Latinalicious: The South America Diaries (24 page)

2012 was pretty special, but not as good as 2013 started out when we bought some drinks from a cocktail stand in Taganga.

The bartender sets up his little red, yellow and green stall at roughly 5 p.m. every night, though he does take about thirty minutes to make each drink. I’m not sure if this is because there’s only one other person helping him cater for the entire waterfront, or because he’s incredibly high but, either way, on New Year’s Eve, Charlotte, Sarah, Camille and I had a couple of mojitos each and then noticed a Tupperware box full of cake slices on the counter. A sign read ‘Special Muffins’.

‘You should try, they have spice!’ the bartender encouraged.

‘What kind of spice?’

‘Marijuana,’ he winked.

We shrugged and bought a couple between the four of us, never thinking in a million years that they would have any effect. They were only 2500 COP, after all, which is less than $2. Then off we tottered to a restaurant to order one final feast in a year that’s been full of the tastes of different countries. It took a while to get a seat.

Taganga’s ‘scene’ still consists of ninety-five per cent locals, in spite of the tourists in high season, and on New Year’s Eve the waterfront was crammed full of families in white (worn to usher in a fresh new year), all carrying flowers. Every restaurant was packed. Girls were in their fanciest dresses. Some had clearly been in the salon for hours and most were just simply parading up and down the short main street, looking fabulous. Firecrackers shot off around us, boys on motorbikes tried to dodge the blasts and the boats bobbed gently in the bay in the background.

We ordered steaks and fish, chatting happily, taking in the scene. We waited ages for the food. We waited some more for the wine. It got to 11.30 and we wanted more drinks for the countdown, but waved in vain to every staff member. Vendors approached us with their wares and, in a state of mild amusement, we noted that it’s easier to get cocaine, sunglasses and bejewelled, hand-crafted pendants delivered to your al fresco table in Colombia than it is to get a Cab Sav from your actual waiter.

To be honest, we completely forgot we’d eaten the Special Muffins. I probably never would have thought of them again if it wasn’t for the fact that my brain suddenly started buzzing on red alert and I found myself thinking obscene thoughts about devouring a chocolate brownie and ice-cream. Looking around, I realised the girls were intermittently staring off into space and bursting into fits of giggles over nothing … or at least it
was
nothing until we all saw two stray dogs stuck together on the pavement.

One dog, the female, was dragging the other, a male, along on her back, the male evidently attached to her by his penis, which had got wedged in her vagina. I know this sounds gross but it happens sometimes, apparently, and there’s really no other way to explain it. If you wanted a more seductive
Fifty Shades of Stray
version, I guess I could say something along the lines of: ‘The bitch clasped her ever ready love muscles around her mutt’s throbbing member and held on with all her might, until he begged not just for his release, but for his life as she dragged him cruelly, viciously through hell within her vengeful clutch.’

Are you wincing right now? Because I am. Second thoughts, I probably wouldn’t say that because, for some reason, all that talk sounds even more dirty when it’s about dogs, doesn’t it? Forget that happened.

Boys played football with burning fireballs of newspaper and rubbish, which took our minds off the animal kink and had us eyeing children suspiciously as the Special Muffins continued to work their magic. We
all
ordered chocolate brownies with ice-cream. We never actually got any drinks for the countdown, which didn’t matter anyway in the end because there wasn’t one.

I realised a long time ago that time isn’t very highly regarded in these countries. Everyone does what they want, when they feel like it, and the same can be said of New Year. There seemed to be some confusion over the actual stroke of midnight. Every five minutes another group would cheer, or someone else would let off some fireworks. I think midnight lasted roughly half an hour in Taganga, but by then we were all too high and too involved in our brownies to care. We did, however, notice quite a lot of fireworks coming from The Dark Place.

The Dark Place is a hostel I won’t divulge the real name of because I’m scared to. You won’t find much about it on the Internet or in guidebooks, but once you’re in Colombia everyone talks about it. When you walk in, you’re immediately overwhelmed by the scale of the place. It looks like a Playboy mansion, complete with a huge swimming pool in the centre of a courtyard featuring a wet table and bar stools. Fancy en-suite air-conditioned dorm rooms open with swipe cards only. Food and drinks are served twenty-four hours a day so you never have to leave. There’s a gym, a basketball court and a deck complete with hammocks and a view of the sweeping bay. It’s the greatest hostel you’ve ever seen and rooms are relatively cheap, at just 40,000 COP per night.

But The Dark Place isn’t all it seems. The chance to experience the best and purest cocaine in the world is one of the main reasons some backpackers still head to Colombia, and when in Taganga it seems they come
here
. Cocaine is available over the bar at just US $10 per gram. Australians in particular are flocking to it because cocaine in Australia costs up to $300 per gram.

Up to 300,000 hectares of beautiful rainforest is destroyed each year for the production of coca. It’s a well-known fact that the farther north you head in Colombia, the better the cocaine gets. The FARC — Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia — still controls major pockets of the mountains and deep jungle up here, and it’s estimated that they alone collect more than US $300 million each year through cocaine production.

The highest coastal mountain range in the world, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, is apparently full of government-sponsored forest watch groups, who’ve turned over their coca plantations and moved into eco-tourism, although every now and then you’ll see a fire burning up high in the hills, which suggests that someone’s not happy with something that’s gone down.

The other day, Zac the bar man back at The Dreamer told me a cautionary tale. He’d gone tubing on the river near Palomino with a friend, having passed on a tour guide’s offer to take them for 25,000 COP. Seeing tubes on the street for just 5000 COP, they’d taken themselves, but the tour guide got very upset when he saw them later that day. Without a local guide, he said, they could have accidentally stumbled upon one of the many cocaine labs operating in the hills and that would have been the end of them.

I met a couple of Australians the other day who told me about a cocaine production tour they did in San Augustin — another popular spot on the Gringo Trail largely thanks to the numerous and mysterious ancient, pre-conquest statues on the surrounding hills. After a phone call made by a man who knew a man, the Australians met with an anonymous bloke in a balaclava at an allocated bar, who then took them deep into the hills. Here they were treated to a behind-the-scenes tour of a coke lab
and
got to keep their own coke afterwards, all for just $40.

I was instantly intrigued, but probably won’t be following in their footsteps. No one really wants to come with me, especially not when they can buy the stuff over the counter at a hostel near here
and
not get killed at the same time.

‘Ignore us, we’re just crack whores,’ one girl grinned the other day when a guy called David showed me around The Dark Place. The pretty Aussie girl was in her mid-twenties, slumped on the floor against a wall with her head on her friend’s shoulder. A pack of white powder rested on her lap. Her bottom lip was red and blistered where she’d been chewing.

Her friend was staring into space with her hands resting in twisted, unnatural positions against her body. The bar staff, mostly Israelis, by the looks of it (renowned in town for being unofficially in charge of everything), busied on, oblivious and uncaring. Bikini-clad girls stared at us with glassy eyes in poses around the pool and guys in board shorts grinned behind sunglasses, slumped in plastic chairs. Some looked like they hadn’t slept in days.

While I was visiting The Dark Place, I stood on one of the many balconies and watched a deliveryman show up to the entrance on a motorbike. He handed over what looked like one giant, family-sized can of chopped tomatoes to the security guy and then sped off again.

You might say it was just a can of tomatoes. You might say it wasn’t.

There are also rumours of prostitutes being brought into the hostel.

I remember once when I was sitting in Casa Nativa with Carlos in Cartagena, a guy came in and asked how much it was for an hour. He wanted to pay for an hour in a dorm room! Imagine wanting that. I mean, not even a cheap hotel room, but a room with up to eight bunk beds in it? Carlos shooed him away but told me it’s very common here to enquire about such a thing, especially with prostitutes, because a lot of people live with their parents until they’re older and can’t be alone anywhere else. The Dark Place, so I’ve heard, welcomes such arrangements.

On New Year’s Eve, we didn’t feel entirely safe walking back to Hostel Divanga after ramming ourselves in and out of the nightclub Mirador in a flurry of elbows and dilated pupils. We’d heard that two girls had been mugged outside the hostel while we’d been in Palomino, and it could have been the Special Muffin making me extra paranoid but the drunk boys on bikes beeping behind us as we walked up the darkened street to the pounding of everyone’s giant speakers seemed to be zooming extra fast and extra close when they got near us. I’m starting to detect some seriously dark energies in Taganga.

Eventually, back in our dorm, I managed to pass out at roughly 5 a.m., in spite of the pumping music, which didn’t actually stop until 8.30. Sarah and Camille then left for Cartagena and Charlotte went shortly afterwards to Colombia’s adventure capital, San Gil, so I’m all alone in Scary Town right now, wondering what to do. Moving on is expensive. I left booking my plane ticket to Rio (for the Carnival, wahey!) too late and wound up paying almost $800 one way for the February flight. Right now, everything here on Colombia’s coast is double, or triple, the cost! Even getting to Medellín from Santa Marta is over $100, whereas after 31 January it goes down to just over $20.

Tourist season is annoying, if I’m honest — I remember the days back in Argentina in September where I’d have entire dorm rooms to myself. Now it’s a struggle to get a hammock in some places, and you can barely move through any dorm without falling over backpacks and discarded Santa hats.

I thought about doing another tour. One of the greatest archaeological finds of the last century was La Ciudad Perdida (The Lost City) and the five-day hike up to it is one of the reasons people come to Santa Marta and Taganga. I was all set to embark on the journey, but wimped out after talking to numerous people who’ve done it. They’ve all come back absolutely covered in insect bites.

Allegedly, it’s incredible, majestic, mesmerizing, all the adjectives you can come up with for a city that remained lost until 1975, but it’s really tough to reach. The entrance can only be accessed at the end of a perilous climb up 1200 stone steps, which take you through dense jungle, teeming with mosquitoes. You’re sweating the whole time, sleeping in hammocks and you can’t ever shower.

Quite frankly, it sounds awful and I can’t be bothered.

Oh, I know. It’s terrible, isn’t it? I’m here, I might not get the chance to see it again. But I might not get to see Palomino again, either, and I’d much prefer lying on the beach for a few more days with some more yummy Special Muffins, before taking the only affordable transport option away from the coast — my last ever South American night bus, to Medellín.

Well, you can’t do
everything
, for goodness’ sake.

10/01

There’s a woman in my hostel with bandages around her arms. She’s about sixty. Last night she groaned a lot in her bottom bunk and this morning she was very huffy and puffy as she ordered her scrambled eggs. I think the Tiger Paw hostel is a fine establishment, personally, but El Poblado’s loudest, most popular party hostel is perhaps not the ideal location in which to recover after surgery on your bingo wings.

Medellín is a good place for surgery, apparently. But it must cost a lot if you have to recuperate in a dorm room full of backpackers afterwards. Perhaps keep that in mind.

Anyway, Medellín is definitely one of the most beautiful cities I’ve visited in a while. There’s a permanent temperature of around twenty-six degrees and the sun always seems to be shining. I particularly like the Metro, too. It smells like freshly baked bread and happiness.

I went to check out the Botero Museum yesterday (also known as the Museo de Antioquia) with a guy called JP. Aside from some suspicious-looking youths sitting under a bridge in various states of slit-eyed intoxication, the Plaza Botero outside with its oversized bronze statues of obese men and women, and vendors selling a variety of weird tropical fruit juices — all of which we tried — was a great place to while away an afternoon.

Fernando Botero is Colombia’s most famous artist and you can’t escape his work. You’ll see reproductions of his paintings of squishy-faced fat folk and sculptures absolutely everywhere. Intrigued as to the meaning of all the plumpness, I was pleased to discover a plaque with his words on it: ‘I fatten my characters to give them sensuality. I’m not interested in fat people for the sake of fat people.’

So there you go.

There’s something else you have to do in Medellín, by the way, besides photograph yourself under the giant bronzed penis of a fat Botero sculpture. The poster called me from the hostel’s pin board: ‘The tour that takes you inside of his life. The Escobar family will personally introduce you to their lifes.’

I know something is going to be good when even bad grammar lures me in.

Of course, Pablo Escobar himself is dead. He was shot on the run in 1993 and, in spite of almost thirty years as a narco-terrorist and cocaine trafficker who brought havoc and pain to the people of Colombia, over 25,000 people attended his funeral. This public grieving was a result of the Robin Hood image he created for himself, as a man who relinquished both time and money to the poor, prior to his days as a politician. It seems implausible now, but for a while Pablo Escobar was thought to be nothing but a very rich and generous businessman, who built an entire housing estate for the homeless in Medellín … and, because soccer was his passion, gave millions of dollars in sponsorship for children’s football teams, among other things.

All the while, and unbeknownst to many, Pablo Escobar’s drug money was also sponsoring lavish parties held at his ranch in the countryside, complete with hippopotamuses and supermodels. He and his cocaine cohorts were stashing billions of dollars in piles so huge and in places so dirty that rats would eat a percentage of the cash before he could even spend it!

Pablo’s brother, Roberto Escobar, is still very much alive and will tell you all these stories and more as you sit in his bullet-riddled living room. At one point, he said, as we all sat around him wide-eyed as if we were listening to grandpa, the Medellín cartel were spending as much as $2500 per month on rubber bands, just to hold all their money together. The most money Roberto has ever seen in one place with his own eyes, he thinks, is $80 million, in cash.

Roberto is partially deaf and blind thanks to a letter bomb exploding in his face, but he’s been participating in the tour here in Medellín (Pablo’s old stomping ground) for a few years now. If you want to meet him, though, you have to pick your tour carefully, because there are several others that are running without his approval and only one will take you to his house, like ours did. I paid quite a lot for the privilege, I think about $50. But some of this money goes to charity.

Roberto is very into charity now, as you can imagine. I should think if you’d spent so much time in the slammer as the only surviving member of a drug cartel and your dead brother was Colombia’s most hated, you’d be quite generous with your resulting wealth, too. He told us how, since 1987, he’s been actively involved in finding a cure for HIV. He started to investigate this after using alternative methods to help find a cure for one of his sick racehorses. Roberto firmly believes that his quest to find a cure for HIV is the reason he’s the only one of the Medellín drug cartel to have survived. He’s supposed to do something great for the world.

The house Roberto currently lives in is the last place Pablo hid before he was killed. To reach it, we rattled up a long and winding driveway that had our van bumping up and down maniacally on stones. Once our driver had pressed a buzzer, a little maid in a turquoise uniform swung a giant gate open to let us in, and there we found Roberto sitting under a canopy on the lawn, drinking coffee, dressed in casual but expensive navy Nautica slacks and a salmon orange Ralph Lauren shirt.

He could have been anyone’s grandpa as he stood up to shake our hands in front of the relatively normal-looking, low-level brown and cream house. But an air of knowing and superiority surrounded him as we followed him, as instructed, to the garage. Even without knowing what this man has seen and done, you can tell he’s a deep thinker, an introvert, someone whose past plays on his mind like a never-ending movie. You want to fire questions at him instantly, but something holds you back.

In the garage, we saw a small blue pick-up truck from the 1960s, which we were told was OK to take photos in. Roberto bought this truck before he became involved in his brother’s cartel, back when he was a regular man with drug-free dreams and a racewinning, professional cyclist in Colombia. I later learned that this truck has a hollowed-out body for stashing cocaine inside; so too, incidentally, does the table in the living room. Once we were all sitting around eating peeled peaches with plastic forks provided by Roberto, our guide, a beautiful Paisa (the name for people from Medellín) pulled the side of a writing desk off and showed us two
casetas
(hollows in the legs).

‘Each side is designed to hold one million dollars in cash,’ she said proudly. She then swung a nearby bookcase around, revealing a hiding place in the wall the size of a walk-in wardrobe. Poster-sized photos of Pablo Escobar and his family around the house show clearly that he still lives on in his family’s memory … although, when our guide moved one photo aside in the hallway, we were shown a huge bullet hole, reminding us that he was a dangerous man to know. Roberto thinks that Pablo committed suicide. He was shot on the rooftops of Medellín but Roberto told us the two had an agreement, whereby if Pablo ever felt cornered he would end it himself, with a gunshot through the ear. That was exactly how he was found.

Pablo Escobar, as well as being responsible for shipping eighty per cent of the cocaine that made it into the United States, nurtured young soccer players and provided what they needed to improve their game. For a long time it was drug money that funded Colombia’s soccer teams and often Pablo and his brother would settle back to watch games as fleets of submarines (all authorised by their allies in the police and military services) sped their goods towards the States, beneath the seas.

In the back of the van, as we were ferried to Pablo’s final resting place in the Cemetario Jardins Montesacro, we were shown a documentary entitled
The Two Escobars
, which examines how deadly the relationship between sport and crime could be in this country. It tells the sad story of how the biggest soccer star in Colombia, Andres Escobar (no relation), scored an ‘own goal’ in the 1994 cup that got his team eliminated, and got him killed. It was Pablo Escobar’s money that had turned Andre’s team into a team of champions in a time of violent civil war, and because Colombia’s national identity flourished along with the team’s success and then floundered when they were kicked from the game, Andres, with millions of dollars in gambling losses to answer for himself — mostly to drug lords — was murdered.

The Pablo Escobar tour has become one of the must-do activities on the Gringo Trail and I can definitely recommend it, if only to get a glimpse of how much things have changed in this country over the last few decades. His life and legacy are a story well worth telling … no matter how grammatically or morally incorrect it might be. Some officials are concerned that these tours continue to connect Colombia with cocaine when everyone’s trying so hard to keep up appearances of a changed country. But at the end of the day, Roberto won’t be around forever to reap the benefits of his former sibling’s sins, so I guess it’s up to you: would you rather spend $50 on hanging with an ex-convict in his mansion in Medellín … or would you rather put a bit more cash towards sorting out your bingo wings?

18/01