Planet Kapow 37 : San Gil to Bogota

THREE SMALL: children on bicycles cling to the rear bumper of a semi-trailer slogging its slow way up a mountain. Another small boy on a hairpin turn holds a handmade flip sign indicating whether it’s safe to pass. Our driver drops him a coin from his window. A drunkard at a bus stop goes to pee off a bank into the river; he overbalances and tumbles down the grassy embankment. Looking out the window, I had never imagined such a shade of green to be possible.

In the morning we find ourselves at Bucaramanga bus station. The drivers are loading the bus with packets of sugar in their thousands, filling up the luggage hold and the rear seats; they enlist Adam and Phil to lend a hand. Once we are all aboard and sitting on the bus, a policeman boards and asks us all to get out. He snatches my bag away and searches it roughly; his partner grabs Erin. The bus station security guard looks on grinning eagerly as if in anticipation. They go through all our things until they find the culprit – Phil’s rolling tobacco.

“It’s just tobacco,” Phil explains.
“Marijuana?” asks the policeman uncertainly.
“No, no, just tobacco.”
The policeman sniffs the pouch hesitantly, then swings on the security guard.
“It’s just tobacco, you fool!” he cries. The security guard skulks off. The policemen submit Phil to a thorough pat-down anyway before they allow us back onto the bus and storm off, muttering to themselves about it having been a waste of time.

The next few days are spent traveling on crumbling highways between the beautiful towns of San Gil, Barichara, Guane and Villa de Leyva through typically mindblowing Colombian countryside. The roads are blocked with with the earthy vomit of landslides and in a lot of places are missing an entire lane, having disintegrated and slid down the slope – sometimes taking an unfortunate truck or bus along for the ride. We bathe under waterfalls one hundred and eighty metres high, swollen and cacophonous: it’s like swimming in a factory. We hike past bellicose geese, gobbling turkeys, peacocks fanning their tails. We wander through Villa de Leyva’s profusion of whitewashed houses, cobblestone streets, orange terracotta roof tiles – an image that should be becoming tiresome by now but just isn’t. We slide gleefully down natural rock slides stretching thirty metres, crashing against the walls. Outside of Villa de Leyva we find ourselves at an ancient Muisca astronomical site, dozens of huge rocks fashioned into penises rising straight and proud from the grass beneath. Precisely how the presence of so many engorged dicks assisted in their astronomical calculations isn’t explained, sadly. And the clouds pass low over the green fields.

The abundance of marine fossils in the area is extraordinary – particularly given that it lies two thousand metres above sea level and several hundred kilometres from where the ocean is now. Giant pliosaurs, trilobites and other creatures are on display everywhere. In Guane the museum contains over ten thousand specimens; the surplus are used as paving stones in the plaza outside. An old woman unlocks the museum for us and guides us through with a schoolteacher’s pointer and a menacing scowl. Thankfully we are spared her wrath as a young Colombian joins the tour; the death stares rain down as his particularly obnoxious black metal ringtone sounds no less than eleven times during the thirty minute tour.

San Gil is billed as the ‘Adventure Capital of Colombia’, but we completely fail to take advantage of it; Dan and Phil are the only ones with sufficient guts to attempt to paraglide but the wind dies and leaves Dan stranded on the clifftop.

But San Gil does introduce us to the wonderful Colombian sport of Tejo.

Under a corrugated iron roof being pounded with rain and on a floor of dull grey concrete, groups of older men are tossing their heavy iron weights some fifteen metres across the room to a pit of grey soggy clay, perhaps a metre square, crested by an Aguila beer logo. Inside every pit are a couple of small pink triangles filled with gunpowder – these are the targets, and when one is hit there is a tremendous blast that lights up the building and leaves the ears ringing.

Finally, finally, somebody has decided to combine lawn bowls with modern warfare.

Even throwing from half the distance of the old men we find it difficult to hit the pit of clay, let alone the explosives. The underarm toss is hard to judge with the weight of the tejo, which at several kilos is quite a dangerous piece of equipment. It’s free to play as long as a case of beer is purchased, and as we drink the throws become more free-form and wild. A British girl who seems to have a lot of trouble aiming narrowly misses Erin’s head and everybody screams. One of my throws rebounds off the back wall and between an American guy’s legs, almost cracking his Achilles’ tendon; he doesn’t even notice.

In the end nobody but Danielle manages to hit the explosive honestly; in a fit of drunken pique we surround the pit of clay and blow up the explosives from a metre away. Our hearing is muffled and ringing all the way into Bogota.

Bogota’s Plaza Bolivar is thronged with pigeons, massed on top of each other, chased by giggling toddlers who fall face-first onto the pavement and jump straight back up and start running again. Vendors sell birdseed and some children have dozens of the filthy birds clawing over them, clinging to their arms and shoulders, sitting in their hair. A llama is led by an old woman offering it for photographs; a mime does whatever it is mimes do.

Somehow, despite the pigeon infestation and the beggars who crowd us motioning from hand to mouth and the crazy streets and the woman who pesters us up and down the streets insisting we buy rice for her dog – somehow, Bogota retains both charm and class. A group of punks with expensive haircuts stand and smoke outside the cinema. Groups of businessmen talk on mobile phones attached by keychains to the red vest of an old woman advertising cheap calls. From the steep hill of Monserrat the city stretches away forever in a sea of reddish grey. A helicopter far below looks like a little flickering circle. Behind us, a frumpy middle-aged couple in their Sunday best make out passionately on the stairs outside the church.

The charm and the class both dissipate somewhat as one heads into the La Candelaria district, awash with cheap coke; it doesn’t seem to affect the shiftless mobs of well-dressed Colombian kids smoking outside bars and sitting on stairs with slices of pizza. But the five-dollars-a-gram temptation transforms the backpacker community into a pack of slavering, slobbering beasts acting solely off animal instinct and gross overconfidence. A boy meets a girl; five minutes later they’re dry-humping in the gutter. A group who can’t find a bathroom snort off the palms of their hands in the middle of the street. Rambling stories, sniffling noses and twitching faces proliferate; “What you’ve gotta do, you’ll see buses with folding doors,” says one man helpfully, giving us directions to a corner store, “and when you see those, if you’re in the right place, where the buses with the folding doors go past, then, behind, if you’re standing on the other side of the road, there will be a brick building, made of brick…”

A pair of coked-up twenty-year olds stumble into Phil’s dorm at 4am and make their way to the bed above his. There follows an hour of attempted lovemaking involving five failed cracks at the prize, much passive-aggressive abuse (from the girl), many babbled apologies (from the guy), the once-in-a-lifetime sound of a condom ricocheting across a crowded dorm, and both participants falling out of the bunk and onto the floor. It also involves this immortal dialogue – as recounted by Adam the following morning:

She: What’s goin’ on? You gonna come or what?
He: Ah, sorry, must be all the blow.
She: Fuck… Fuck. Ah, don’t worry, it’s okay.
He: But I want to make you come.
She: Nah. You won’t be able to.
He: Sorry.
She: Yeah, well. Fuck. It’s okay.

Phil escapes from the buckling bed to find Adam and Dan already roused; together they go outside for a cigarette, watching the sun come up over the city and chatting softly to the tired-eyed girls stumbling back to their dorms. When they go back in, there’s another bed thrashing and undulating. They return to bed, pull the blankets up over their heads and try to sleep, the sounds of brutish humping vibrating through the bunks and out into the night.

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Trip Details: From Bucaramanga to San Gil is a two and a half hour journey costing 18,000 pesos. While there we stayed at Macondo; the owner, Shaun, is very friendly and can offer help with getting to the waterfall (Cascada de Juan Curi) which costs 3,000 to enter. Dorms at Macondo go for 15,000. Getting to Barichara takes 45 minutes and costs a little over 3,000 pesos; it’s a stunning two hour hike to Guane from there. Minivans on from San Gil to Villa de Leyva went for 18,000, though you’ll probably have to bargain hard. 14,000 and four hours will see you safely into Bogota from there. In Bogota we stayed at the Cranky Croc, which has very nice staff but not a whole lot more going for it.

Songs on this video include Los 50 de Joselito’s “Montanerisimo” and Los Warahuaco’s “La Tuna”, both from the Putumayo Presents… Colombia compilation, and the charmingly titled “Galacticock” by Diva Gash. And if you’d like to read Mr Adam Teale’s firsthand account of the loved-up backpackers in Bogota, click here.

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