Planet Kapow 35 : Cartagena to Taganga

WE FIND: ourselves in Turbo with Sebastian and Pixie, negotiating with a couple of touts in front of a bus armoured with bull bars and heavy-duty off-road tyres; it is a rough road ahead. The day is hot and our packs are heavy and the touts are shouting; cars are buzzing past, honking their horns and kicking up plumes of choking dust. Eventually we agree to the price, but Pixie is not happy – “I have one rule over here,” she says to Sebastian, “and that is never to buy anything when I’m being pressured,” but she gets in nonetheless. The seats are coated in dust. As we pull around the corner a large, sad-faced drunken man jumps into the stairwell clutching a half-empty bottle of aguardiente, and has to be physically wrestled from the bus by the conductor. Outside, a horse attached to a cart has its head deep inside a wooden bucket.

A couple of hours on an unforgiving dirt road past grand Spanish haciendas leads us to a semi-collapsed bridge where we are forced to change buses. A great crowd of people pushes by carrying produce. A young guy in a smart white shirt and aviator sunglasses walks past with an enormous basket of green plantains balanced atop his head. Everywhere the ground is littered with exploded plantains. The bridge is still crossable on foot; a recent storm has washed away the far bank and the bridge now tilts at an unnatural angle. Next to it, the tattered remains of a pedestrian suspension bridge sway in the breeze.

It is three hours further to Monteria; outside the city a man boards the bus and offers to take us the remaining distance to Cartagena. We agree while the bus driver circles the city, unable to enter the terminal because of a fatal motorbike accident just outside it that has drawn hundreds of onlookers, jostling for the best view. On our final pass of the terminal, the paramedics are lifting the corpse into the ambulance, wrapped in a white bodybag. The driver gives up and heads back into town.

We board the minivan but this new driver wants to go to the terminal for some reason. Still blocked by the crowd, he turns down the highway on the wrong side of the road, trying for the rear entrance. An oncoming semi-trailer blasts its horn at us and swerves away at the last second with such a microscopic distance between us that the two people on the passenger side actually fling themselves from the van and onto the traffic island.

We all pass out in the van, Adam slouching in a shirtless heap next to me. The blinding lights of semi-trailers race across our faces. At one in the morning a cow on the side of the road steps in front of the van. There is the squeal of tyres, a rush of gravity, the sound of something breaking…

Everyone is suddenly awake.

“What was that?” gasps Danielle.
“Was that a person? I think it was a person,” says Adam.
“A cow,” I croak through a dry throat, “It was a cow.”

The cow has disappeared into the bush and the driver inspects the damage. We have lost our front indicator and side mirror. Semi-trailers continue to roar past at short intervals.

We arrive in Cartagena at two in the morning. Pixie and Sebastian split off to a different hostel. The man who takes down our names in the guestbook has lost his left hand; he uses the stump to hold down the page while he writes.

We wake to a steaming sun, sweating with our backpacks on as we trawl the streets for a hostel that has been recommended to us. It turns out to be a dilapidated three-story terrace; our room has large holes in the ceiling, no door on the bathroom and a toilet that doesn’t flush. The shower has no tap; it is controlled by means of a rope, and the drain clogs and forms a stinking cesspool within two days. There are four huge dogs at the hostel that drag rubbish out of the bin and onto the kitchen floor. They leave the rooftop as a minefield of turds.

Outside of the hostel, Cartagena is a masterpiece of colonial Spanish architecture, webbed with wonderful, labyrinthine alleys, littered with leafy plazas. Hawkers everywhere sell chewing gum and fake Cuban cigars; tour groups mill hopelessly about the parks and plazas. The entire city somehow manufactures the ambience of a sunny Sunday afternoon in the park, permeated by the burble of families talking and laughing. It has a dizzying effect – on more than one occasion we even find ourselves watching a mime. And liking it.

But forty-odd hours of travel in cramped longboats and cow-killing minivans takes its toll on the body. My back is twisted and useless for days; I wander the streets crooked and grimacing like Quasimodo. We’re all sick, or injured, or simply exhausted, and between this and the sticky, sweltering heat, we allow Cartagena to slip away from us, floating away beyond the tree line, as we sit and watch it from afar.

Easter arrives, and with it my birthday. The streets are empty and the stores closed; in the blast-furnace heat we catch a bus out east to Volcan Totuma. The volcano – barely worthy of the name – forms a lumpy little anthill at the near end. Only fifteen metres high, it has a line of people stretching down it, caked in dry mud, their bodies ashen and grey.

We leave our packs at the bottom, change into our swimmers in the little wooden toilet block. As we scale the stairs of the volcano, little pieces of cool mud squish under our fingers on the handrail. The texture is unpleasant, like baby shit.

At the top is a square mud pit inside the crater, a riotous orgy of slimy Colombian bodies rising from the muck. The pit is filled to bursting point. A fat man is laying face up in the grey-brown sludge at the bottom of the ladder, laughing uproariously at the feeling on his skin, but refusing to get out of the way for us. Eventually his friend grabs him by the ankle and drags him away, the fat man laughing louder. We sink our feet in – it feels disgusting, but when our bodies sink in entirely we are amazed by the buoyancy; our feet do not touch the ground but even when we stand perfectly still we do not sink. We are suspended perfectly with our shoulders above the mud. It presses in on us like a tight blanket and it is terrifically difficult to move about the crater without grabbing at other people for support.

We cake the mud over our faces and through our hair. Young teenagers nearby wrestle each other until the grappling pair both plunge face-first into the ooze. A woman holds a baby whose face is caked in mud, suffering in stoic silence. We start to get bits of mud in our eyes and our teeth are stained grey. Other peoples’ limbs scrape against us under the blanket of mud, like a monster in a horror film.

Adam decides to put his entire head under, a feat that can only be achieved by having Danielle and I push down on his shoulders with all our weight. He comes back a creature of the swamp, which we find hilarious until he realizes he can’t open his eyes and his ears are blocked with mud. He panics and blindly gropes for his way out of the pit. The girls and I continue to wallow in the mud, floating on our backs and wondering whether the fact of having several dozen sweaty people in the pit at any one time outweighs the health benefits of the mud.

We descend the volcano to wash ourselves in the lake, which is difficult as the lake is already full of the silt washed off of other people, the water grey and cloudy. A boy delivers our flip-flops to the lakeshore and then hounds us for a tip most of the way back to the highway.

The buses north through Barranquilla are small, air-conditioned blanknesses, delivering us to Santa Marta, where we head directly to the beach under the shadow of the port and the mammoth cargo ship docked within. The beach is small, dirty and packed with small boys. Two hit each other with a long piece of bamboo, laughing and babbling incoherently.

Santa Marta may be the oldest town in South America but one would never guess it. In general it is a bland port city with a wide malecon sprinkled with statues whose only real highlight is a ceviche stand off the main drag serving cups of cold prawns in a delicious creamy pink sauce. Walking down what we think is our street, past saddled mules along the footpath, we chat and amble thoughtlessly, and when we look up we are in a ghetto, surrounded by the glazed zombie eyes of crackheads asking for spare change, cigarettes. There are a couple of dozen, standing in a rough semicircle, blocking our path, motionless and staring. It’s a dead end. Somebody is laughing at us. We backtrack and turn down a sidestreet. “Run!” calls a toothless woman sarcastically. “Go on, run!”. A small child follows us down the street in a dirty, ragged white jumper several sizes too big for him, offering us drugs.

We try one of Colombia’s famed beaches, Rodadero, but it’s covered with pigeons, cooing and pecking at cigarette butts. The water is clean and refreshing, though first a jellyfish and then a small turd float by. We rent a tent and sit in deckchairs. A man walks down the sand dressed as an eagle. A woman with deformed feet folded beneath her offers us massages. A pair of fat, balding, fifty-year old men separately make ugly sandcastles on the shore by languidly tossing handfuls of sand on top of each other.

On the way back to Santa Marta our bus pulls up next to an open bus with a children’s party on board. All the kids are singing, a little girls in a pink dress dances enthusiastically. At the front of the bus sit eight soldiers with machine guns across their laps.

The next morning is insufferably hot and humid and we decide after far too much talking to make our escape to the mountains for the day. We walk thirteen blocks to the markets, through meat stalls smelling rancid. Danielle, already sick, almost vomits. There are no buses to Minca, just a man with a beat-up, rusted sedan offering us a lift for 5,000 pesos each. We take a taxi instead and as we drive off the man with the sedan is organizing a group of men to push-start his car.

We pass out of the city through trainyards piled with trash, up onto rough mountain roads where the air blowing into the crawling cab becomes mercifully cooler. Everything is draped in cloud. At the steel-plated bridge into the centre of Minca we wait for a heavily laden donkey to cross, pulled by an elderly lady. We begin our walk up the mountain, unsure if we are headed in the right direction, invisible birds calling from the trees. A man walks past, singing a merry tune as he swings his machete in slow circles.

We come to a wooden bridge over a gushing river stretching from one waterfall to the next, collecting into large swimming holes. The water in the holes is murky and brown from the rains. A large Colombian family swings into the river on a ratty, torn rope, splashing each other and screaming. The water is refreshing, then brisk, then numbing, then bone-chilling. As we stand to leave the prettiest of the girls asks me to take pictures of her posing in her bikini; I reluctantly oblige.

As night falls we catch a cab to Taganga, a few miles further north, a tourist town of quiet bars surrounded by the lapping of gentle waves along the shore.

We have a beer on the beach and a shirtless, drunken man approaches with a beat-up guitar and a harmonica in his mouth. He plays some songs for us, poorly but energetically, tossing the guitar in the air and diving to his knees. He asks for tips and Adam hands him some coins – “Is that it?” he asks incredulously. Adam nods and he tosses the coins back. “Not enough,” he hisses, and stomps away.

The next day Adam and Dan leave to pick our friend Phil up from the airport. They arrive back after dusk; Phil is bright-eyed and smiling, excitement pushing through the haze of exhaustion from twenty straight hours of travel. We head to the beachfront, eat hot dogs and salchipapas from a stand and then take some beers and aguardiente down to the sand. In the playground, some kids carry a puppy by its front legs to the top of a slide and lob it down to the bottom. We are all anxious for gossip from Sydney, and Phil indulges us while downing harsh, anise-flavoured shots of the aguardiente. After a while we all hit the dancefloors in town and perform our traditional dance – one performed solely to illustrate the fact that we can’t dance. The laser lights occasionally escape the dancefloor and illuminate a tree or pedestrian further down the street.

We’re excited to be five. Excited to have Phil here. The night builds in energy; we return to the hostel and play music offensively loud and dance like twits up and down the stairs and chatter excitedly, hanging out the window over the coiled razor wire. When we fall into bed it’s to the crowing of cocks in the hills. The grey light of dawn is rising. Colombia is coming to life.

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Trip Details: Information for the Turbo-Cartagena trip can be found in the last episode. We stayed at Las Piratas in Cartagena, which wasn’t terribly nice but at 10,000 pesos was one of the cheapest places in all of Colombia, and certainly the cheapest in Cartagena. Volcan Totumo is can be reached by catching a bus toward Galerazamba and disembarking at the little rest stop of Lomita de Arena. From there, it’s a half hour walk. It costs 5,000 to bathe. From Cartagena to Barranquilla cost 14,000 and took two and a half hours; it’s then 8,000 and two more hours to Santa Marta. In Santa Marta we stayed at Hotel Miramar for 12,000. Comfortable enough. Getting to Minca in a taxi costs around 35,000 pesos; Taganga is 7,000. In Taganga the hostel was a new one next to the police station – from memory it was called The Owl or something similar and cost about 14,000. It was one of the nicest dormitories in which we’ve stayed and comes highly recommended.

Music on this video comes courtesy of Sonora Dinamita, with “El Ciclyn”, a track so awesome we had to use it twice, and Choc Quib Town, with the beach-ready “Somos Pacifico”.

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