MY EARS: pop furiously all night, the right ear sounding like a thousand champagne bottles corked in quick succession, as the bus ducks and weaves dangerously along the narrow mountain passes on its way south from Bogota. In the dawn light we pass muddy rivers, swollen and engorged and furious.
And Colombia unfurls herself, a huge, soft quilt of sumptuous green hillsides rolling to the horizon. We find ourselves a spot on the map where the air is cool and clear – Salento. A rustic hostel in the midst of vast paddocks where we can help weed the vegetable garden, build the pizza oven, play with the dogs.
We pause: we breathe.
River trout fills the menus of the restaurants in the main plaza of town; handicraft kitsch clogs the stores. Salento seems the most perfectly harmless place on earth. Which makes it all the more astounding when on our third night there Dan and Phil come running up to us at dusk, wild-eyed and exhilarated, to report that they have just been held up by a skinny, trembling man with a flick knife on the dirt road outside town.
“That’s not a knife,” said Phil slowly, looking the man directly in the eye, “This is a -” – and then they both sprinted past the confused would-be mugger without further harm.
It’s a wake-up call for us. Since coming to Colombia we’d become sloppy, overconfident – despite its reputation Colombia really does feel like one of the safest countries in Latin America. After much discussion we decide it’s time to re-adopt the caution that had seen us through the dodgiest cities so far – Managua, San Salvador, Guatemala City. Our gazes become steely-eyed; our biceps ripple with readiness; our minds are alert to every possibility.
This lasts about three hours.
By the next day we’ve put it behind us and headed out in two separate directions – Dan and Phil to a horseback ride through the surrounding countryside and the remaining three on the back of a jeep to the Cocora valley for a day of hiking which passes by in a succession of dreamlike images strung together by the swampy, waterlogged track through which we slog all day. Hummingbirds dart past, thrumming the air – a dozen of them at least, swooping and hovering, holding their wings upwards and still like insects when they land. A cluster of wax palms, sixty metres high, together on a hillside obscured by cloud. An armadillo, shuffling along beside us with wheezing breath.
The place has such a hypnotizing effect on Erin that she decides to stay awhile, volunteering at the hostel while the rest of us move on, first to the hot springs of Santa Rosa – “Call me George,” says the owner of the hostel in strained English, “I like to practice English but I speak it not very fine.” – and then to the bars of Manizales, where a Colombian girl with braces cheerfully demonstrates to Adam the ‘Colombian accordion’, in which the breasts are squeezed together rhythmically, resulting in a sound not unlike heavy breathing from the table of older gentlemen behind us. Adam watches in stunned silence.
And then it’s onward to Cali, the highway clogged with cars full of young men hanging out the window, wielding the green flag of the city’s soccer team. The pedestrian overpasses are crowded with motorbikes using them to change direction. We get into the city tired and cranky; our cab driver takes us to the wrong address, then tries to charge us double the price for his mistake.
“I wish I knew the Spanish for ‘fucking asshole’,” says Phil despondently.
Cali is a working-class city famous for salsa; its many bars vibrate with the energy of hips being gyrated at dangerous angles. Despite several lessons in Mexico and Cuba, none of the team could be mistaken for a salsa expert, and Adam and I in particular more closely resemble broomsticks suffering convulsions than anything remotely rhythmic or sexy.
So it’s time once again to hit the classroom for some lessons. We find some offered by our hostel which go surprisingly well until a huge group of drunken Irish backpackers decide to join the festivities. They’re obnoxious and inebriated and out of control but funny – when the salsa teacher taps out the salsa beat (“123-567…123-567”), they use it as a cue to launch into a group singalong of “We Will Rock You”. But the room is crowded and ridiculously sweaty, the drunker Irish lads can’t get the steps and keep stepping on toes (“I can’t go that way!” one shouts helplessly as the whole room shuffles forward, leaving him stranded at the back of the classroom, “I’m going backward! Help me! Somebody!”), and new people come in and not only introduce themselves but try to establish their genealogical link to every other person in the room. It quickly devolves into an utter shambles.
We take the mature alternative, and spend our time in Cali on rollercoasters and/or waterslides.
Next stop: Popayan – a beautiful settlement of whitewashed buildings but it, like Guatemala’s Antigua, carries with it a certain coldness, a certain blandness, the rhapsodic effect of these colonial towns fading with familiarity. Another plaza? Another cathedral?
- We feign enthusiasm and head for the hot springs, square concrete pools populated by ancient women, wrinkled and soggy. The temperature of the water is controlled by clogging the plastic PVC pipes of scaldingly hot water with ragged plastic shopping bags. A fifty-three metre handmade concrete waterslide leaves us grazed in sensitive areas. We return to town via goat track through hills bleeding green, a series of barking dogs beginning what will be an ongoing phobia for Adam and Erin.
And here we reach the end of our winding road through Colombia, in the ancient settlement of San Agustin, where we are to settle for two weeks to volunteer on an organic farm, the longest stop of this entire southbound odyssey. But before the farm, the ruins: we wander out of town along the highway, past the public swimming pool which more closely resembles a post-apocalyptic holiday resort. Along the way a German Shepherd growls menacingly from outside a yoga school called “The Light Society of Intergalactic Consciousness” or something equally preposterous.
The ruins – large stones carved into cartoonish fanged monstrosities – aren’t in the same league as others we’ve passed but they’re certainly different, more closely resembling the villains from an episode of Powerpuff Girls than the carvings of Copan or Palenque. We wander from statue to statue, taking in the clean forest air, the crisp sunshine.
When we go to leave, we realize that we’ve lost Adam. I pace back and forth, waiting for him to emerge; when he fails to materialize I dive back into the forest, sprinting along the track we’ve just walked. And here is Colombia in miniature as I run – groups of students cheering me on, old men leaning on canes touching my arm as I hurtle past. A mustachioed father grabs me by the shirt and hauls me in with surprising force to a couple of family photos with his sons. I stand and grin with their arms about me, and then I dart off once more, only to be pulled up again by an upper-class middle-aged woman in expensive sunglasses who implores her daughter to take another photo of her with her arms about me. And I’m off again, until two young guys grab both my arms as I try to weave through a scrum of students.
“Here,” one of them says, handing me a small glass of rum. “Drink this.”
I swallow it down, and nod at them. “It’s good.”
They pour me another. I look around at these smiling faces as I lift the glass to my lips. Hands are patting me on the back; a thousand questions are launched at me. Such wonderful people. Such an outpouring of kindness. But even after all these months, I still don’t understand this. After all this time, I still don’t get it.
“I’ve really got to go,” I say stupidly. “I’m looking for a friend.”
-
Trip Details: In Salento we stayed at La Serrana Eco Farm and Hostel which we absolutely adored – it comes with our highest recommendation. Beautiful location, great atmosphere, excellent meals and an endless roster of activities. Dorms are 20,000 pesos. To get to the Cocora Valley we caught a Jeep from the main square in Salento for 3,000 pesos each – it took about an hour each way. From Salento we caught a 90-minute bus back to Pereira for 5,000 pesos – from here it was a 2,000 peso, forty minute ride on to the Santa Rosa hot springs. From Pereira on to Manizales took an hour and cost 5,000 pesos. In Manizales we stayed at Mountain House, which we found to be a pleasant place to stay, if slightly overpriced at 20,000 per dorm. Manizales to Cali cost 12,000 pesos and took six hours; in Cali we stayed at Iguana, which had a good atmosphere, and cost 18,000 pesos each. Cali to Popayan was three hours and 18,000 pesos; Popayan to San Agustin seemed to take forever but was actually only five hours, and set us back 20,000 peso each.
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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 
Beautiful part of the world.Thanks for sharing. That rail ride at the fun park looks dangerous, keep me away from it!