Latinalicious: The South America Diaries (23 page)

I only went on today’s excursion to Cartagena’s most popular beach destination, Playa Blanca, because I’d already bought the boat ticket. Plus I had a red wine hangover the size of Colombia, having spent most of last night chatting to random guys in a bar in the walled city I’ve come to frequent called La Bistro. I thought a day ogling hot Colombian boys with no shirts on might ease the pain.

Farzana was right, by the way — the men are delicious here. They all seem to have very white teeth, the gift of the gab, and rhythm.

The guy behind the bar at La Bistro, Klaas, regaled us all with tales of his woebegone yet ongoing relationship with a Colombian girl, which involves a lot of dramatics, by the sounds of it. In spite of the bar being very busy, Klaas took a lot of time out to do things like lean forward on his elbows and bury his face in his hands and make a sort of muffled scream before checking his Facebook page again on his phone.

‘This morning I found out she’s single,’ he said incredulously. ‘Can you believe that? We’ve been living together for two months and she changed her relationship status to single this morning without telling me!’

The poor guy was more perplexed than distraught. I didn’t want to say it but by now I’ve heard plenty of stories involving men who’ve embarked on relationships with South American girls on their travels. While I don’t think any continent’s population of females deserves to be stereotyped, it does sound like the girls here are a lot more … shall we say, demanding. And passionate. One guy I met suggested that the females in these countries spend a lot of time sitting around watching the terrible
novelas
— South America’s infamous soap operas.

These badly acted shows, bursting with botoxed, trout-lipped, large breasted ladies and long-haired lotharios sleeping their way through well-respected family circles, can be seen crackling from a screen in the corner of pretty much every family shop or restaurant. Each episode is filled with such blubbering angst it’s a wonder they don’t issue Prozac with the sale of every TV set.

They’re very low budget, these soaps, usually. I mean, we’re definitely not talking
EastEnders
here, although I suspect much of the budget is spent on tubs of Vaseline, or whatever it is the actors have to rub into their eyes to make them cry.

The theory goes that women are subjected to this nauseating melodrama from the word go and, therefore, they grow up making similar scenes in front of men who don’t turn out to be perfect.

‘I think she’s mad at me because the other night, when she asked if I would cry if she died, I didn’t say anything,’ Klaas said, shaking his head as though this grave mistake was going to haunt him his whole life. ‘I mean, who asks that?’ he continued. ‘I’ve been living with her for two months. Is that not letting her know I care? Does she really need to ask if I would cry if she died?’

Later that night, Klaas’s girlfriend strolled into the bar after totally erasing their relationship from cyberspace, dressed in the standard Colombian female uniform for a casual evening out — tight white jeans and a halter top with glittering platform heels — and announced that she had terminated their unborn baby (of which he had no idea). She said that when she’d changed her status to single she had actually meant to announce that she was one person again instead of two. Then she kissed his cheek and ordered a drink and went on as though nothing had happened.

Back to the beach trip. Playa Blanca is, as the name states, a white sand beach. It lies on Isla Baru, one of the largest islands in the Islas del Rosario cluster, which is in turn one of the forty-six national parks of Colombia. I’d bought a ‘direct’ ticket and was hurried onto a boat at 7.30 a.m., where I was instantly perturbed by the ear-bangingly loud Caribbean salsa music blaring from a large set of nightclub-worthy speakers.

A Colombian family, two of whom were respectable-looking women in flowery dresses and sun hats, were drinking Aguila beer from bright yellow cans and screeching. Another guy was falling over the seats, singing a song of undying love at high drunken volume, and a child with beaded dreadlocks was running between them all, begging for attention. The rest of the boat passengers were eating orange-coloured fried goods from folds of tissue, which I’m told are yummy pasties filled with meat and plantain. One day I’ll try one, but they always look so dangerously carcinogenic to me, even with a hangover.

We sat there for about forty minutes, ears bleeding in this heinous acoustic mess, while more people piled on, along with vendors trying to sell us cigarettes and bananas and overly sweetened coffee in tiny cups. The music never stopped but occasionally a woman on a megaphone, or at least it sounded like a megaphone, would yell something into the mix that was so muffled it sounded like she was chewing on socks.

One such announcement made the drunk man cheer, crack open another Aguila and dance around everyone, stopping midway to straddle his wife and grind his crotch in her face like a horny monkey. This made the other tourists on the boat, like me, who’d come for a peaceful morning boat ride to a lovely island, want to slit our wrists. I could tell the lady to my left, a sweet oldie who looked American, wished she’d just gone to Crepes & Waffles instead.

My hangover rose a level and, as the boat took off to another round of cheers, I took myself out to the deck, in case I hurled. This was when I realised another giant speaker was poking out of the window towards me in the event that I might miss a beat of what had now switched to some sort of reggae/trance mix. It was like being forced into a party when I’d just crawled out of bed.

I tried to drown it out with my iPod but then the lady with the megaphone/sock came back on and yelled something periodically in Spanish, which I couldn’t decipher at all. After roughly fifty horrible minutes, being stepped on by children and danced around by the beer-swilling monkey man, we stopped in Caribbean paradise.

Two guys with caramel skin in yellow board shorts straddled surfboards in the crystal clear blue waters, cormorants swirled, pelicans dived and swooped. And we all piled off, pushing and shoving into the hollers of about a hundred more vendors trying to sell us hats and water.

Because I didn’t understand the muffled sock lady, I was a bit confused as to what was going on. I walked around and failed to spot a beach, but people were queuing up for some sort of attraction surrounded by fish tanks. Where the hell was Playa Blanca?

Eventually I was told by a nice Argentinean lady that we weren’t on Playa Blanca yet and we were stopping here on this tiny beach-less island for an hour so that people could visit the aquarium. I can’t think of anything more depressing than watching fish swim in tanks on a tropical island, can you? It’s cruel. Why don’t they just leave them alone and sell you a snorkel instead?!

Realising I’d been duped with my ticket and had somehow found myself on the Colombian sailing equivalent of a round-the-houses bus ride that takes four times as long as it should to get anywhere, I sucked it up and plonked myself on a bench by the rocks. Here I watched about 300 people try their best to find a personal piece of paradise in front of five giant passenger boats and even more hassling vendors.

Then, when my time was up I made my way back to the harbour, only to find my party boat chugging off without me. The deck hands even waved back cheerily when I gestured frantically in my bikini to get them to come back. I’d missed the boat by two minutes. I was marooned in tourist hell and, what with my hangover and the hassling men and the serious heat and being abandoned by a boat I hated anyway, I started to cry. I stood there waving and crying like some tortured wife saying goodbye to her sailor husband until a nice man in a uniform came to usher me onto another boat going the same way.

Luckily, this new boat didn’t play devastatingly loud reggae/ trance the whole way to our next stop. It played brain-numbingly loud Spanish pop instead. And the open bar graciously provided even more opportunity for obnoxious, swaying drunks. I was not having a good day.

After a while, I realised that this second boat was actually going much slower than the first one. It wasn’t a speed boat like the other one had been. For about an hour I sat in the middle of shrieking teens and boozing adults and, when we finally reached Playa Blanca, I had about forty minutes before I was expected to join my first boatload again and head back to Cartagena. Turned out my original boat got there in about ten minutes and they’d already eaten their included lunch. Some were even riding on banana boats and lounging around drinking more beers. Fuckers.

I was faced with a choice. I could either eat my included lunch with the new boatload, then relax on the beach and get the slow boat back with them, which at that speed would probably have taken three hours. Or I could skip the food, enjoy the beach for forty precious minutes and only have to endure
one
horrible hour back to Cartagena on the original musical speedboat from hell.

In the end, I decided I couldn’t be bothered to eat, so instead I just walked up and down on the sand for a bit, dodging people. Which was quite difficult. I sat down for a moment and watched the kids swimming in the turquoise waves and I was just starting to relax when I felt someone grab my shoulder. I spun around to the freakish site of a lady, who must have been in her sixties, wearing hot-pants and a child’s T-shirt with a teddy bear on it.

‘Massage,’ she said as I did my best not to recoil in terror, and it wasn’t even a question, really, because by then she’d taken both my shoulders and was working her bony fingers into my flesh, right where the shit mugger had tried to yank the strap of my bag and where the gashes still hadn’t healed. I pulled away sharply, at which she looked highly offended and remained towering over me, right next to me, until I was forced to stand up and walk away. I bought some water from a kid, who went off to look for some change and never came back.

There were hundreds of people in the water. And, unnervingly, loads of jet skis were zooming about within inches of the swimmers and snorkellers. In fact, Playa Blanca, while unquestionably beautiful, was barely visible thanks to the people and touts running all over it.

I’m sure if you stayed the night in one of the tree-house type structures and waited for all the boats to sod off, it would be an entirely different experience (in fact, it is, because I’ve met people who’ve hired a hammock for the night and loved it) but I couldn’t help thinking how the beach has been quite spoilt and how there are probably going to be better beaches when I get up to Parque Nacional Tayrona, further north (Charlotte’s coming now, too, yay!), and how I should have waited for those.

When I walked into La Bistro tonight, Klaas waved and asked if I’d had a good day.

‘Compared to you with your girlfriend problems, yes, but actually, not really,’ I told him.

‘Oh yeah, it’s a Sunday,’ he said. ‘Should have warned you it would be packed. It’s always worse on Sundays. Sorry, last night was a bit … well, you know … ’ He looked at me sheepishly.

‘That’s OK,’ I told him as my wine was placed in front of me.

‘You survived!’ he said, raising a glass to mine.

‘That’s true, Klaas, I did. But would you have cried if I’d died?’

29/12

Not too long ago, Taganga was nothing but a sleepy fishing village, lightly marked on the Gringo Trail thanks to its proximity to Parque Nacional Tayrona. This picture perfect paradise, specifically the beach Cabo San Juan de la Guia (which features on the front of the latest
Lonely Planet Colombia
guide), consists of 12,000 hectares of deserted beach, dense jungle and ‘eco’ accommodation on the Caribbean coast, about a two-hour bus ride up the road from Cartagena.

Always fun to stand in the location of a Lonely Planet guidebook cover!

As tourists bound for the park started to make their way from the nearby hub of Santa Marta to the less crowded base of Taganga, the sleepy fishing village started to wake up. The drug cartels even built some nightclubs, but we’ll come back to all that, I’m sure.

Keen for some beach time after a fun but profusely sweaty mulled wine-infused hostel Christmas within Cartagena’s walls, Charlotte and I headed up the coast on a rickety bus to Taganga on Boxing Day. Pre-Christmas, we’d spent 21 December in a sweet local bar waiting patiently for the end of the world — or the awakening at the hands of The
Maestros Ascendidos
— and when it didn’t come I said a small pina colada-enhanced prayer for Francisco, probably sitting on the roof of his car somewhere in Capilla del Monte, staring up at the sky, fondling his quartz.

Charlotte, by the way, has had a few adventures of her own since we left each other in Peru, including getting chased and charged twice by a horned bull in a field in Huaraz. Further Googling when we were drunk (and consequently when Charlotte had seen the funny side) confirmed that this happens quite often to hikers on this picturesque day trip through Peruvian greenery, although of course no tour operator will ever tell you.

When Charlotte and I lugged our stuff into Hostel Divanga in Taganga, we were told that we could use the swimming pool at their sister hotel, Casa Divanga, up the road, so we wasted no time in sprawling ourselves on sun lounges and planning our day trip to Tayrona. Here we met another couple of girls, a fun Kiwi and an American, also planning some coastal adventures, but our chatter was interrupted somewhat by the booming reggaethon. The hotel wasn’t even playing it. It was blasting instead from a series of humongous, stadium-worthy speakers on everyone’s driveways outside.

I noticed this in Cartagena, too. In Cartagena, though, the speakers were placed mostly in shop doorways with microphones attached to them. Men would stand there yelling like crazed DJs at random intervals for people to come in and buy stuff. On several occasions I saw tourists take a tentative step inside these shops and then flee, looking frightened. It must work for the locals, though, especially in the cheap clothing establishments, because there’s an awful lot of tight neon T-shirts, printed leggings and garish hooped earrings going on with some of these Colombian women.

Volume plays an integral part in this battle of the speakers in Taganga. Each it seems must be cranked to the absolute max, to the point where the incessant pounding through the cheap mesh is so distorted that you can barely distinguish the tune from the feeling that your head is being bashed in cruelly by the bass.

The funniest thing to me is that the owners of these ear-abusing monstrosities aren’t always young men. Sometimes they’re really old. Sometimes you’ll see five entire generations of one family sitting in front of them on their driveways, on plastic chairs, drinking juice or Aguila or rum quite serenely, munching on their
arepas
as though the throbbing, head-fuckingly loud speaker in their ear is akin only to a fluttering flock of butterflies as they picnic in a quiet park.

Some men even sit in front of them reading newspapers. I don’t know how they do it. Just walking up the street had Charlotte and I holding our hands over our ears and speeding up. Perhaps, as someone suggested, it’s a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses type mentality that spurs them on here, whereby the family with the biggest, loudest speakers is perceived as having the most money and clout. Who knows? Perhaps they grew up with such things and no longer notice how loud their music is. Perhaps they’re all deaf already and don’t even know when they’re playing music at all. Either way, it was quickly apparent that Taganga is not a place one should come to unwind. We were so wound up after an hour, we decided to head off ASAP.

Being peak travelling season right now, we were warned that there probably wouldn’t be any hammocks left for staying over in Tayrona so, whereas the lovely Kiwi Sarah, and the American girl, Camille, bundled their worldly belongings onto the speedboat the next day, Charlotte and I just took our bikinis and some water.

Good thing, too, it turned out, because the boat trip, which eventually deposited us on the coke-white sands of Cabo San Juan de la Guia, was a thrashing and crashing James Bond-style thrill ride that saw us mounting waves the height of houses to the elated shrieks of our driver and no one else. Had my laptop been on that vessel, I would have cried. Everyone and everything was soaked. One girl was sick in her sunhat. By the time we were approached by the only vendor on the beach, a lady whose homemade cheese-filled croissants were a welcome feast after such horrors, we were all bedraggled, drenched and shaking. I remembered, too, that one of the guys in the book
The Gringo Trail
, Mark, had died in the waves close to here, in Arrecifes — a spot where a fierce undertow and crazy currents claim numerous lives every year.

We’d had the choice between taking the bus along the coast to the park entrance or taking the boat; we kind of wished we’d chosen the bus. Either way, there was no escaping the
muy caro
‘gringo’ entrance fee of 37,000 COP (AU $20). No one seems to know what this money is spent on, but by the time you get off that boat and onto land, trust me, you don’t give a shit what it costs — you just want to stand on it.

The beach was unbelievably beautiful, like a scene from
Jurassic Park
, all palm-fringed shores and treacherous, galloping waves. At Cabo San Juan de la Guia, the
Lonely Planet Colombia
book cover greeted us — a hut built high on a breezy rock, boasting panoramic views, in which hammocks are so hard to get that, reportedly, backpackers will murder one another over them.

There were a
lot
of backpackers. We set off through the forest on the trail towards the other beaches and even saw people we’d met at other hostels, in other cities! Ironically, it felt a bit like everyone had journeyed to the top of Colombia at exactly the same time in order to spend the Christmas period away from the crowds. The road to paradise, it seems, is a well worn trail. If you need a little time to yourself, bring an iPod.

Our friends finally secured the very last hammocks at Arrecifes, although, as we continued our walk and talked in turn about Mark’s death in
The Gringo Trail
, everyone agreed not to swim. Not that we would have anyway. We realised that the sea was too rough for swimming everywhere in the park. It was almost cruel.

The one spot deemed safe enough, a bay called La Piscina, was so full of snorkellers that I’m pretty sure every fish would have left weeks ago. By the time it came for Charlotte and I to leave, we’d taken hundreds of photos but, to be honest, we should have tried to stay over, because we spent more time walking through the forest in order to get to the bus on time than we spent on any of the beaches.

Which is exactly how we came to be in Palomino, two days later, with Sarah and Camille.

Palomino’s close proximity to the notoriously unfriendly border with Venezuela makes its stretch of relatively unspoilt beach less of a tourist trap. It’s about forty-five minutes further along the coast from Tayrona, and from the sand you can see snow-capped mountains almost 6000 metres high, just forty kilometres away from palm tree-lined shores.

There’s hardly anything about Palomino online, or in the guide books, and while most tour operators will advise you not to go — mainly because they won’t make any money from you if you head off the beaten track — it’s highly unlikely you’ll be caught up in Colombia’s illegal drug trade or any of the armed conflict that exists between guerilla groups and paramilitaries while you’re reclining on an empty white beach with a coconut in your hands. Unless you go off in search of cocaine, of course.

Palomino, we found, was populated mostly by local families all camping out in tents, sitting around blazing fires or paddling in the violent surf. Being the Christmas season, a small cluster of touristic ‘hotels’ along a small section of the beach was buzzing with gringos drinking beer and burning in various shades of red. We saw a hostel called The Dreamer with shacks for dorms just behind the beach. It had a freshly-painted yellow ring around its brand new swimming pool and we turned our noses up at the obvious blight on paradise. ‘How dare they open such a monstrosity here?’ we asked each other incredulously, and continued along the sizzling sands. We were desperate for some sort of romance-novel type beach hut to present itself for less than a tenner a night.

It looked highly unlikely.

Soon it was confirmed as impossible.

An hour later, with our backpacks stuck to our skin with our own sweat, we turned around and headed despondently back to The Dreamer.

The blight on paradise welcomed us in with open arms. They’d only been open five days — just in time to save holiday season stragglers like us, looking for a remote, tourist-free slice of sand and sunshine (perhaps also with Internet and access to beer). How absolutely, inconveniently perfect.

Nothing stays off the beaten track for long, these days. At the rate tourism is developing here, it won’t be long before Palomino becomes just another extension of Taganga, covered in places like The Dreamer, which, to be fair, is rather a nice place, and great value considering it has a pool and you can’t swim in the sea. And yes, it has wi-fi … when it works. And decent coffee. I hate to say it, but I actually love it. I loved it even more when the barman, Zac, started telling me how he’d been invited to watch ‘a donkey-fucking’ up the road on his second day of work. Apparently, some young Colombian men out here in the sticks practise the art of sex on donkeys before moving on to women. He attempted to show me proof on YouTube but fortunately this was one of many occasions when the wi-fi was down.

It’s still the quiet beach we envisioned would exist up here. Tucking into grilled fish dinners, stargazing from upturned boats on the beach, singing to the guitar around the fire and engaging in the good old-fashioned art of conversation with strangers are all things you can do when the pink sun sets on another perfect day. You don’t have to pay an entrance fee, like you do for Tayrona. And better still, you can hear yourself think, relax and unwind, let go of your stresses a while, because, in spite of the inevitable development in recent months, you won’t find any stadium-worthy speakers pounding at your ears in Palomino. Yet.

02/01