THE WILD: backcountry of Colombia is where the land really comes to life, flooding the senses with shades of green I hadn’t thought possible. In the dusty streets of Bosconia we are physically grabbed by a couple of men and dragged bodily toward a minivan bound for Mompox. We drive for hours through dry countryside until, as the sun is beginning to set, we hit the river. The van rolls onto a ‘car ferry’ – actually three longboats lashed together with a huge steel plate on top – and the whine of a single longboat motor propels us across the river. The clouds are dramatic and frozen, like a Renaissance painting. The red light of the sinking sun reflects off the water.
Across the river the land becomes flooded. A string of houses sit up to their windowsills in water, islands without land access. The lights are still on inside. It’s dark when we roll up to the riverfront in Mompox. Large frogs hop through the mud puddles of the street, and the road is littered with the carcasses of the slow or hesitant. Iguanas are everywhere; they run through our bathroom, across the streets, fall out of trees onto the tables of the cafe outside. Lightning flashes in great sheets in the distance, soundless and magnificent.
We spend the night on the rooftop talking to a young editor from New York. A perfect illustration of the surrealism of travel: she gave up her profitable job and her Williamsburg apartment and now supports herself working for a Colombian internet company whose sole raison d’être is to write gushing love letters to women on internet dating sites on behalf of rich twits who don’t have the time to do it themselves.
In the morning Adam, Erin and I are trailed up the street by a large, slobbering Rottweiler. It follows us through the main square, where a donkey stands rigidly out the front of the cathedral, past longboats being loaded with motorbikes, up into a shoe store and finally into the riverside cafe where we have breakfast. The old lady who runs the restaurant and her two granddaughters try to run the dog off, but it just slobbers away in a friendly manner and then rejoins us.
The two little girls – home from school because rain during the night wiped out the power – lure the dog toward the river and encourage him to jump in, which he does with a splash. But the river is swollen, almost breaking its banks, and very fast – the dog tries helplessly to pull itself out but cannot; its forepaws slap the water impotently and it stares up at us stupidly.
“Abuela, the dog doesn’t know how to swim,” calls the older girl to her grandmother nervously.
“He’ll work it out, cariño,” calls the grandmother without emerging from the house.
At this point the dog is having difficulty keeping its head above water. It’s clearly drowning and Adam and Erin reluctantly reach down into the river and pull the whole huge soaking mess out of the water. By way of thanks, the dog immediately shakes several gallons of water onto Adam’s shirt and pants and trots off.
The day is hot and humid and the entire town is without power until nightfall. Erin and I head out to the cemetery, leaving a trail of sweat on the footpath. It’s a beautiful spot of large white tombstones and walls of graves, some stacked six high, where people unable to afford a burial plot are buried. Many of them are unable to even afford a plaque – the name spelt out in black paint or etched with a knife into the concrete itself.
We eat dinner in the plaza outside the Santo Domingo church again; we’re approached by a prostitute with Down’s Syndrome who touches our shoulders, giggling in attempted flirtatiousness. Another old woman in a ratty dress and bare feet stands near the statue in the middle of the plaza and, as we watch, urinates onto the pavement, just standing there pretending nothing is happening, the hot yellow piss splattering onto her feet.
Next morning we crowd the five of us into a taxi out over the dirt roads that run alongside the river. After nearly an hour we come across a bridge that has been washed out. A makeshift replacement has been formed out of dirt and sandbags but for reasons unknown there is a huge pile of dirt in the middle of it, blocking traffic. At our end of the bridge a large Hitachi excavator has tumbled into the river and sits drowned with its huge shovel reaching up out of the water and clinging to the shore as if to life itself. A couple of young soldiers sit around it clutching machine guns; we chat to them idly while we wait for a solution to present itself. An arepa stand has set up at the base of the bridge, offering hot food to waiting motorists. Fish jump from the water in great schools; the shore is littered with those who jumped too forcefully.
By nightfall we are across the river and on a bus. We wake among the lit-up hills of Medellín, streetlights stretching for miles in the 4am gloom, the gentle strains of tango coming gently over the radio.
Medellín is a huge, bustling city of overcrowded streets that sing with energy, a city by turns invigorating and exhausting. The obese bronze sculptures of artist and favourite son Fernando Botero litter the plazas and galleries; the Zona Rosa is full of expensively-dressed Colombianas and skinny coke peddlers. A man in the middle of a plaza is taking bets on his guinea pig; he has a series of bowls set up in a semi-circle, each with a hole cut out; passersby place bets on which bowl the guinea pig will run into. Most of the time the guinea pig simply runs off through peoples’ legs into the garden. A toothless woman catches my eye and winks at me. “Hey, you!” she shouts in English, followed by a stream of wolf-whistles. I walk away at a quick stride but she follows, swearing in Spanish and whistling and yelling, “I love you tomorrow!”. Across the road is a huge sculpture of an overturned boat, the mass of humanity inside trying to fight their way to the top, where angels are plucking children away to safety.
At night we join an Englishman, Andrew, and head out to the tacky discos of the Zona Rosa. Andrew is a nice guy, very intelligent, but the word used to describe him in all conversations in the days following is ‘sketchy’. He stops to buy a couple of grams of coke from a sniffling teenager and when we sit in a park for a chill, Andrew is snorting lines off of a make-up kit. A young couple make out against a railing. A policeman rides by on a motorbike; somebody thinks they can hear him circling back around. Andrew snaps the makeup kit closed and we half bolt down the street before realizing it is a false alarm. When he reopen the kit, all the coke has soaked into the makeup pad. He snorts it off there anyway. In the plaza, a man is smashing bottles on the ground and then walking on them in bare feet, laying down on them, for the change of passersby.
Medellín’s metro system includes two lines traversed by cable car; both were paid for by Pablo Escobar. We head to the line closest to the city centre, sharing our cabin with a young girl in braces who clutches her schoolbooks and shyly asks us questions. Below us, Medellín explodes in red-tiled roofs, kids playing games of football on the basketball courts, people yelling through megaphones. From the top of the hill the view of the massive city laid out before us, creeping up the valley walls, is sensational.
On the other side of the hill it is a different story, however – a slum that clings precariously to the hillside, wooden shacks with sheets of corrugated iron posing as roofs, held down with large rocks. The boulders in the river at the bottom of the hill are crudely painted and scratched with the names of biblical verses.
That evening we go out to Parque Periodista – a complete reversal of what we’d seen the night before in Zona Rosa. There, the bars had been expensive, tacky and empty. In Periodista the bars are cheap and grungy and overflowing; the park is crowded with groups of young men clutching beers to their chests. The atmosphere is crackling with excitement, sleaze and even a little danger; it has the ambience of a crowded biker bar.
We are soon joined by a man named Luis, who speaks to us in a loud, near-fluent English. He says that he is an astronomer and we ask him several questions on the subject which he seems unable to answer; it is only when we see his university ID card that we realize he was saying “gastronomy”, not “astronomy”, and we drop our questions of supernovas and star systems. Luis bounces on the balls of his feet while talking and dominates conversation – he presses all of our “conman” buttons and all of us hold him at arm’s length throughout the night, though in the end he turns out to be no more or less than an extremely friendly guy with a propensity to chat. When he asks to accompany us from the park to a bar we are all less than enthusiastic but Adam answers in a dull monotone: “Yes, sure, that would be fine.”
We find a cheap bar with outdoor tables on a corner. Two older gentlemen behind us offer me a shot of aguardiente and then, in an act of sweeping generosity, buy us an entire carton. A chubby-faced journalist, happening by, sits down and cheerfully buys us another bottle of aguardiente. He then tries to compliment Danielle by telling her she looks like “a little monkey with glasses” and then promptly falls asleep at the table. A young, slightly dumb girl joins us, a rectangle cut out of her top to expose her burgeoning cleavage; then her brother (“This man’s accents is very annoying in Spanish,” Luis confides to us in English. “All Colombians find that accent very annoying. But I am very glad he cannot understand what I am saying.”); then her much older sister, who talks Adam’s ear off with a litany of complaints and apologies. All three are from Buenaventura on the Pacific coast and have come into Medellin to find work.
It’s a raucous night; we feel as if we’re introduced to half of Medellín and most of its aguardiente. It’s with aching heads the following morning that we board the bus to Guacate. On the bus – lo and behold! – an old lady cackles and passes us more aguardiente. She is clearly very funny – the entire bus is laughing at her every word about us – but her accent is too thick for us to hear anything except “You’re not listening to me!”, “You should study more Spanish!” and “Here, drink this!”. The countryside is of such a lush, impenetrable green that it stuns the mind into silence. Or perhaps it’s the alcohol.
We exit the bus at Piedra de Peñol, walking up the steep hill to the granite monolith, an immense black egg staring out over the extraordinary landscape of lakes and islands.
The rock has a series of stairs constructed of cheap concrete zig-zagging up a cleft in the otherwise smooth surface. The climb is steep and hot and we are forced to take frequent breaks. At the top, sweating and cursing, we’re treated again to one of the oddest national characteristics of Colombians – their hobby of collecting photos with foreigners. Everywhere we travel, from Cartagena to Mompox to Medellin to beyond, Colombians of every age approach nervously, asking if they can pose in photos with us. It’s a mystifying habit but we wipe the sweat from our brows and smile toothily at the call of “One, two, three… whiskey!” as if we are celebrities.
The landscape below is too beautiful to take in. Pathetically, the only comparison we can come up with is Super Mario Land. Far below, on the water, the white specks of swans floating on the lakes.
It is another beautiful day, and our last in Medellín, as we jump a crowded train to the edge of the city. On the bus toward Barbosa a man is drinking rum from the bottle. He swats his wife in the face with a rolled-up newspaper every time he wants her attention.
The water park is our destination, a place of water slides and bored looking families in inner tubes and mobs of little girls who follow us curiously, grilling Erin for gossip. There are large black buzzards bouncing about on the grass looking for scraps. A security guard with a shotgun strapped to his back strolls the perimeter of the park, looking sleepy. And we tumble and slide down the sloshing slides, Erin screaming and Phil always somehow ending upside-down on his face. We could be having this day anywhere in the world but we’re here, Medellín, land of drug kingpins and plastic surgeons, sprinting back up the long, spiraling concrete ramp to the top of the slides like children, over and over, smiling with the rush of blood and the sun on our backs.
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Trip Details: Our trip from Santa Marta to Bosconia cost about 18,000 pesos; the minibus from Bosconia to Mompox will take some negotiating. We’re informed by the staff of the Casa Amarilla in Mompox that the fare should be between 35,000-40,000; we were asked for 70,000 and eventually worked it down to 50,000. La Casa Amarilla comes highly recommended – excellent staff and just one of the most beautiful hostels in which we’ve stayed. Dorms go for 15,000 pesos. Getting out of Mompox takes some doing. Take a taxi north to Bodega for 7,000 pesos, then a boat to Magangüe for 6,000. From Magangüe to Medellin you’re looking at a fare of about 100,000 and a twelve hour ride. In Medellin we stayed at the Black Sheep Hostel; quite a handy place to meet other travellers. Beds go from 19,000 pesos. Piedra de Peñol costs 5,000 to enter; the bus out there is 10,000. The water park is called El Parque Metropolitano de las Aguas; it’s 23km north of Medellin on the road toward Barbosa and costs 8,000.
Music on this video is made up of Joe Arroyo’s “Yamulemao” and “Oye Manita” by Toto La Momposina, both taken from the Putomayo Presents: Colombia compilation.
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Within the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle dynamics of the Planet Kapow team, Lachlan considers himself the Donatello - nerdy, condescending, vaguely wimpy and widely disliked by children. He also looks good in purple.
Lachlan can be contacted at lachieprior@gmail.com 