Marta hostel, he was in Parque Tayrona and now he was here. He was stalking me to torture me with his fucked upness and the random luck he seems to divulge from this. I mean a few days later he did not even remember where his hotel room was. Talk about taking your luck for granted. One last thing from this night. The Colombians must be a little sensitive to foreign sensibilities. Everything on the menu for dinner was translated except for one dish. Caballo. Ah they think we would not like to horse on a menu maybe. Ah us westerners eh. Too sensitive. This place would food poision Tom.
Hmm I have called this Yoana day, because she arrived in town from Bogota and we would catch up for the first time since Monterrey. The three of us set off for the mud volcano near Cartagena in the morning. You can tell i paused there to go out drinking and the difference in quality may now be quite noticeable, but I need to catch my damn tail and I am still about 3 weeks behind. If I can at least get Perdida up there it will be good. That and I am now thinking of pushing Brazil back beyond Argentina on this trip and coming back to Colombia in August time to work and live for a couple of months. This country is really getting its hooks into me. Speaking of hooks, it appeared that some stomach bug had got its hooks into Tom and he was sick all over the pavement on the way to the marketplace that Lonely Planet reckons is the hangout for the buses going to the volcano. Lonely Planet reckons a lot of things that are plainly plucked from some void of inspiration, where intelligence is just not welcome. Anyway we got to this market and were foisted from person to person in the vain hope of finding someone with some sense of directional skills. Hmm I am buzzing at the moment. We somehow lost Tom in the chaos (he would end up going back and booking his flights out of Colombia, which killed off the three way tango we had been following and cost him the chance for Ciudad Perdida). We also found out buses went from the terminal. What a waste of time. Was this to be Panama City all over again. Nope was the answer, but we would have to sit in a bus for 55 minutes while we waited for it to decide the road conditions were suitably treacherous enough for our intrepid voyage. Here I wrote "shittier driving than Guatemala", which still surprises me. Can't wait to see just how bad that driving in Bolivia is if people reckon its worse than here. The bus plonked us down by some random petrol station and we would have to walk for 45 minutes. Or would we. Ah motoconcho riders. Flashbacks to Dominican Republic. I still hate these motorcycle wankers and I was still keen to walk. So off we set down the road for the premier tourist attraction of Cartagena. Round a hill we walked and lo and behold a toy volcano we did see.
Hmm. So small. Weird. Dom said it was the biggest disappointment of his life and it is kind of small and insignificant. It certainly does not look that natural with the sandbags piled up the sides, but apparently it is natural. We had only taken 4 hours to get here. Its actually closer to Barranquilla but the Bible failed to mention that. I told Dom the story of Big Chicken and our great disappointment (for the unitiated or those who only read bits of the blog, you can head back to the South Part 1 to find out what I am talking about). We paid a little more to get in and overall we saved $4 for this round the houses trip and it may be one occassion when a tour is worth it. Except that on the tour they massage you, take photos and insist upon bathing you for substantial amounts of money. The volcano was like a muddy yoghurt. It felt like swimming in yoghurt, was lukewarm and quite fun. Moving was an incredible effort and you really need to grab the sides to push yourself down or along. I got mud in my non squinty eye while I was trying to smother myself, which made sight a little bit of a problem. Some little kids made us fill up small plastic bottles with mud in return for them taking photos. Ironically after complaining that no Southerners travel (which is a shame for the Yankee reputation) and talking about Big Chicken, we should bump into a girl from Atlanta who was getting married down here in Santa Marta next year. I love southerners and she did not disappoint. Afterwards we muddily strolled down to the Rio Magdalena. Here we could clean ourselves. We ran the gauntlet past all the cleaner women and got all of the mud off. Except of course for that small bit that always seems to hang around inside your ears. The food here in the site is extortionate. We walked back to the petrol station and got the same food for one third of the price, before we ended up taking two buses back to Cartagena.
That morning for breakfast I had clocked a cute girl in the other cafe and had thought nothing of it, but while we headed for cash, I managed to randomly strike up a conversation with her when she came out of a hostel. She was half English/half Colombian and agreed to join us for drinks that night. So we got back, sorted ourselves out and Tom and I went out and joined the English girl and Yoana for drinks. Was good to catch up. We drank a bit, had the usual problem with the bill when many people were drinking. Again as normal the nicer people end up paying more than their fair share to cover for the people who can't remember what they are doing. Then we set off for a park for some drinks and eventually we set off for Mister Barbilla. A famed club in Cartagena. Tom and Dom stayed to chat as now Tom was leaving they wanted some quality time together. Yoana managed to talk the bouncers into waving the charge for men and we were in. My salsa still sucks. The English girl and I gave a demonstration of the bump and grind English dancing style to reggaeton. The barmaids were dressed in angel costumes and were up on the bar dancing to every other song. Cool place if a little expensive. Locals were far too good dancers for me. I told the others to wait while I walked Francesca back and that was the last I saw of her. First and only person I have met on this trip from my home county of Hertfordshire. When I got back the others had gone, because they had not realised I was coming back. God knows what they thought my chivalry had been intended for. I bumped into Tom and Dom on the way back and we headed back to the hostel. I did find out that Kelvin was on his way. That was random, but the Irishman would be very, very good company.
In the morning I caught up with Yoana online and agreed to meet her for lunch. Failed to sort out meeting Francesca or sorting out accomodation for Mompos. By this point it was obvious we were going to miss Semana Santa there and that we would stay for Tom's leaving do. I met Yoana by the clock tower and we had a very expensive but good lunch. Then we headed down to Bocagrande to her hostel and watched Barcelona maul Bayern Munich while we waited for some of the Colombian couchsurfers from the night before to catch up with us. We headed to the beach with the Colombians. I must be developing my latin looks. One guy the day before had thought I was from Chile and now after a bit of Spanish chatting a guy from Barranquilla thought I was latin and not English. He said we were all blonde no? I answered him in Spanish that most blondes came straight out of a bottle. Bocagrande beach was swarming with Colombians up on the coast for Semana Santa. The beach itself was ok, but overcrowded. The water was shallow but also strong. Like a dwarf riptide intent on taking you out by kneecapping me. Only Yoana joined me in the water and we hung out there before a flying umbrells (it was quite windy) tried to decapitate someone. I left earlier than the others as wanted to get some food and then agreed to meet Yoana later for drinks. Danish guy was still a dick. Grabbed a random bunch of Irish girls for some drinks and went out with them before meeting Yoana. For 4 hours that night we chatted in Spanish only (although I had to ask for about 50 words, which is not bad going). She reckons my improvement was significant and that I would need another 8-9 months to be a good speaker of the language. Thats acceptable as it would put me in Buenos Aires. We went to Havana but it was dead, so headed to a cool bar on the walls of the city called Cafe Del Mar. This bar had a phenomenal vista and is definitely worth a drink, even if my Kir Royal love (developed in St Petersburg) cost me a fair whack of money. Afterwards we randomly bumped into Dom and Tom. There was a beer guy who sold beers on the street. He became sort of a friend of ours for his humour and mainly due to his cheap beer. Well we headed to the third floor of some club, which was shite and then Yoana left. She would head over to Santa Marta and Tayrona. We came out and drank with the beer guy, while some mental prostitute circled Dom. Beer man told us of this great club and we went with him to store his wagon before heading down there. It was seemingly a very posh affair, but most of the women we later discovered were high class prostitutes. It took ages to get past the door nazis and I abandoned the cause as lost. One of my new roomates was an Aussie/Canadian. He had just fled Taganga after an interesting incident. He had been heading home when he was cut off by a motorcycle carrying a guy wielding a knife. He ran for it. The motorcycle cut him off. The driver produced a gun and pointed it at his head. The other guy tackled him and held the knife to his throat. This is your first introduction to the infamous Taganga police force. They marched him to the police station and incarcerated him while they worked out how much he would pay them. He ended up paying $40 and having to hide out in an American guys apartment while the police continued to circle outside.
I woke up the late the next morning and seemingly had a completely uneventful day. I bought a Colombian sim card for my phone so I could use it here and did some writing. that must be the last updates I did. I had a siesta. Wow I was an exciting individual this day. We had easily overstayed the need to be in this city, but were here for Tom's leaving do now. I caught up with Lucciana online, apparently I had some quiet drinks and then turfed in. Dom and Tom went out drinking with Eric (The Canadian guy who would end up coming to Ciudad Perdida with us). The Aussie/Canadian was called Sam. They went drinking for a while. I just caught up on sleep. What a waste of a day that looks like on paper. And yet that complete nothingness apparently needed 7 lines of bullet points.
I went to the beach with Dom in the morning and bought some new jeans (I still to this day have not stitched up my clothes even though I really need to). They do have some dodgy inconsistent sizes here. I lost them in San Gil when I left them on a washing line. What a pointless purchase. Still I got a good 7 days out of them. They may still be in my back as well. I just don't think they are. A guy named Juan (from Santa Fe in Argentina) had joined our merry group. So the 5 guys headed out for drinks. We were then joined by some friends of Erics (Steph and Laura who would also join us on the hike). We also randomly walked into a couchsurfing meeting that I had forgot was taking place on that night and met a Yankee and a local (there was also a girl from Sweden and I have marked us down as a group of eleven). I can only assume that the last person was so uninteresting that I can't even remember who they were. We did not enter the reggae bar in the end and the night was quite fragmented as we bounced from bar to bar, haemmorghaging people as we go. Bugger that word is hard to spell. Not sure how close I got and too lazy to check it. We eventually went to the reggae bar. Most people thought Tom would hook up with the Swede but it did not happen. There was a Catalan guy whose Colombian girlfriend insisted upon dancing /groping me and Dom. The rest of us headed backj around 3am, but Dom went on some random odyssey around the clubs of Cartagena with the remainders of that group. In the morning everyone was ropey, but we had a posse to head off with. Juan, Dom, me, Eric, Laura and Steph were going to head to Taganga, while Sam and Tom would head for Bogota.
I tried twice to no avail to raise Dom into the living in the morning. I had to send Tom up in the end as three times is pushing it. We said goodbye to Tom and got a bus to Santa Marta. I got to watch Shoot Em Up on the bus while feeling sick. I may have to conlcude that Monica Bellucci is the best looking woman in the world, because in this film she has that god awful fringe that some women have and always looks shit, but she is still incredibly sexy with it. I learnt from a chocolate bar that Jaguar in Latin is Tigre Mariposo (Butterfly Tiger. How cool is that. This linguistic stuff can be quite good fun). We got into Taganga and checked into some shit hotel. The other guys were ok with the price, but then I was the one who had to have the stupid fold out couch thing. What an awful nights sleep. We decided to sort out the tour for Ciudad Perdida. Dom wanted to head to the beach and not meet the others. He wanted to meet the woman from last week. The others wanted to book the tour immediately. Juan failed to pass the message on to Dom and we were left in a limbo state and I was getting tired of having toi mediate stuff. Its not my natural disposition. Usually I am on one end of the conflict or the other. This trip was definitely mellowing me. We managed to haggle for 380,000 pesos, which to everyones knowledge is still the lowest price paid. Everyone was knackered and I was suffering from mild food poisoning so I ended up skipping the reggae fest in Taganga. Dom stayed in because he was knackered and Juan went out with the other three. I felt sorry for him because he had come all the way for the festival and then noone went because we were off to hike in the morning. Wow we spend a long time in Cartagena accomplishing nothing, but we still had a good time there. Seven says is too long though, even though I am about to spend eight here in Bogota seemingly.
I have written this next sentence down verbatim. "Sorted stuff out with my bank eventually, although not without pain." This sentence has since been proven to be optimistic and false. I do not now believe it is possible to fix things with my bank. For over 3 months I have been asking them to change the correspondence address for my credit card bills. Finally I got apoplectic and slaughtered them over the lack of service. They assured me that the address would now be changed within the week. Problem solved. Then a letter appears at the new address (which is where my normal card is registered) saying they can't send mail to that address without authorisation from me that its a correct address (which they have had at least twice). How can they send a fucking letter to an address saying that they can't send anything to that address because its not registered. Its mind boggling. They just sent correspondence there. They send all my other correspondence there. It exists on their system. My god the level of retardedness is unrivalled in the history of anything. Accomodation in Mompos was sold out. Could be a problem for Semana Santa. On the plus side there was a reggae fest that weekend in Taganga up on the coast. Might be worth checking out. I decided to walk the town. Firstly I went all the way round the outside of the old town walls and then climbed them and walked all the way back round, but this time from a position of vantage. Its very pretty. It kind of looks like Campeche, but with a bit more too it. Though the city does not really have loads to do in the day. They have loads of multicoloured colonial buildings and the old wall turrets are dotted with bars here and there. You can see why they say its a very romantic city. I managed to grab myself a haircut on the way back and found out that Yoana's hostel was booked up. That evening I got back and caught up with the other guys. It seemed that Tom was still determined to move on at some point and the others had been out doing their various things. I got back to my room and only one of the Dutch girls was left. Jopke was her name. We got chatting about people we had hooked up with on the trip and had decent chemistry. Then the others brought in some beers and Jopke got some rum as she was off into the middle of the north east wilderness the next day. The four of us got drinking in the room and decided to head out even though Jopke had a bus at 5am the next morning. Somehow we lost the two guys and after heading to the castle walls we decided to go for drinks on the beach. There was some random hobo there with his dog, but we ignored him and settled for a log near the waterfront. We chatted for a fair bit and then hooked up on the beach. At some point we lost the bottle of rum and thought the cup we had borrowed from the long suffering doorman had been swept out to sea. Eventually we abandoned the beach and headed back to the hostel. Luckily for us we had the room to ourselves, so after we woke up the long suffering doorman, we headed back in and had some more fun, although she was quite clear there would be no one night stands. Ah well it was still an enjoyable, random night and we did not sleep much before we had to grab a taxi for her in the morning. I woke up the doorman again and got him to call a cab. Jopke ended up taking one from the street anyway and the doorman was left to explain why there was noone for the taxi. Meanwhile the cat had got stuck up on the roof somehow and had to be rescued. The cat was clearly a moron, because it would then go and do identically the same thing the very next day. Idiot cat.
The next day we got up and the first thing I have written is 'huge iguanas'. Interesting start to the day. We had decieded to head out around town again and had gone to Castillo San Felipe. This place had huge iguanas swarming all over the walls. The entrance fee was more than we wanted to pay so we skirted the perimeter and the others decided we would scale the side of the castle with freehand climbing. Fuck me. Not a great idea for my vertigo. I got halfway and came down because I felt uncomfortable. Then Tom and Dom both scaled it. Tom said he believed we were in the castle. Hmm so it was only one wall. I tried it again. I worked low down with some footholds and got about halfway. The wall must have been 50 feet high maybe. High enough to do some damage. Then two thirds of the way up I lost footholds. Dammit. I would have to use just my upper body strength and after nine months of no weight work or swimming I did not fancy my chances. I went for it, slipped, looked like a fool and then just about scrambled up. I did not want to have to do that again. Ah I was up. Thank god. And then we realised we were only in a turret area. Crap. We could scale the internal wall easily but there were guards posted at the top. We would have to go back down. Arse. This was worse than going up. I wanted to go second as I did not want to be left up there. Having to hold my weight while I slid blind for footholds is not something I want to repeat again. It was awkward and took serious concentration. Still your strenght is rapidly increased from the iron will of fear. We resolved we might take this on again at night if there were no guards and completed our circumnavigation. We snuck into the museum, which put us beyond the guard lines, but not beyond the ticket booth sadly. We went back to the old town to walk around. As we skirted the walls we came across a cracked up local woman stretching naked on the castle walls as you do. Tom and I decided to walk all through the old town, which is a very worthwhile walk. Dom set off back for the hostel. We grabbed some food, got eyed up by some random cute local girls. I was feeling a little sick from lack of sleep and headed to bed for a bit. Then we woke up and headed for the old town. Dom was in the mood for a big night as they had done nothing the day before, but I was too creamed. We would dovetail like that throughout Cartagena. When one was in the mood, the others were not. We headed back to the hostel and Tom and I ended up drinking pointlessly in the hostel while listening to a stupid drinking game that revolved around 'English is a Roman language' (which is a fargin lie anyway). My arsecrack it is, is how I succintly put it in the diary. We were all turfed in from the courtyard and the Danish guy went out for drinks. He was a prick. I don't dislike many people, but this waste of space just drank all night, slept all day and acted like a dick. They seem to be the chief three aims of his life. Ah you have got to be kidding. The Irish guy was here again. Now this Irish man had an amazingly good looking Colombian girlfriend and can't speak a word of Spanish. He looks like a crackhead from the streets of Soho. And he seems braindead. And he just wanders around in a daze. Man these Colombians really do like the Estranjeros. He was in my Santa Marta hostel, he was in Parque Tayrona and now he was here. He was stalking me to torture me with his fucked upness and the random luck he seems to divulge from this. I mean a few days later he did not even remember where his hotel room was. Talk about taking your luck for granted. One last thing from this night. The Colombians must be a little sensitive to foreign sensibilities. Everything on the menu for dinner was translated except for one dish. Caballo. Ah they think we would not like to horse on a menu maybe. Ah us westerners eh. Too sensitive. This place would food poision Tom.
Hmm I have called this Yoana day, because she arrived in town from Bogota and we would catch up for the first time since Monterrey. The three of us set off for the mud volcano near Cartagena in the morning. You can tell i paused there to go out drinking and the difference in quality may now be quite noticeable, but I need to catch my damn tail and I am still about 3 weeks behind. If I can at least get Perdida up there it will be good. That and I am now thinking of pushing Brazil back beyond Argentina on this trip and coming back to Colombia in August time to work and live for a couple of months. This country is really getting its hooks into me. Speaking of hooks, it appeared that some stomach bug had got its hooks into Tom and he was sick all over the pavement on the way to the marketplace that Lonely Planet reckons is the hangout for the buses going to the volcano. Lonely Planet reckons a lot of things that are plainly plucked from some void of inspiration, where intelligence is just not welcome. Anyway we got to this market and were foisted from person to person in the vain hope of finding someone with some sense of directional skills. Hmm I am buzzing at the moment. We somehow lost Tom in the chaos (he would end up going back and booking his flights out of Colombia, which killed off the three way tango we had been following and cost him the chance for Ciudad Perdida). We also found out buses went from the terminal. What a waste of time. Was this to be Panama City all over again. Nope was the answer, but we would have to sit in a bus for 55 minutes while we waited for it to decide the road conditions were suitably treacherous enough for our intrepid voyage. Here I wrote "shittier driving than Guatemala", which still surprises me. Can't wait to see just how bad that driving in Bolivia is if people reckon its worse than here. The bus plonked us down by some random petrol station and we would have to walk for 45 minutes. Or would we. Ah motoconcho riders. Flashbacks to Dominican Republic. I still hate these motorcycle wankers and I was still keen to walk. So off we set down the road for the premier tourist attraction of Cartagena. Round a hill we walked and lo and behold a toy volcano we did see.
Hmm. So small. Weird. Dom said it was the biggest disappointment of his life and it is kind of small and insignificant. It certainly does not look that natural with the sandbags piled up the sides, but apparently it is natural. We had only taken 4 hours to get here. Its actually closer to Barranquilla but the Bible failed to mention that. I told Dom the story of Big Chicken and our great disappointment (for the unitiated or those who only read bits of the blog, you can head back to the South Part 1 to find out what I am talking about). We paid a little more to get in and overall we saved $4 for this round the houses trip and it may be one occassion when a tour is worth it. Except that on the tour they massage you, take photos and insist upon bathing you for substantial amounts of money. The volcano was like a muddy yoghurt. It felt like swimming in yoghurt, was lukewarm and quite fun. Moving was an incredible effort and you really need to grab the sides to push yourself down or along. I got mud in my non squinty eye while I was trying to smother myself, which made sight a little bit of a problem. Some little kids made us fill up small plastic bottles with mud in return for them taking photos. Ironically after complaining that no Southerners travel (which is a shame for the Yankee reputation) and talking about Big Chicken, we should bump into a girl from Atlanta who was getting married down here in Santa Marta next year. I love southerners and she did not disappoint. Afterwards we muddily strolled down to the Rio Magdalena. Here we could clean ourselves. We ran the gauntlet past all the cleaner women and got all of the mud off. Except of course for that small bit that always seems to hang around inside your ears. The food here in the site is extortionate. We walked back to the petrol station and got the same food for one third of the price, before we ended up taking two buses back to Cartagena.
That morning for breakfast I had clocked a cute girl in the other cafe and had thought nothing of it, but while we headed for cash, I managed to randomly strike up a conversation with her when she came out of a hostel. She was half English/half Colombian and agreed to join us for drinks that night. So we got back, sorted ourselves out and Tom and I went out and joined the English girl and Yoana for drinks. Was good to catch up. We drank a bit, had the usual problem with the bill when many people were drinking. Again as normal the nicer people end up paying more than their fair share to cover for the people who can't remember what they are doing. Then we set off for a park for some drinks and eventually we set off for Mister Barbilla. A famed club in Cartagena. Tom and Dom stayed to chat as now Tom was leaving they wanted some quality time together. Yoana managed to talk the bouncers into waving the charge for men and we were in. My salsa still sucks. The English girl and I gave a demonstration of the bump and grind English dancing style to reggaeton. The barmaids were dressed in angel costumes and were up on the bar dancing to every other song. Cool place if a little expensive. Locals were far too good dancers for me. I told the others to wait while I walked Francesca back and that was the last I saw of her. First and only person I have met on this trip from my home county of Hertfordshire. When I got back the others had gone, because they had not realised I was coming back. God knows what they thought my chivalry had been intended for. I bumped into Tom and Dom on the way back and we headed back to the hostel. I did find out that Kelvin was on his way. That was random, but the Irishman would be very, very good company.
In the morning I caught up with Yoana online and agreed to meet her for lunch. Failed to sort out meeting Francesca or sorting out accomodation for Mompos. By this point it was obvious we were going to miss Semana Santa there and that we would stay for Tom's leaving do. I met Yoana by the clock tower and we had a very expensive but good lunch. Then we headed down to Bocagrande to her hostel and watched Barcelona maul Bayern Munich while we waited for some of the Colombian couchsurfers from the night before to catch up with us. We headed to the beach with the Colombians. I must be developing my latin looks. One guy the day before had thought I was from Chile and now after a bit of Spanish chatting a guy from Barranquilla thought I was latin and not English. He said we were all blonde no? I answered him in Spanish that most blondes came straight out of a bottle. Bocagrande beach was swarming with Colombians up on the coast for Semana Santa. The beach itself was ok, but overcrowded. The water was shallow but also strong. Like a dwarf riptide intent on taking you out by kneecapping me. Only Yoana joined me in the water and we hung out there before a flying umbrells (it was quite windy) tried to decapitate someone. I left earlier than the others as wanted to get some food and then agreed to meet Yoana later for drinks. Danish guy was still a dick. Grabbed a random bunch of Irish girls for some drinks and went out with them before meeting Yoana. For 4 hours that night we chatted in Spanish only (although I had to ask for about 50 words, which is not bad going). She reckons my improvement was significant and that I would need another 8-9 months to be a good speaker of the language. Thats acceptable as it would put me in Buenos Aires. We went to Havana but it was dead, so headed to a cool bar on the walls of the city called Cafe Del Mar. This bar had a phenomenal vista and is definitely worth a drink, even if my Kir Royal love (developed in St Petersburg) cost me a fair whack of money. Afterwards we randomly bumped into Dom and Tom. There was a beer guy who sold beers on the street. He became sort of a friend of ours for his humour and mainly due to his cheap beer. Well we headed to the third floor of some club, which was shite and then Yoana left. She would head over to Santa Marta and Tayrona. We came out and drank with the beer guy, while some mental prostitute circled Dom. Beer man told us of this great club and we went with him to store his wagon before heading down there. It was seemingly a very posh affair, but most of the women we later discovered were high class prostitutes. It took ages to get past the door nazis and I abandoned the cause as lost. One of my new roomates was an Aussie/Canadian. He had just fled Taganga after an interesting incident. He had been heading home when he was cut off by a motorcycle carrying a guy wielding a knife. He ran for it. The motorcycle cut him off. The driver produced a gun and pointed it at his head. The other guy tackled him and held the knife to his throat. This is your first introduction to the infamous Taganga police force. They marched him to the police station and incarcerated him while they worked out how much he would pay them. He ended up paying $40 and having to hide out in an American guys apartment while the police continued to circle outside.
I woke up the late the next morning and seemingly had a completely uneventful day. I bought a Colombian sim card for my phone so I could use it here and did some writing. that must be the last updates I did. I had a siesta. Wow I was an exciting individual this day. We had easily overstayed the need to be in this city, but were here for Tom's leaving do now. I caught up with Lucciana online, apparently I had some quiet drinks and then turfed in. Dom and Tom went out drinking with Eric (The Canadian guy who would end up coming to Ciudad Perdida with us). The Aussie/Canadian was called Sam. They went drinking for a while. I just caught up on sleep. What a waste of a day that looks like on paper. And yet that complete nothingness apparently needed 7 lines of bullet points.
I went to the beach with Dom in the morning and bought some new jeans (I still to this day have not stitched up my clothes even though I really need to). They do have some dodgy inconsistent sizes here. I lost them in San Gil when I left them on a washing line. What a pointless purchase. Still I got a good 7 days out of them. They may still be in my back as well. I just don't think they are. A guy named Juan (from Santa Fe in Argentina) had joined our merry group. So the 5 guys headed out for drinks. We were then joined by some friends of Erics (Steph and Laura who would also join us on the hike). We also randomly walked into a couchsurfing meeting that I had forgot was taking place on that night and met a Yankee and a local (there was also a girl from Sweden and I have marked us down as a group of eleven). I can only assume that the last person was so uninteresting that I can't even remember who they were. We did not enter the reggae bar in the end and the night was quite fragmented as we bounced from bar to bar, haemmorghaging people as we go. Bugger that word is hard to spell. Not sure how close I got and too lazy to check it. We eventually went to the reggae bar. Most people thought Tom would hook up with the Swede but it did not happen. There was a Catalan guy whose Colombian girlfriend insisted upon dancing /groping me and Dom. The rest of us headed backj around 3am, but Dom went on some random odyssey around the clubs of Cartagena with the remainders of that group. In the morning everyone was ropey, but we had a posse to head off with. Juan, Dom, me, Eric, Laura and Steph were going to head to Taganga, while Sam and Tom would head for Bogota.
I tried twice to no avail to raise Dom into the living in the morning. I had to send Tom up in the end as three times is pushing it. We said goodbye to Tom and got a bus to Santa Marta. I got to watch Shoot Em Up on the bus while feeling sick. I may have to conlcude that Monica Bellucci is the best looking woman in the world, because in this film she has that god awful fringe that some women have and always looks shit, but she is still incredibly sexy with it. I learnt from a chocolate bar that Jaguar in Latin is Tigre Mariposo (Butterfly Tiger. How cool is that. This linguistic stuff can be quite good fun). We got into Taganga and checked into some shit hotel. The other guys were ok with the price, but then I was the one who had to have the stupid fold out couch thing. What an awful nights sleep. We decided to sort out the tour for Ciudad Perdida. Dom wanted to head to the beach and not meet the others. He wanted to meet the woman from last week. The others wanted to book the tour immediately. Juan failed to pass the message on to Dom and we were left in a limbo state and I was getting tired of having toi mediate stuff. Its not my natural disposition. Usually I am on one end of the conflict or the other. This trip was definitely mellowing me. We managed to haggle for 380,000 pesos, which to everyones knowledge is still the lowest price paid. Everyone was knackered and I was suffering from mild food poisoning so I ended up skipping the reggae fest in Taganga. Dom stayed in because he was knackered and Juan went out with the other three. I felt sorry for him because he had come all the way for the festival and then noone went because we were off to hike in the morning. Wow we spend a long time in Cartagena accomplishing nothing, but we still had a good time there. Seven says is too long though, even though I am about to spend eight here in Bogota seemingly.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Colombia Part 1: Barranquilla, Santa Marta and Tayrona
Right. I have been having complaints about my tardiness with the blog. Also I have been accused of writing a teen novel, but thats a different matter lol. Colombia is chaos. I will start with that. A headspinning, glorious chaos, that sucks you in, spins you till your head explodes and then still carries on as your headless body careens from one unplanned situation to another. And thats just the buses. The best laid plans of mice and men have no bearing on this country and yet I love the place. Probably why I have not updated too much. I have been too busy doing nothing and everything. And my head hurts. Need some downtime. Need something. Don't think Bogota will be the place to find it, but that where I go next. Anyway enough of this drivle. When I get to part 4 you will understand why my head hurts and what kind of emotional and physical whirlwind I was in for it. Ah a teaser you say. Maybe. Is it worth the build up? Probably not, but everyone needs some PR sometimes eh.
Ah I am tired. Mentally and physically beaten down. Estoy muy frustrado, although that may carry a different connotation in Spanish. It can in English. Thank god for Mark Twain. Have to meet a Dutch girl from Cartagena tomorrow in Bogota, Dom has recovered from his bust up feet and there is a question over whether Mayra will come to Venezuela with me. Too many questions. And I ran out of mulitivitamins, though I did find the smallest scissors in the world to replace the ones customs stole. Thank god for Seal. Though I may finally have got sick of Kiss From a Rose. I thought that song was untouchable. Maybe I should listen to Bryan Adams. That will be interesting, Ah its so pherapeutic to be writing, although I am sure everyone is wandering what I am banging on about. Welcome to Colombia. Como. Ah bugger I have just been sucked by youtube into the Bryan Adams live radio station. Never heard of this song.
Anyway Barranquilla. Dusty, dirty, gritty Barranquilla. We rocked up in town and realised the taxis are on official meters and have set prices. Very strange. Then noone tried to rip us off and everyone gave us genuine prices. Or if they did not and we challenged it they went ok, shrugged their shoulders and gave the real price. Aha we had left Central America behind clearly. That and the Spanish was rapid fire. Like a machine gun battery. I could not understand anything. None of this slow, clear stuff. Rapid fire chaos. I regressed in Spanish level during one short flight. It took me a few days to recover my understanding and even then the people of Mompos make no sense. I had a chest infection from the Darien at this point. It had not upgraded to Dengue Fever. It was just kind of shitty and there. Tom had hassles with his passport at the border and I was double stamped. I may already have mentioned this, but my mind is too tired to care. Its such riveting stuff I figured you might want to hear it a second time. At this point I was still trying to stitch together a fragmenting group. Tom wanted to leave in the morning, I wanted to stay to meet some more couchsurfers, Dom wanted to go, but noone wanted to spend 7 days in Cartagena (we were all eventually stiffed on that front). We met up with some couchsurfers in a bar in one of the posher neighbourhoods (a very, very expensive place, but not as expensive as the clubs in Cartagena). They were 90 minutes late, so it seems Colombian time is even worse than Mexican time. And their driving is even worse than Guatemala. Those are words I never thought I would issue. Guatemalans tried to kill me all the time but they at least vaguely stuck to their side of the road. Colombians drive wherever there is a gap. So the effect is snakes of traffic weaving through each other, looking like the want to crash into some giant auto wreck crochet. A full metal jacket maybe. Damn that was awful. Anyway before this we had wandered into some bar that appeared to just be full of women in blue. Very strange to have a bar dominated by women and for them all to have the same uniform. Either this place employed a lot of extra staff or it was a prostitute hangout. I know where my money was and I was right. We had one cheap beer (though not as cheap as advertsied, because we did not read the small print) and carried on. Anyway one of Andreas friends taught me how to dance close and fast in the Colombian way. She said for an Anglo at least I had rhythm, even if I could not dance. Its impossible here though. They are just too damn fast. One girl in Cartagena said to me its easy. Just do this and then proceeded to make 15,000 rapid movements in less than a minute. Hmm yes, so easy. I tried, failed and she said just dance how you want. Nice. So I did. Sometimes its just easier that way. Especially when you suck. Needless to say I feel constrained from mentioning how good looking the locals are in order to avoid the teen novel connotations. Everyone else seemed to get bored and it was clear that the two groups did not get on. My knitting skills were failing me and I was getting tired of stitching things together everywhere. Always stitching socially and since I bought my thread I still had so many clothes to actually stitch. And I still have not done it. Manana, manana eh. I can't be bothered to write anything more about the night. It was not a great one, it forced my hand into leaving the next day or I would be responsible for fragmenting the group and I cut a deal to head over to Santa Marta.
We all agreed eventually to head to Santa Marta and the inevitable split was postponed a little further. This was like San Andreas fault patching at this point. We arrived in town and it seemd a nice enough place. Right on the coast. We checked into a ridiculously cheap, but also ridiculously shitty hostel. Then we had a really cheap lunch. For $2 here you get soup, a drink and a full plate of food. No more of those bread ans water days that we always had in Central America. Food is simple but good here. Like home cooked granny food. We also went to the Museo Del Oro, which had some interesting Tayrona gold exhibits. The jewel was the model of Ciudad Perdida. We had hoped that would spur Tom's interest in remaining travelling with us, but by this point he was in a funk and I think determined to move on. If he had stayed I think he would have enjoyed it, but alas twas not to be. Dom and I went for a walk and ended up popping into the offices of Turcol. Ah MSTRKRFT this is more like it. Type in rhythm. We managed to get the price down to 380,000 pesos each ($152) which is still the lowest anyone has ever come up with. Class. Dom now thinks I am tight though. I just think I am frugle. Damn banking gone done turned me into a scrooge. Ah Mark Twain. Having fun playing with old style Mississippi English. What you go done that for I hear thee hark. Cos I can comes my reply. I have down rip off prices, but I dont remember anything being expensive in Santa Marta, so perhaps I am just nuts. We did walk into a street protest, complete with burning stuff in the middle of town. We asked the police what was happening. They told us that the students were protesting because evening classes were being scrapped and they liked them because they could laze around all day. Hmm fair enough. We asked the students. They said teachers were not being pàid and the evening classes were being cut because of it and many of them had to work to pay fees and would not be able to study. Always two sides to each story. The correct one and the official one. Then Tom decided to stay in. The honking car/barking dog duo I believe finally tipped him over the edge to leave, although he would be with us for 7 or 8 days more. Dom and I went to a nice little student bar called La Perla to have a few drinks and then turf in for Tayrona in the morning.
This day was where our hostels naffness came to the fore and where we took advantage of it in revenge. Firstly they had offered us the Ciudad Perdida tour for an amazingly generous 550,000 pesos. Only 170,000 more than we had been offered and a definite bargain. Mentires. Then they had decided not to tell us that even though the first bus for Tayrona goes at 5am, the park does not actually open until 8am. Cheers guys. We flopped out of bed, grabbed a bus from the market and then sat around for 90 minutes wondering if we really did need proof of our yellow fever vaccination with us. We did not. They said they needed to change the wristbands. They did not. They wanted to open at 8am. They failed. The main guard wanted to have a piss on the side of the road. He succeeded. One out of four is not bad. Just a shame it was the least useful one for us. At least we got to watch the monkeys and get ignored. There are loads of animals in the park. Its no Manuel Antonio, but it is very good looking. Beautiful beaches. You can take a truck for 2,000 pesos each into the park and I would advise it. We did not take it out of spite and we did a very good job of spiting ourselves. I was proud. Food and drink is prohibitively expensive in the park. Especially food. Bring your own. Having said that I had a very expensive lunch with Yoana in Cartagena and I am not sure how much dinner tonight with Mayra will be. But anyway they were/are probably worth it. Looking at Tom's plate, this place was not. Ah many things happened here. Lets put it in a montage of sorts.
We did the first walk with the lookout and the egg shaped boulders. Interesting and a good beach. We even fought with wooden oars, but mine broke because it was made from two bits of wood. Damn shoddy craftsmanship cost me again. Then we tramped down the beach instead of the pathways. Its highly recommended if you are moderately athletic and you hate your clothes. We found a great looking eco lodge on the beach. They even had a four poster bed on the sand and a hot tub next door. Awesome stuff. Anmd a mere snip at $220 a night. Bit beyond our budget. That room costs the same as Angel Falls almost. Uribe did stay there though while we were there. So the whole park was crawling with military. We were a little disturbed at first, but I prefer the military to the police here in Colombia. By a long way. We ended up bouldering into a dead end and bleeding from different places. Then we scarmbled over some other boulders. This was serious scrambling. Leaping over gaps that scared the crap out of me, sliding free fall with feet breaks, scaling down trees hanging in mid air, crawling through gaps you can't reach and scratching yourself to ribbons on the plantlife. You battle one of these krypton factor courses for an hour and look back with rieghteous satisfaction only to be slapped with righteous indignation as to how truly pathetic it looks from down on the beach. I tore the arse out of my shorts and the skin from my legs. Brutalised, we even had to dodge a snake that Dom found and scattered a bat colony that had been hiding in the rocks. At one point we were tossing water bottles across chasms before making the jumps. There were definitely a few places where mistakes could have been fatal. The worst was when my bag got caught on an overhang and tried to push me over the edge of a cliff. I would scramble, hit the rock, slide down, scramble again and Tom eventually had to haul me over. It was like boarding a chopper in war. Really tough course. The others loved it and I did in moderation. Risking your life is fun, if you do it only 30 minutes at a time, but 3 hours or so is a little excessive. We saw some monkeys and some lizards, though Dom saw more than the rest of us. On one of the deserted beaches after some serious scrambling (to reach the beaches other travellers just can't reach) we came across an army of land crabs, strung out like Japanese world war two soldiers. Every one had his own hole and they ranged in size from small to big enough. It was a sea of blue, but only at 30m. Every crab as if on command hit his hole when you were less than 30m, but from that point the blue line can be seen, hovering next to the whole, wondering if they will need to scramble. Why we are dangerous at less than 30m I don't know. It was probably excessive cautiousness on their behalf. The beaches are good here and fronted by mountainous jungle. It really is an excessively pretty place. The later backpacker beaches are worse than the earlier ones, but you canm actually afford to stay there. The sea is apparently dangerous as well. I think its fine if you can swim well, but the tide is definitely strong and maybe dangerous for the uninitiated and foolish. They do have a swimming pool made from a rock cut off and the water is really refreshing there. We decided we were going to sleep on the beach, but the powers that be decided we would not. In fact they threatened us that we had to leave the backpacker place unless we commited to a hammock. Hmm. We asked if they had mosquito nets. They said no there was no need as there were no mosquitos. So we said good we would sleep on the beach and they said no it was too dangerous with all the mosquitos. Glad that was cleared up then. We snuck back, met a Catalan hippy who travels only on sales of trinkets in her wagon. Dom enjoyed being able to speak Catalan and then we headed to the beach to sleep with the tide and bats. Yet it was too cold. If you have long sleeved stuff you will be ok. If not its a problem. So we scrambled for a tent around midnight and I got a traditionally shit nights sleep in a tent. Always. Damn I hate them so much.
After the night of crap sleep we went to the piscina for the morning and swam. Then we decided to head out but Dom gave us the slip and we did not see him till the exit. We seriously underestmated the time we needed to get to Cartagena. It took us all day. We got there at midnight. This time we took the horse trail back though and it was a different kind of scenery. Pretty but the bouldering is more fun. We had problem with buses. Why are they never actually direct when they say they are. We did drive past Barrabquillas stadium while watching the play on tv and they scored. Kind of funny. Could here the stadium cheer over the live tv football. We were supposed to pay 2,000 pesos for storing our bags in the hostek as well, but we skipped out without paying. Dom was concerned the hostel would call our embassy and they would give us problems. I thought that might be a tad excessive for $0.80. The phonecall would be more expensive than the debt. Ah anyway we got to Cartagena and we stayed there forever doing nothing in particular and yet still managed to get some good stories. That takes skill and dedication. Does this satiate you for a while? Will fire up the rest up to date in Bogota, but you can see Colombia was a cool place. Plenty to do so far, but more to do later.
Ah I am tired. Mentally and physically beaten down. Estoy muy frustrado, although that may carry a different connotation in Spanish. It can in English. Thank god for Mark Twain. Have to meet a Dutch girl from Cartagena tomorrow in Bogota, Dom has recovered from his bust up feet and there is a question over whether Mayra will come to Venezuela with me. Too many questions. And I ran out of mulitivitamins, though I did find the smallest scissors in the world to replace the ones customs stole. Thank god for Seal. Though I may finally have got sick of Kiss From a Rose. I thought that song was untouchable. Maybe I should listen to Bryan Adams. That will be interesting, Ah its so pherapeutic to be writing, although I am sure everyone is wandering what I am banging on about. Welcome to Colombia. Como. Ah bugger I have just been sucked by youtube into the Bryan Adams live radio station. Never heard of this song.
Anyway Barranquilla. Dusty, dirty, gritty Barranquilla. We rocked up in town and realised the taxis are on official meters and have set prices. Very strange. Then noone tried to rip us off and everyone gave us genuine prices. Or if they did not and we challenged it they went ok, shrugged their shoulders and gave the real price. Aha we had left Central America behind clearly. That and the Spanish was rapid fire. Like a machine gun battery. I could not understand anything. None of this slow, clear stuff. Rapid fire chaos. I regressed in Spanish level during one short flight. It took me a few days to recover my understanding and even then the people of Mompos make no sense. I had a chest infection from the Darien at this point. It had not upgraded to Dengue Fever. It was just kind of shitty and there. Tom had hassles with his passport at the border and I was double stamped. I may already have mentioned this, but my mind is too tired to care. Its such riveting stuff I figured you might want to hear it a second time. At this point I was still trying to stitch together a fragmenting group. Tom wanted to leave in the morning, I wanted to stay to meet some more couchsurfers, Dom wanted to go, but noone wanted to spend 7 days in Cartagena (we were all eventually stiffed on that front). We met up with some couchsurfers in a bar in one of the posher neighbourhoods (a very, very expensive place, but not as expensive as the clubs in Cartagena). They were 90 minutes late, so it seems Colombian time is even worse than Mexican time. And their driving is even worse than Guatemala. Those are words I never thought I would issue. Guatemalans tried to kill me all the time but they at least vaguely stuck to their side of the road. Colombians drive wherever there is a gap. So the effect is snakes of traffic weaving through each other, looking like the want to crash into some giant auto wreck crochet. A full metal jacket maybe. Damn that was awful. Anyway before this we had wandered into some bar that appeared to just be full of women in blue. Very strange to have a bar dominated by women and for them all to have the same uniform. Either this place employed a lot of extra staff or it was a prostitute hangout. I know where my money was and I was right. We had one cheap beer (though not as cheap as advertsied, because we did not read the small print) and carried on. Anyway one of Andreas friends taught me how to dance close and fast in the Colombian way. She said for an Anglo at least I had rhythm, even if I could not dance. Its impossible here though. They are just too damn fast. One girl in Cartagena said to me its easy. Just do this and then proceeded to make 15,000 rapid movements in less than a minute. Hmm yes, so easy. I tried, failed and she said just dance how you want. Nice. So I did. Sometimes its just easier that way. Especially when you suck. Needless to say I feel constrained from mentioning how good looking the locals are in order to avoid the teen novel connotations. Everyone else seemed to get bored and it was clear that the two groups did not get on. My knitting skills were failing me and I was getting tired of stitching things together everywhere. Always stitching socially and since I bought my thread I still had so many clothes to actually stitch. And I still have not done it. Manana, manana eh. I can't be bothered to write anything more about the night. It was not a great one, it forced my hand into leaving the next day or I would be responsible for fragmenting the group and I cut a deal to head over to Santa Marta.
We all agreed eventually to head to Santa Marta and the inevitable split was postponed a little further. This was like San Andreas fault patching at this point. We arrived in town and it seemd a nice enough place. Right on the coast. We checked into a ridiculously cheap, but also ridiculously shitty hostel. Then we had a really cheap lunch. For $2 here you get soup, a drink and a full plate of food. No more of those bread ans water days that we always had in Central America. Food is simple but good here. Like home cooked granny food. We also went to the Museo Del Oro, which had some interesting Tayrona gold exhibits. The jewel was the model of Ciudad Perdida. We had hoped that would spur Tom's interest in remaining travelling with us, but by this point he was in a funk and I think determined to move on. If he had stayed I think he would have enjoyed it, but alas twas not to be. Dom and I went for a walk and ended up popping into the offices of Turcol. Ah MSTRKRFT this is more like it. Type in rhythm. We managed to get the price down to 380,000 pesos each ($152) which is still the lowest anyone has ever come up with. Class. Dom now thinks I am tight though. I just think I am frugle. Damn banking gone done turned me into a scrooge. Ah Mark Twain. Having fun playing with old style Mississippi English. What you go done that for I hear thee hark. Cos I can comes my reply. I have down rip off prices, but I dont remember anything being expensive in Santa Marta, so perhaps I am just nuts. We did walk into a street protest, complete with burning stuff in the middle of town. We asked the police what was happening. They told us that the students were protesting because evening classes were being scrapped and they liked them because they could laze around all day. Hmm fair enough. We asked the students. They said teachers were not being pàid and the evening classes were being cut because of it and many of them had to work to pay fees and would not be able to study. Always two sides to each story. The correct one and the official one. Then Tom decided to stay in. The honking car/barking dog duo I believe finally tipped him over the edge to leave, although he would be with us for 7 or 8 days more. Dom and I went to a nice little student bar called La Perla to have a few drinks and then turf in for Tayrona in the morning.
This day was where our hostels naffness came to the fore and where we took advantage of it in revenge. Firstly they had offered us the Ciudad Perdida tour for an amazingly generous 550,000 pesos. Only 170,000 more than we had been offered and a definite bargain. Mentires. Then they had decided not to tell us that even though the first bus for Tayrona goes at 5am, the park does not actually open until 8am. Cheers guys. We flopped out of bed, grabbed a bus from the market and then sat around for 90 minutes wondering if we really did need proof of our yellow fever vaccination with us. We did not. They said they needed to change the wristbands. They did not. They wanted to open at 8am. They failed. The main guard wanted to have a piss on the side of the road. He succeeded. One out of four is not bad. Just a shame it was the least useful one for us. At least we got to watch the monkeys and get ignored. There are loads of animals in the park. Its no Manuel Antonio, but it is very good looking. Beautiful beaches. You can take a truck for 2,000 pesos each into the park and I would advise it. We did not take it out of spite and we did a very good job of spiting ourselves. I was proud. Food and drink is prohibitively expensive in the park. Especially food. Bring your own. Having said that I had a very expensive lunch with Yoana in Cartagena and I am not sure how much dinner tonight with Mayra will be. But anyway they were/are probably worth it. Looking at Tom's plate, this place was not. Ah many things happened here. Lets put it in a montage of sorts.
We did the first walk with the lookout and the egg shaped boulders. Interesting and a good beach. We even fought with wooden oars, but mine broke because it was made from two bits of wood. Damn shoddy craftsmanship cost me again. Then we tramped down the beach instead of the pathways. Its highly recommended if you are moderately athletic and you hate your clothes. We found a great looking eco lodge on the beach. They even had a four poster bed on the sand and a hot tub next door. Awesome stuff. Anmd a mere snip at $220 a night. Bit beyond our budget. That room costs the same as Angel Falls almost. Uribe did stay there though while we were there. So the whole park was crawling with military. We were a little disturbed at first, but I prefer the military to the police here in Colombia. By a long way. We ended up bouldering into a dead end and bleeding from different places. Then we scarmbled over some other boulders. This was serious scrambling. Leaping over gaps that scared the crap out of me, sliding free fall with feet breaks, scaling down trees hanging in mid air, crawling through gaps you can't reach and scratching yourself to ribbons on the plantlife. You battle one of these krypton factor courses for an hour and look back with rieghteous satisfaction only to be slapped with righteous indignation as to how truly pathetic it looks from down on the beach. I tore the arse out of my shorts and the skin from my legs. Brutalised, we even had to dodge a snake that Dom found and scattered a bat colony that had been hiding in the rocks. At one point we were tossing water bottles across chasms before making the jumps. There were definitely a few places where mistakes could have been fatal. The worst was when my bag got caught on an overhang and tried to push me over the edge of a cliff. I would scramble, hit the rock, slide down, scramble again and Tom eventually had to haul me over. It was like boarding a chopper in war. Really tough course. The others loved it and I did in moderation. Risking your life is fun, if you do it only 30 minutes at a time, but 3 hours or so is a little excessive. We saw some monkeys and some lizards, though Dom saw more than the rest of us. On one of the deserted beaches after some serious scrambling (to reach the beaches other travellers just can't reach) we came across an army of land crabs, strung out like Japanese world war two soldiers. Every one had his own hole and they ranged in size from small to big enough. It was a sea of blue, but only at 30m. Every crab as if on command hit his hole when you were less than 30m, but from that point the blue line can be seen, hovering next to the whole, wondering if they will need to scramble. Why we are dangerous at less than 30m I don't know. It was probably excessive cautiousness on their behalf. The beaches are good here and fronted by mountainous jungle. It really is an excessively pretty place. The later backpacker beaches are worse than the earlier ones, but you canm actually afford to stay there. The sea is apparently dangerous as well. I think its fine if you can swim well, but the tide is definitely strong and maybe dangerous for the uninitiated and foolish. They do have a swimming pool made from a rock cut off and the water is really refreshing there. We decided we were going to sleep on the beach, but the powers that be decided we would not. In fact they threatened us that we had to leave the backpacker place unless we commited to a hammock. Hmm. We asked if they had mosquito nets. They said no there was no need as there were no mosquitos. So we said good we would sleep on the beach and they said no it was too dangerous with all the mosquitos. Glad that was cleared up then. We snuck back, met a Catalan hippy who travels only on sales of trinkets in her wagon. Dom enjoyed being able to speak Catalan and then we headed to the beach to sleep with the tide and bats. Yet it was too cold. If you have long sleeved stuff you will be ok. If not its a problem. So we scrambled for a tent around midnight and I got a traditionally shit nights sleep in a tent. Always. Damn I hate them so much.
After the night of crap sleep we went to the piscina for the morning and swam. Then we decided to head out but Dom gave us the slip and we did not see him till the exit. We seriously underestmated the time we needed to get to Cartagena. It took us all day. We got there at midnight. This time we took the horse trail back though and it was a different kind of scenery. Pretty but the bouldering is more fun. We had problem with buses. Why are they never actually direct when they say they are. We did drive past Barrabquillas stadium while watching the play on tv and they scored. Kind of funny. Could here the stadium cheer over the live tv football. We were supposed to pay 2,000 pesos for storing our bags in the hostek as well, but we skipped out without paying. Dom was concerned the hostel would call our embassy and they would give us problems. I thought that might be a tad excessive for $0.80. The phonecall would be more expensive than the debt. Ah anyway we got to Cartagena and we stayed there forever doing nothing in particular and yet still managed to get some good stories. That takes skill and dedication. Does this satiate you for a while? Will fire up the rest up to date in Bogota, but you can see Colombia was a cool place. Plenty to do so far, but more to do later.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Top Ten Caribbean/Central America
1. San Juan (Puerto Rico): This city is all sorts of fucking awesome. Unbelievably beautiful women, stunning architecture, great ambience. Possibly my favourite place I have been.
2. Monteverde/Santa Elena (Costa Rica): This place was just awesome. Stunning jaw dropping scenery all the way down to the coast, abundant wildlife, so much greenery and great cloud forests)
3. Panajachel (Guatemala): Yes its touristy, yes the town itself is not that amazing, but man that lake is so beautiful.
4. Sambu/Quina (Panama): Playing football with the native kids, meeting the most genuinely nice people we met all trip and hiking and boating into the middle of the unknown. One of the collest things I have ever done.
5. San Salvador (El Salvador): The best of the big cities and the best of the capitals. More western than most, cosmopolitan and the people are so nice they never try to seel you anything. The El Salvadoreans are definitely the nicest Central Americans.
6. Apaneca/Juayua (El Salvador): Brilliant mountain towns, with great hiking and again those El Salvadoreans mean the country creeps up on you slowly.
7. Grenada (Nicaragua): Its not as good as Guanajuato, its a little too clean cut, but its by far the best colonial town in Central America (Don't listen to those who back Antigua or Leon)
8. Las Terrenas (Dominican Republic): Could have been Cabarete with the windsurfing, could have gone to Cap Haitian, but this place is chilled with good bars, but most importantly the most awesome French cuisine anywhere. A slice of France on the Caribbean beachside.
9. Panama City (Panama): Parts of it piss me off. I missed its best bits, but there is no arguing it is pretty, its unique and it has by miles the best nightlife in Central America.
10. Copan Ruians (Honduras): This country does not deserve a city in the top ten, but Copan Ruinas is a beautiful little colonial town. Much more so than Gracias supposedly is.
2. Monteverde/Santa Elena (Costa Rica): This place was just awesome. Stunning jaw dropping scenery all the way down to the coast, abundant wildlife, so much greenery and great cloud forests)
3. Panajachel (Guatemala): Yes its touristy, yes the town itself is not that amazing, but man that lake is so beautiful.
4. Sambu/Quina (Panama): Playing football with the native kids, meeting the most genuinely nice people we met all trip and hiking and boating into the middle of the unknown. One of the collest things I have ever done.
5. San Salvador (El Salvador): The best of the big cities and the best of the capitals. More western than most, cosmopolitan and the people are so nice they never try to seel you anything. The El Salvadoreans are definitely the nicest Central Americans.
6. Apaneca/Juayua (El Salvador): Brilliant mountain towns, with great hiking and again those El Salvadoreans mean the country creeps up on you slowly.
7. Grenada (Nicaragua): Its not as good as Guanajuato, its a little too clean cut, but its by far the best colonial town in Central America (Don't listen to those who back Antigua or Leon)
8. Las Terrenas (Dominican Republic): Could have been Cabarete with the windsurfing, could have gone to Cap Haitian, but this place is chilled with good bars, but most importantly the most awesome French cuisine anywhere. A slice of France on the Caribbean beachside.
9. Panama City (Panama): Parts of it piss me off. I missed its best bits, but there is no arguing it is pretty, its unique and it has by miles the best nightlife in Central America.
10. Copan Ruians (Honduras): This country does not deserve a city in the top ten, but Copan Ruinas is a beautiful little colonial town. Much more so than Gracias supposedly is.
Panama Part 3
I seem to have done fuck all in Panama City despite being there for 4 days but I will cover it nonetheless for completest sakes. Once we landed in our diddy plane in Panama City, banking and rolling onto the runway we were greeted by the world's most pointless customs. They dumped our bags on the tarmac and had to hand them through a small plastic flap. We could easily have just gone and picked them up ourselves. Then as we were flying from the Darien we were treated to a thorough search for undesirable materials. This consisted of a pat down and a quikc look into one of the bags. Why bother. Either don't check or check it properly. Whats the point in doing some half arsed neither one nor the other. Oh well. Also one line was pointlessly slower than the other. It felt like those times on the London Underground when you get stuck behind that old guy who has practically died from the exertion of standing motionless on an escalator and then proceeds to crawl like a snail through the narrowest of tunnels. Only Oxford Street shoppers are more annoying than that. Though London appears to be falling apart at the moment (despite the pounds brief rally) and maybe there will be no shoppers left and when I return home my hometown will resemble 28 days later. Once we got through the vigorous pointlessness we grabbed a bus into town and found out that Luna's Castle was full. So we checked into a shittier cheaper hostel that we never left (bit like now in Cartagena really) and really needed to wash our clothes. We managed to find a local laundromat and I did my best imitation of a bad TV advert. I stripped down to just my swimming trunks, loading everything in the machine and then hung around outside to watch the people walk by (there was a catwalk show in the local square that night). In our hostel room we bumped into a bunch of young posh kids from the UK. 'When mommy takes out the porsche', you know the types. Good bunch though and the girl Poppy had a sensational figure. We decided to drag them along with us for a night out in Panama City. Beforehand I was ambushed on our balacony by an Argentine girl who pinned me to the railings with her Spanish. I felt like Mohammed Ali rope-a-doping the zinging the rapid fire Spanish.
Having lost on points, we grabbed a taxi and headed out to a bar called Habibi's in the posh part of town. It was completely contrasting from the shitheap of an old town we stayed in. It was full of weirdos (some old woman calling me a beautiful, beautiful man in some chicken shop and a man covered in talcum powder trying to solicit us for money), but it did have its rustic charm. It also provided the contrast on the malecon of looking right and seeing a place that looks like Venice and then looking left and seeing a place that looks like New York. In Habibi's we struggled to get a table amongst the beautiful people, before they eventually cleared some corner table out of site of the other clientele. The sheesha was not badly priced, but the beer was going to be beyond us. Afterwards the seven of us decided to grab a bottle of rum (1.75 litres) for $2 each and go drink in the park like British teenagers. Its remarkable how fun that was and how much you forget how much fun these nights were before you could actually get into bars and be done up the arse on prices. Then we decided around 3am to hit up a club and went out to the only late after party dance club. Not a bad venue, though Poppy and I broke their cage with our dancing. Damn papier mache structure. Poppy also managed to get stuck in the toilets for half an hour. I thought she would surely have been able to get out underneath no, but she calmly informed me her breasts were too big. Yep, sounded feasible. I stopped drinking in there and missed a free shot round because I was in the toilet (bowel timing). It was bought because the English kid Tom had accepted $10 for entrance fee when Dom was on the verge of haggling it down from $20 to $5. This was a poser club, with the beautiful plastic people out in full force, but it did feel good to be in a proper dance place again. Outside I got chatting with an Aussie and his Panamanian girlfriend. He was in the IT business. I asked what type. He said the most profitable thing on the internet. Ah he was in porn. Well actually he ran his own webcam business out of Panama City and his girlfriend was the secretary. They invited us to a house party, but by this point we were all a little mullered. One of the English guys suggested going to a casino, which I fancied, but instead we hired a taxi to take us looking for food and left him waiting outside some food place while we fucked about for 20 minutes eating. Poor man.
In the morning we were woken up by Poppy bursting into our room in skin tight gym clothes. The English guys only stayed briefly before taking off and then we noticed Dom's memory card for his phone was gone. He suspected the English guy. Both me and Tom could vouch for Poppy's movements and that it wasn't her. We also did not believe that upper class English would steal something (well nothing that was not proper white collar crime anyway) and it was one of their better qualities. Ventually it turned out Dom had put it in his wallet and crisis averted, morning lost, we seemingly did nothing. We must have done something. Yet my notebook is conspicuously blank. I think maybe I was doing my last lot of writing up. I had also sorted out meeting Yoana in Colombia and had the Yankee girl from Dominican Republic confirm she would probably take the CELTA with me in Buenos Aires. I think the other guys took some street photos. There wasa random teaching Yankee who I chatted with. I concluded that the Alcott shopping centre is actually hell on earth. The bastards have you wandering from place to place in some sick twilight zone, as they can't decided which incorrect bus they will send you to next. I got furiously angry at one point and then I was told it was impossible to walk. Motherfuckers. Tell me which bus is mine. Eventually I escaped my prison of shops and bad buses. The old town is a damn insane asylum. They should send in specialists to assess this unique human region. Will leave this paragraph with a thought. The Yankees never pronounce their t's especially in water or wa'eh as they call it. It seems that when they had the Boston Tea Party, the drink wasn't the only t they chucked out.
Dom and I grabbed breakfast with the Yankee Richard in the morning and then set off to see if we could get a yacht up the canal. Then we got boradsided. The Puerto Obaldia flights were sold out until the 13th April. Shit. We needed and alternate route and fast. I also did not want to spend many more days here in Panama. We would probably have flown that day if Dom had not wanted to meet his friend. All the alternatives were too long by boat and Medellin flights were expensive. Bugger. We set off for the Miraflores locks with this problem in mind. This was all I would see of the canal and it was just some super strong trains pulling huge boats through it. We did not even visit the observation decks. We were also told we would not be able to board a boat there. Shitty. We tried to pretend we did not speak any Spanish and climb up an electrical place next door for a good view but they did not buy it and kicked us out. Then we went to find the yacht club, but we had bus problems again as they played ping pong with us between a square and the main bus station. I believe my shorthand sums it up well enough. 'Fucking bus cunt faces'. Must have been really shitty for me to write that. We abandoned the yacht idea and then apparently I did a lot of writing. Is that so? What the fuck did I do on the sunday. Maybe we wiped out the whole day. Oh well I think i just wiped out most of my time in Panama City in general. At least I am not spending all my holiday waiting for dates with checkout girls like this arsehole Dane in my hostel at the moment. In the evening we had a few quiet ones and planned our escape to South America.
We dicked around a lot in the morning, before deciding to fly to Barranquilla (a town lonely planet describes as a place not worth visiting). The cheapest flight we could get was with an airline called Aires. We then headed to a post office so the others could send stuff back. This seemingly simple task took two hours, because the post office does not have envelopes and requires as many forms to be completed as a Russian border official. Also the place we went to buy envelopes had a security guard who offered Dom a free shoe box for his stuff. Then when we came back down he was gone and we had to go through every level of management before we could finally take the damn box. Of course they said we could never reenter the shop with the shoe box. How terrible. After this mission we went off to the 'best bookstore in Central America' which was crap and the one in Costa Rica is the best I saw. The other guys went to the Bridge of the Americas (which I did not even see) and we did not have enough time for Panama Viejo (We saw it from the taxi to the airport the next day) and I phoned both my sister and my dad for their birthdays and we had a long chat. When I got back to the hostel I went for dinner with an Israeli guy and a German/Englishman. We then joined them, an Italian guy and a hot but bitchy Israeli girl for drinks in an extortionate bar. They told us it was $2.50 a beer than charged us $3.75. Bear in mind we were paying $0.60 in the hostel. I argued with them in Spanish and the head waiter said sorry but the guy had not known the prices. I said sorry thats not my problem and you are only getting $2.50 so they accepted that in the end. Dom had gone out with his Catalan friend from home and she had paid for him to have a swanky night out over the good part of town. He came back around 4am or so but noone could let him in so he climbed in the balcony like Spiderman up a drainpipe and along. Considering Tom had done this on his first visit to Panama City I felt like a fraud for always using the front door. In the morning we picked up a taxi and headed for the airport to pick up our flight. We were worried they would ask for proof of onward travel, but they didn't. What they did ask for was the original credit card used to book the flights. Well they asked Dom. Fuck it. I didn't have mine. It was back in England. I sweated and nervously filled out my form, waiting for the inevitable rejection. Yet they never asked me in the end. Tengo muy suerte and this time I needed it. I did not ask too many questions and we ducked through the airport where a bar of Swiss chocolate was over $10. Ah how I remembered this place from when I was there exactly 2 months before on the way to El Salvador. I had successfully managed to see fuck all of Panama. I had however managed to reach the psyhological mid point of my trip and the geographical one as well (if not quite the time one. That will come in May). We borded our crappy little plane (that was going to stop in three cities like some public bus) and set off on our exodus to Colombia. The plane was a nightmare of rocking, rolling and unstable flying. At one point I thought we were going to try to land on the grass. I tried to sleep. I prefer that method. Either I wake up touched down or I don't wake up. Either way its less stress. When we touched the tarmac in Barranquilla I felt tremendous pity for the other passengers who had to endure two more take offs and landings under this pilot. I hope they made it. Oh well you can see why it was cheap. But fuck it. I was in SOUTH AMERICA. Woohoo. Bout fucking time.
Having lost on points, we grabbed a taxi and headed out to a bar called Habibi's in the posh part of town. It was completely contrasting from the shitheap of an old town we stayed in. It was full of weirdos (some old woman calling me a beautiful, beautiful man in some chicken shop and a man covered in talcum powder trying to solicit us for money), but it did have its rustic charm. It also provided the contrast on the malecon of looking right and seeing a place that looks like Venice and then looking left and seeing a place that looks like New York. In Habibi's we struggled to get a table amongst the beautiful people, before they eventually cleared some corner table out of site of the other clientele. The sheesha was not badly priced, but the beer was going to be beyond us. Afterwards the seven of us decided to grab a bottle of rum (1.75 litres) for $2 each and go drink in the park like British teenagers. Its remarkable how fun that was and how much you forget how much fun these nights were before you could actually get into bars and be done up the arse on prices. Then we decided around 3am to hit up a club and went out to the only late after party dance club. Not a bad venue, though Poppy and I broke their cage with our dancing. Damn papier mache structure. Poppy also managed to get stuck in the toilets for half an hour. I thought she would surely have been able to get out underneath no, but she calmly informed me her breasts were too big. Yep, sounded feasible. I stopped drinking in there and missed a free shot round because I was in the toilet (bowel timing). It was bought because the English kid Tom had accepted $10 for entrance fee when Dom was on the verge of haggling it down from $20 to $5. This was a poser club, with the beautiful plastic people out in full force, but it did feel good to be in a proper dance place again. Outside I got chatting with an Aussie and his Panamanian girlfriend. He was in the IT business. I asked what type. He said the most profitable thing on the internet. Ah he was in porn. Well actually he ran his own webcam business out of Panama City and his girlfriend was the secretary. They invited us to a house party, but by this point we were all a little mullered. One of the English guys suggested going to a casino, which I fancied, but instead we hired a taxi to take us looking for food and left him waiting outside some food place while we fucked about for 20 minutes eating. Poor man.
In the morning we were woken up by Poppy bursting into our room in skin tight gym clothes. The English guys only stayed briefly before taking off and then we noticed Dom's memory card for his phone was gone. He suspected the English guy. Both me and Tom could vouch for Poppy's movements and that it wasn't her. We also did not believe that upper class English would steal something (well nothing that was not proper white collar crime anyway) and it was one of their better qualities. Ventually it turned out Dom had put it in his wallet and crisis averted, morning lost, we seemingly did nothing. We must have done something. Yet my notebook is conspicuously blank. I think maybe I was doing my last lot of writing up. I had also sorted out meeting Yoana in Colombia and had the Yankee girl from Dominican Republic confirm she would probably take the CELTA with me in Buenos Aires. I think the other guys took some street photos. There wasa random teaching Yankee who I chatted with. I concluded that the Alcott shopping centre is actually hell on earth. The bastards have you wandering from place to place in some sick twilight zone, as they can't decided which incorrect bus they will send you to next. I got furiously angry at one point and then I was told it was impossible to walk. Motherfuckers. Tell me which bus is mine. Eventually I escaped my prison of shops and bad buses. The old town is a damn insane asylum. They should send in specialists to assess this unique human region. Will leave this paragraph with a thought. The Yankees never pronounce their t's especially in water or wa'eh as they call it. It seems that when they had the Boston Tea Party, the drink wasn't the only t they chucked out.
Dom and I grabbed breakfast with the Yankee Richard in the morning and then set off to see if we could get a yacht up the canal. Then we got boradsided. The Puerto Obaldia flights were sold out until the 13th April. Shit. We needed and alternate route and fast. I also did not want to spend many more days here in Panama. We would probably have flown that day if Dom had not wanted to meet his friend. All the alternatives were too long by boat and Medellin flights were expensive. Bugger. We set off for the Miraflores locks with this problem in mind. This was all I would see of the canal and it was just some super strong trains pulling huge boats through it. We did not even visit the observation decks. We were also told we would not be able to board a boat there. Shitty. We tried to pretend we did not speak any Spanish and climb up an electrical place next door for a good view but they did not buy it and kicked us out. Then we went to find the yacht club, but we had bus problems again as they played ping pong with us between a square and the main bus station. I believe my shorthand sums it up well enough. 'Fucking bus cunt faces'. Must have been really shitty for me to write that. We abandoned the yacht idea and then apparently I did a lot of writing. Is that so? What the fuck did I do on the sunday. Maybe we wiped out the whole day. Oh well I think i just wiped out most of my time in Panama City in general. At least I am not spending all my holiday waiting for dates with checkout girls like this arsehole Dane in my hostel at the moment. In the evening we had a few quiet ones and planned our escape to South America.
We dicked around a lot in the morning, before deciding to fly to Barranquilla (a town lonely planet describes as a place not worth visiting). The cheapest flight we could get was with an airline called Aires. We then headed to a post office so the others could send stuff back. This seemingly simple task took two hours, because the post office does not have envelopes and requires as many forms to be completed as a Russian border official. Also the place we went to buy envelopes had a security guard who offered Dom a free shoe box for his stuff. Then when we came back down he was gone and we had to go through every level of management before we could finally take the damn box. Of course they said we could never reenter the shop with the shoe box. How terrible. After this mission we went off to the 'best bookstore in Central America' which was crap and the one in Costa Rica is the best I saw. The other guys went to the Bridge of the Americas (which I did not even see) and we did not have enough time for Panama Viejo (We saw it from the taxi to the airport the next day) and I phoned both my sister and my dad for their birthdays and we had a long chat. When I got back to the hostel I went for dinner with an Israeli guy and a German/Englishman. We then joined them, an Italian guy and a hot but bitchy Israeli girl for drinks in an extortionate bar. They told us it was $2.50 a beer than charged us $3.75. Bear in mind we were paying $0.60 in the hostel. I argued with them in Spanish and the head waiter said sorry but the guy had not known the prices. I said sorry thats not my problem and you are only getting $2.50 so they accepted that in the end. Dom had gone out with his Catalan friend from home and she had paid for him to have a swanky night out over the good part of town. He came back around 4am or so but noone could let him in so he climbed in the balcony like Spiderman up a drainpipe and along. Considering Tom had done this on his first visit to Panama City I felt like a fraud for always using the front door. In the morning we picked up a taxi and headed for the airport to pick up our flight. We were worried they would ask for proof of onward travel, but they didn't. What they did ask for was the original credit card used to book the flights. Well they asked Dom. Fuck it. I didn't have mine. It was back in England. I sweated and nervously filled out my form, waiting for the inevitable rejection. Yet they never asked me in the end. Tengo muy suerte and this time I needed it. I did not ask too many questions and we ducked through the airport where a bar of Swiss chocolate was over $10. Ah how I remembered this place from when I was there exactly 2 months before on the way to El Salvador. I had successfully managed to see fuck all of Panama. I had however managed to reach the psyhological mid point of my trip and the geographical one as well (if not quite the time one. That will come in May). We borded our crappy little plane (that was going to stop in three cities like some public bus) and set off on our exodus to Colombia. The plane was a nightmare of rocking, rolling and unstable flying. At one point I thought we were going to try to land on the grass. I tried to sleep. I prefer that method. Either I wake up touched down or I don't wake up. Either way its less stress. When we touched the tarmac in Barranquilla I felt tremendous pity for the other passengers who had to endure two more take offs and landings under this pilot. I hope they made it. Oh well you can see why it was cheap. But fuck it. I was in SOUTH AMERICA. Woohoo. Bout fucking time.
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