THE MACHETE: floats through the air above me, spinning slowly, the rusty blade catching the sunlight. I slowly reach out my hand, close my eyes. The hilt lands in my palm with a gentle thwack.
Behind me, Danielle is throwing herself into a patch of undergrowth, her machete flying, to see how much destruction she can wreak in ten seconds. Erin is seeing how far she can drive her machete into a fence post. Phil is crouched on the ground, rocking back and forth.
“I don’t want to be here,” he groans. “I don’t want to be here.”
The pineapple plants we have been sent to weed remain untouched. Adam’s hands are covered in painful blisters; my back, shoulders and face in mosquito bites. What sort of sadistic breed of mosquito goes for the face?
We are tired, we are miserable, we are bored, we are sore. How did it come to this? Why are we here?
We’re still in San Agustin, in the far south of Colombia, on an organic farm run by the Viracocha Foundation. Ever since the initial planning stages of this trip, we’d been determined to do some organic farming at some point. It was, I suppose, a plan to assuage the guilt we (mistakenly) expected to feel after quitting our jobs and living our lives on extended vacation. Our first attempt had been in Chihuahua, Mexico – an attempt that didn’t quite go to plan, ending as it did with the fiasco of Adam and I hiking forty-two kilometres over twenty-four hours without food or water. That failure only made us more keen, and finally, here in San Agustin, we have our chance.
Having arrived in town, we shoulder our backpacks and walk up a dirt road that winds over a hill, past a school and an army base. Outside the base a group of soldiers are working lazily with shovels to build a gutter for the road. They all have machine guns strapped to their backs. There is a civilian woman working for them; upon seeing us she leaps up and tries to pressgang us into service. We back away, refusing politely, and continue walking.
We meet our contacts, Isabel and Fernando, a pair of hippies with frazzled hair and bloodshot eyes and loose patchwork pants of many colours. This will be the only time we meet them, in fact – they’re subsequently accused of stealing volunteers’ shoes and cameras and leave in shame. They guide us to our house for the first week – “La Casa de Jhonny” – where we must stay while renovations on the main house are completed. It’s a shack; the rooms are tiny and dark; our light has no switch and is only turned on or off by jiggling the cable until it flickers. On the landing is a patch of concrete that sinks underfoot, which we try to avoid for the length of our stay. There is no door on the toilet, just a loose plastic curtain. On the landing is a large tree root in the shape of a dog, topped with a real, stuffed dogs head that has been around so long that it has worn away to a blank, creepy greyish-white. But from the landing there is a sweeping view across the valley, taking in waterfalls, plains, forests and farmhouses.
We embark on a farcical odyssey about town in search of gumboots big enough for Adam’s enormous feet, and then it’s time for lunch. The Viracocha Foundation is a farm that grows organic fruit and vegetables to supply to schoolchildren in the region for their lunches. It’s an admirable pursuit, and the food is truly delicious. But when we’re all asked to hold hands and give thanks for something in our lives, nervous glances are quickly exchanged between us.
We hadn’t even started working yet.
On the first day I’m handed a shovel and put to work alongside a young Colombian guy named Camilo, tilling soil that previously grew coffee. The work is hard and sweaty, but satisfying. After an hour we’re called away by Carlos, the supervisor. Camilo tries to chat with me in Spanish as we’re walking out but I find his accent all but impenetrable; I nod and shrug and “¿Que?” and “Mmm” to get myself through it. Outside the gates of the farm, though, he turns to me and says, “You like marijuana?”
“¿Que?” I say, nodding blankly.
He pulls out a small wooden pipe and presses a thumb of weed into it.
“Helps you work harder,” he says.
“Mmm,” I say, shrugging my shoulders.
We walk down the road toward town with shovels slung loosely over shoulders but find nobody working there, so we sit, stare at the clouds and try to avoid talking to each other. At length somebody does turn up – the slightly intense woman from the day before who tried to make us work on the road.
She makes us work on the road.
In later days we will find out that her name is Clemencia, but everyone calls her Dementia; she has a reputation for being a nutball. We are set to dig a gutter for the road in the hot sun (“The road is for everyone!” she declares repeatedly, conveniently ignoring the fact that she owns a hostel further down the road and stands to profit far more than anybody else from having a good road). It’s awful work. Camilo keeps rolling his eyes at me. Eventually, to their chagrin, Phil and Adam are sent to help us out.
“Welcome to Hell,” I tell Phil, “Population: me and a bunch of people I can’t understand.”
We fling the dirt over the road into the bushes; we pile it into wheelbarrows. It’s very hot and after getting so excited about the volunteer experience we’re pissed off to be sent to work on something that has absolutely nothing to do with the farm.
Our poor mindsets don’t dissipate. After work we’re all broken and bitching; we have all already decided, I think, that we will not be staying the whole two weeks.
Things don’t improve. Our bodies have grown lazy after so many months without work and we wake each morning sorer and stiffer than the day before. Mosquitos bite us all over; blisters develop, explode, and develop again. I accidentally destroy half the farm, stepping too close to the terrace walls and collapsing them. Our moods are awful; we sit in the lettuce searching for caterpillars, snapping their little green bodies with scowls on our faces.
After a couple of days we are moved into the main house, a rabbit warren of rooms branching off in all directions, a patchwork of wood and cement that feels distinctly half-finished. But the collection of hippies who live there have surmised with astounding swiftness that we are phonies and dilettantes and treat us as such, only compounding the misery. It becomes a segregated house, Spanish speakers and us.
Each afternoon we wander listlessly back into town. We sit by the public swimming pool, which looks less like a public swimming pool than it does an expensive report built in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
“I just wish it wasn’t like this,” says Adam. “I wanted this to work. I hate that we’ve gotten into this pattern of feeling shit about it and bitching. I wish it was different.”
Perhaps Adam was secretly clutching an enchanted monkey’s paw purchased from a gypsy while he sat there; I’ll never know. But the moment we leave the pool, everything improves dramatically.
We go back and have a lovely dinner with our housemates around the campfire. We wake invigorated, galvanized, and throw ourselves into our work with newfound vigour. We’re hoeing weeds like champions, building plots, cackling evilly while snapping caterpillar corpses.
We build a community of friends around us – Georgina, Hernan, Edwin, Lina, Oscar. Hernan teaches Adam and Dan to make a delicious sourdough; Edwin chats excitedly with us each time we go to town. At the end of the first week – these being hippies, remember – they reward our work with a joint of such potency that after only a couple of puffs Danielle is throwing up in the bathroom, Adam is passed out in bed, and Erin is in the back garden passed out on the paving stones, only discovered three hours later by a German volunteer trying to find the toilet.
Back in town the following evening, we look for a place to drink. A man leans out of his shop on the plaza – “I have beers for you!” he calls excitedly. Inside, his shop is chaos – there is a large stand of chips and drinks, beside which is his thin mattress, covered with guitars of various shapes. All corners of the room are stacked with junk; there is a plate of half-eaten food under the drink stand.
His name is, of all things, Will Smith. He even shows us his passport. He is a music teacher, he owns a shop, and he used to guide seventy-day tours from the coast of Brazil along the Amazon and all the way up into Colombia. His son is a television star.
Also, he laughs like a crazy person.
He and Adam jam on the guitars awhile; he is indeed an excellent guitarist and singer. He shows us a DVD of his own music. The cover features him in sunglasses, grinning and with both thumbs up, next to a tall woman, bent over, in a string bikini and cowboy hat.
As time passes he focuses more and more of his songs on Erin.
“This song is about taming a wild horse,” he explains meaningfully, staring at her and giggling crazily. “To tame a wild horse you need to take your lasso and throw it around the horse” – (here he motions the throwing of a lasso around Erin’s neck) – “and catch it, and then you pull it close…”
When we go to leave he attempts to kiss Erin on the lips but settles for nestling weirdly into her neck.
“That was weird,” she murmurs as we walk down the street.
“That was excellent!” exclaims Adam, oblivious.
Over the following week things continue on their positive trajectory. We enjoy being on the farm, we enjoy living in San Agustin, and we successfully avoid the wild-eyed, slightly haggard hippie girl who had become overly enamoured of Adam (“My name is Jessi-… uh, I mean my name is Magicka,” she’d introduced herself).
Our last night is a big party in town that moves back to the house, a great drunken blast that ends with everyone crouched around the campfire once more, with Adam in bed and Edwin, blitzed and hyperactive, wandering about laughing maniacally and asking repetitively where Adam has gone.
“Should I go check if he’s awake?” he keeps asking, and then answers his own question – “No, he’s dead. Knocked out. K! O!” He throws imaginary punches.
He steals some pot from the sleeping Germans and starts to roll a joint but, continually distracting himself, it takes him about forty minutes. Then it gets passed around once and Edwin forgets that he was passing it around and just sits sucking on it and asking where Adam is. Unable to take any more, I head to bed.
We’ve spent two weeks at the farm – the longest we’ve remained in one place at any point on the trip. It’s time to hit the road once more. We pack our things, and catch buses over landscapes beyond compare toward the Desierto de Tatacoa, a 330 square kilometre patch of arid desert high in the mountains, famous for the stargazing possibilities near the local observatory.
We find a van driver willing to take us to a lonely hotel on the sandy plains; his van has no lights and dusk is settling in. We wonder how he will resolve this predicament but he does so with typical Latin ingenuity: as we pass through Villavieja he has his wife borrow a motorbike from some friends, and we spend the following ludicrous hour following behind her small inadequate headlight as the driver screams “Faster, woman!” from out his window.
We arrive, ensconced in empty space, with only the roar of the generator and the buzz of the television spoiling the silence. The heat is dry and comforting; between that and the wide open sky it’s impossible not to be reminded of Australia. The hotel must have one of the only televisions in the area; visitors pass through all night to watch this or that program. The sky becomes overcast; we watch the moon flicker in an out of the clouds. Eventually rain starts to fall in thick, hard drops. We’ve come to stargaze but somehow the globules of water exploding on the parched earth are just as satisfying.
During the day the heat is a razor. We scuttle between pieces of shade, swimming in a nearby pool while a donkey brays wildly. We are shocked into life only by the occasional sudden burst of gunpowder from a low-key tejo game in progress a few metres away. We walk through the desert as dusk settles over the wide plains, admiring the intensity of the sky.
A pickup truck back to Neiva, where a flamboyant Colombian in azure pants plays us a selection of traditional Colombian marching tunes from his boombox. From Neiva to Pitalito where, while waiting for a bus, there is the crash of breaking glass followed immediately by the sounds of people running from all over the station. When we walk over to check it out there is a large and growing mob of onlookers. A small bus, left in gear, has mounted the curb and ploughed through the plate-glass wall of the bus station, wreaking havoc and destroying several pillars in the process. This does not bode well for our upcoming journey.
In the puddled bus station of Macoa we buy tickets on to Pasto. We’ve decided to get to Ecuador through the back door, as it were, but the bus travels at a snail’s pace – the speedo does not rise above 25km/hr for the first six hours of the eight hour trip as the bus rises and curls through the rain around terrifying dirt roads covered in mudslides and with sheer drops to either side. Three times we are pulled over and patted down at police checkpoints. By one in the morning the air is freezing. It streams in through windows jolted open by the bus’ constant jittering. At 3am we arrive, sleep briefly, and wake to head on toward Ecuador.
Rain spits sharp and hard at the cathedral of Ipiales, straddling a deep gorge and situated geographically on the border between Colombia and Ecuador and aesthetically on the border between tacky and breathtaking. The rock walls are covered in plaques extolling the miracle of the virgin, jutting out at odd angles. In the crypt, poorly taxidermied mutant cows stare at us from alcoves – one calf has two heads, the other six legs.
It’s a typically unexpected sight to finish our time in the country. Colombia has been a lot of things to us over the last two months – it has the friendliest people, the craziest drivers, the most beautiful landscapes, the best games, the worst tourists. It’s a stunning slice of land: cheap, safe, endlessly surprising, a place it would be very easy to settle down in. But settling down is hard work. Our bus heads toward Ecuador.
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Trip Details: Details on volunteering with Fundacion Viracocha can be found on their website, fundacionviracocha.org. They’re a fantastic organisation and we support them wholeheartedly. From San Agustin, we took a minivan to nearby Pitalito, from where there are buses to Neiva for 20,000 pesos, taking about five hours. It’s a beautiful trip. From Neiva into Tatacoa takes about an hour; our van took five of us for 35,000 pesos. We stayed with Doña Elbira for 15,000 per person including meals – it’s a lovely spot. From the desert we had to travel back to Pitalito to get to Macoa and through serious backcountry to Pasto; this route was very uncomfortable and reasonably dangerous – we don’t recommend it.
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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 