Wednesday, June 17, 2015

The Colombian Hat Dance


There is only one non-stop flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Bogotá, Colombia. For reasons known only to American Airlines, the flight arrives in South America at one o’clock in the morning, just in time for everything to shut down.

I’m already convinced that landing in Colombia with my hipster hat, earring and beard that I have DRUG MULE written all over me. Now they have me arriving on a flight when even the coke dealers are headed for bed.

Hola!” I greet one of the sleep-deprived cab drivers outside of the baggage claim. “Como está esta noche?”  The driver nods politely but I see from the look on his face that’s he’s sized me up as way more cheerful than any normal person should be at 1:30 in the morning. Unless they’re on drugs.

The driver loads my bag in the trunk and asks where we’re going. I have specifically booked a hotel near the airport because I knew at this hour I wouldn’t be up for a 45-minute taxi ride into the city. I tell him the name of the hotel.

He’s never heard of it. Address? 
I locate a printout in my bag and give him the address.

He puts the car and gear and starts driving, but I can tell that he has no idea where we’re going. We turn from the main airport road on to a deserted side street. At 1:30 in the morning it looks like it would be a good place to dump the bodies. No one is on the sidewalks; no other car is in sight.

The cabby drives slowly, looking at street numbers. Eventually we stop at a corner and the driver points to a small building with a tiny lit sign above the doorway.

Is that it? I ask in Spanish. I don’t think that’s it.
The driver is also incredulous.
Esta es la dirécción, pero … es feo!”

My Spanish is not great but I’m pretty sure the driver just called my hotel ugly.
As the cab creeps closer I see the tiny sign above the door: Hotel Aces Del Dorado. A tiny woman cracks open the door and eyes us suspiciously.

That must be the bellhop, I tell the driver.  This gets no laugh, but, you know, it’s getting early.

*          *          *

As anyone who has been to Colombia lately will tell you, the country gets a bum rap due to its long-standing bad rep. Yes, Colombia was more or less synonymous with cocaine, cartels, and drug-related violence throughout the 80s and well into the 90s. The government’s battle against the FARC and ELN guerilla movements has lasted five decades. In the mid 90s, Bogotá was undisputedly one of the most dangerous cities in the world, with 4,325 murdered in the city in 1993 alone.  Medellin – home to the world-infamous Medellin Drug Cartel – was even worse.

This is not exactly the information you want printed up in your tourism brochures.

But I had read enough before coming here to know that a lot has changed in Colombia in the past twenty years, and I know from experience that reputation and reality quite often are not the same.  Today the guerilla wars are more or less over, unless you wander into a remote jungle where you really shouldn’t be wandering. And the Colombian cartels are just not what they used to be. By 2007, the murder rate in Bogotá had dropped by more than 75 percent, and by 2014 in Medellin the rate was its lowest in decades.

I didn’t think this would be like a trip to Disneyland. But if you are over the age of 10, who really wants to go to Disneyland? All that walking. I’d much rather go to Colombia, where I can invent my own version of the Disneyland death march.

*          *          *

The Hotel Aces Del Dorado is located almost within walking distance of the El Dorado International Airport, in a neighborhood I would charitably describe as “working class.” It is also unfortunately located next to the airport’s runways, that seem to be working 24 hours a day.


So I don’t sleep during what’s left of my first morning in Colombia, as much as I lie awake on the bed in a puddle of sweat, listening to airplanes. The hotel is clean but short on amenities. For example, the air conditioning system doesn’t seem to involve the actual cooling of air. The bathroom sink includes a single faucet, cold water only. Wi-fi exists in theory, but not actual practice.

The hotel is staffed by a family of tiny, unsmiling women, ranging in age from 16 to 86. Around 9:30 a.m. I emerge from my room and walk down to the small lobby. When I ask a sullen 16-year-old girl reading a magazine behind the desk if breakfast is available, she turns and looks at the clock.

Breakfast ends at 9:00, she tells me.

Someone yells something in Spanish from the back room. It’s grandma. From her tone I gather she’s telling the teenager to get off her ass and make me some breakfast. It’s not like she’s busy with other customers.

The girl gets up with a sigh and an eye roll and disappears in the back. I take a seat at one of the two laminated tables, still half-asleep. After a while Abuelita emerges carrying a plate with a small plain omelet, with a couple of slices of cheese on the side.  What I really need is some coffee, which I ask for as I reach for the shaker to put salt on my eggs.

The old woman actually shrieks.
Aye! No es sel! Es azúcar!”

Just another crazy Gringo, scaring the elderly by trying to put sugar on his omelet. I’m too tired to pretend that I did it on purpose.

 “GRACIAS!” I say to grandma, raising my voice to be heard over a plane roaring down the runway outside.  The girl is staring at me from her place behind the front counter, like I’m an exotic species in the reptile house. Maybe she’s mesmerized by my hat.

I smile and thank the girl for making me breakfast. She doesn’t smile back.

*          *          *

Bogotá is the third largest city in the Western Hemisphere (after New York and Mexico City) with an area population of more than 13 million, but has no subway or metro system. “Sprawling” and “traffic choked” don’t do it justice. It’s as if Los Angeles and New Delhi had sex, gave birth to a South American city, and named it Bogotá.


To travel from my new hotel (hot water in the sink and nowhere near a runway. Score!) in the neighborhood of Usaquén to the historic center, there is essentially one north-south route, Avenue Alberto Lleras Camargo, running along the foothills of the Cordillera Mountains. This “main artery” consists of an endless parade of honking cars and buses, sporadically moving forward at two miles an hour.

I see no point to paying for a taxi and sitting in traffic, so I opt for the less comfortable but cheaper option of taking a bus and sitting in traffic. Still, this is not as easy as it sounds. In Bogotá there are dozens of privately operated bus companies trawling the streets, with their ultimate destinations (sometimes) written in placards next to the drivers’ windshield.

These placards might be difficult to read if the bus was moving at a normal speed, but at midday on Avenue Alberto Lleras Camargo that doesn’t present a problem. I wait on the side of the road looking for a bus with a sign that says “El Centro.” Twenty buses creep by. Nothing says “El Centro.”

But hey, they’re all headed in the same direction, down the same road. They all have to go to the Center, right? Or at least toward it. That’s enough of a rationalization to get me off the street and out of the sun. I wave down the next bus that lumbers toward me, hand over 2,000 pesos (about 80 cents), and join the slow parade into the city.

*          *          *

There may be other tourists somewhere in Bogotá, but if there are, I haven’t seen them.  On the steps outside the Fernando Botero museum, I am approached by a group of uniformed schoolgirls and handed a questionnaire.  It’s a class project, they explain in English. They have to find foreigners, and ask them questions about Colombian fruit.

Sadly, I score very poorly on the fruit quiz.  I ask them how many other foreigners they’ve found. A girl answers by holding out only two or three completed survey forms. I wonder how long it took to get those.

*          *          *

Tourists seem equally scarce in Botero’s hometown of Medellin. I suspect the Medellin Chamber of Commerce might need another slogan other than “Former Cocaine Capital of the World!”



The reputation hangover from the Drug Wars is a shame, because Medellin is actually a beautiful city, lining the Medellin River and nestled in a valley between a ring of tree-covered mountains.  Unlike Bogotá – or any other place in Colombia – Medellin has a clean and modern metro system that includes the gondola cable cars that climb far into the hills. Giant billboards in the business district are adorned with attractive models in expensive-looking underwear – always a sign that times must be pretty good.




I rent a two-bedroom, two-bath suite in the Medellin neighborhood of La Floresta with a view over the hills for equivalent of $50 a night. The people at the hotel are so friendly and happy to see a customer that, upon checkout, the hotel manager offers to personally drive me 45 minutes to the airport.

On a warm evening I walk alone through Medellin’s Zona Rosa district. I suspect things might get hopping later, but at 8:00 p.m. the bars and restaurants are nearly deserted.

I choose a bar with outdoor patio and order a beer and a plate of Bistec a Caballo (steak with a fried egg and plantain. Big thumbs up). Aside from the waitress and me the only people in the bar are two men talking in low tones at a nearby table. After a few minutes one of the men approaches and asks in English where I’m from. When I tell him, the man claps his hands and gleefully shouts back at his companion.

“See? I told you, I told you!” 

The man’s name is Javier, and he’s the bar owner. Javier just bet his companion Kenneth, a Canadian from Calgary, now living in Medellin, that I was American.  Kenneth didn’t think so. Because of the hat.



“You don’t often see Americans wear a hat like that,” Kenneth tells me.
Frankly I don’t think Kenneth from Calgary really knows what Americans are wearing these days, but I do my best to take it as a compliment.

*          *          *

I finally find the Americans and other foreign tourists in droves on the Caribbean coast in Cartagena, where the sun is hot and the humidity is soul crushing.  

Make no mistake: the old city of Cartagena does have its charms. It’s filled with vibrantly painted colonial buildings, with crumbling stone balconies covered by dangling vines and shockingly pink bougainvillea flowers.  In the middle of the day people move slowly and cluster on one side of the street, instinctively seeking out any available shade. At night salsa music spills out of doorways, and sidewalk cafes cool off the customers with mojitos, Cuba Libres, and ice-cold Colombian beer.

I imagine this is what Havana will be like, when it is once again frequented by sunburned Americans in cargo shorts and Old Navy T-shirts.

But in the tourists’ wake comes the unavoidable flotsam and jetsam of Capitalism: trinket sellers, beggars, street singers, guitar players, restaurant hawkers, strip-bar solicitors, pre-pubescent pickpockets and third-rate con artists.  As a foreigner walking through the Old City I might as well have a dollar bill tattooed on my forehead. Everybody is selling something, and I am accosted on every corner.

Trying to sit Cartagena’s Plaza Santa Domingo and drink a beer is like being a naked fat guy sealed in an aquarium filled with hungry mosquitos.  In this particular analogy, I am the naked fat guy; the trinket sellers are the mosquitos. I desperately try to swat them away, but it’s only a matter of time before I’m eaten alive.

Returning to the hotel a skinny man wearing a fedora and two-toned loafers steps in front of me on the sidewalk. He smiles and wags his finger.

“I know you,” he says perfect English.
“I don’t think so,” I respond, stepping aside.
“I do, I do,” he says, grinning and shaking his head. “I’ve got everything.” He leans toward me, confidentially. “Everything.”

So far in Colombia I learned that I don’t look American, but I do look a guy ready to buy “everything.” The price I pay, apparently, for the long hair, earring, and of course the hat.

*          *          *

After the sun sets on Cartagena I head off in the direction away from the Hard Rock Café and the Ferragamo shoe store. Bypassing the places clogged with tourists, I come across the KGB Bar, an over-the-top ketch factory complete with hammer-and-sickle Soviet flags, female mannequins dressed in Red Army uniforms, looping videos of Kremlin military parades, and Colombian waitresses with Barbie-doll dimensions, dressed in short shorts, tight T shirts, and Russian fur hats.

The bar is completely empty. Everything about the KGB Bar is out of place and inappropriate for the old city of Cartagena, almost as if it was specifically designed to drive away Americans.


I love it.

After a while a couple of sunburned guys speaking Russian tentatively step into the bar and check out the décor. They point at the walls and solemnly nod at each other, as if to say yes, they really have captured the flavor of Old Leningrad here, haven’t they? They walk out without ordering a drink.

As I’m finishing my beer a man and woman in their 60s come through the door. The couple’s appearance screams HI! WE’RE FROM MINNESOTA, OR SOMEWHERE AROUND THERE, YOU KNOW!!, pretty much as mine screams DRUG MULE. They order two light beers, and are outraged when the bartender tells them that they can’t use American money to pay for the drinks.

 “But they told us we can use American dollars!” the man protests.  

I don’t know who “they” are, but, um, we are in Colombia. And this is called the KGB Bar. Rubles maybe, but American dollars?

The bartender shrugs, and the disillusioned Minnesotans turn and leave still holding their dollars, walking in the direction of the Hard Rock Café.

*          *          *         

Back in Bogotá I’ve been walking all day and I’m starting to fade, as both dusk and Friday night rush-hour traffic settles in.  It’s almost dark when I reach Avenue Alberto Lleras Camargo, a few miles south of my hotel. I could wave down a cab, but hey, no need for that. I figured this out the first time around: Buses run north and south, and the cross streets are numbered. Hop on the bus, pay your 2,000 pesos, sit in traffic, hop off the bus.  So easy, it’s almost idiot-proof.

I did say almost.

The bus I wave down does in fact go north toward Usaquén, for a while. But then I notice something strange. The bus seems to be going up, while the lights of the city, conversely, seem to be going down. 




This is because I am no longer headed toward my hotel in Usaquén but instead up into the Cordillera Mountains above Bogotá, headed for God knows where. The bus passes a roadside restaurant and then climbs past all signs of human activity, into the darkened, tree-covered hills.

At this point, I see two choices. I could sit tight, not panic, and wait until I reach a destination with some kind of civilization, where I can figure out how to get another bus or taxi back into town. The people on the bus have to be going somewhere, right? The problem, I realize, is that I have no idea how far that somewhere might be. This might be the bus headed to a suburb 20 miles out of town. For all I know I’m on the bus to Venezuela.

The other choice I see is to pull the chord and bail as soon as possible, before I get any farther from the city.  The problem with this option is that the bus now appears to be in the middle of nowhere, a dark road on a Friday night on the side of a mountain somewhere above Bogotá.    

Not real happy with my choices here, I have to tell you. I take a deep breath and pull the chord.

*          *          *

There is one (and I can only think of one) advantage to being lost in the dark on the side of a mountain in Colombia: at least you know that the correct direction to walk is down. I start walking.

I have no idea how far I am from the city. I can see the lights of Bogotá below me, but whether it’s two miles or ten is hard to guess.  Occasionally I’m illuminated by the headlights of a car or bus driving up the hillside. I don’t notice much driving back the other way.

I walk in the dark along the right side of the road, when there is a side of the road to walk on. Occasionally the side of the road disappears, replaced by a guardrail overlooking a precipitous drop down the hillside.

In the daytime that must be pretty scary.

After about ten minutes I hear muffled voices down the road ahead of me. I think the voices are headed toward me, but this makes no sense. Who is stupid or crazy enough to walking up a mountain in the pitch dark? I have my answer as the voices get close enough for me to see the silhouetted outline of rounded helmets on the figures approaching me. Rounded helmets, and drawn rifles.


I can’t decide whether I should feel safer because there is an army patrol walking at night past me on the side of a mountain in Colombia, or whether I should be concerned that someone in a position of power decided that, for whatever reason, the road where I’m walking in the dark needed to be patrolled by the army.

I move to the other side of the road to let the soldiers pass. They walk on as if I’m invisible, which in the dark, I possibly could be. If I look like a FARC guerilla, or a lost American tourist in a hipster hat, no one seems to care either way.

*          *          *

I finally reach the restaurant mentally noted as The Last Sign of Civilization on my bus ride up the hill. The restaurant is perched on the side of a cliff overlooking the lights of the city, and looks like the kind of place to which people will make a special trip to propose marriage or impress an out-of-town client.

I’m not really in a position to do either. But I figure I will eat a nice meal, have the restaurant call a cab, take a relaxing ride back to the hotel, and put an uneventful end to my night on the mountain. Our crops are saved.

Or so I think. But I’m still in Colombia, and I still have more hell to pay for being an idiot.

I’m tired and hungry, and I wait an excruciating amount of time for actual food to arrive. In order to placate me in the interim, the waiter brings me (as an appetizer? an amuse bouche?) a plate of unsalted popcorn. Not a bowl, but a plate, as if I’m being served an exotic delicacy.

It’s been that kind of night.  I drink my wine, munch my popcorn, and look at the lights of Bogotá, holding vigil for my overpriced meal.

After I finally eat and pay the check, my request to the man behind the restaurant’s bar – and the Spanish necessary to make it – seems simple enough: Please call me a cab to take me back to the city. The bartender looks at me, as if am a FARC guerilla or a lost American tourist in a hipster hat. 

A cab to the city?
Yeah, you know. Down the hill.

Apparently a majority of the clientele here drive their own cars to the restaurant, and when they leave, they drive their own cars home. They don’t get dropped off by a bus, eat a plate of popcorn, and then request a cab to go back to Bogotá. But as if to humor me, the bartender picks up the phone with a this-is-crazy-but-hey-let’s-give-it-a-shot shrug of his shoulders, and punches in a number.

The bartender keeps the phone to his ear for a minute or two while he goes about his bartending. After a while I watch him hang up, and dial again. Maybe it’s another number, maybe it’s the same one. Either way, no one seems to be answering. He looks at me and shrugs.

Is a cab coming?
No, it’s not coming.

“¿Que? Por qué no?”

The bartender explains. It’s a long explanation, all in Spanish of course. From what little I can discern, it’s something about it being a busy Friday night, and cab drivers’ reluctance to drive up into the hills when they can make more money while not having to drive up into the hills. Still doesn’t explain why they don’t answer the phone.

No entiendo.”

The bartender looks at me and shrugs again. The man is full of shrugs.

So. It looks like I’m walking home. I’m tired, my feet hurt, it’s still dark, and I’m still on a mountain. But at least I’m full of popcorn.

*          *          *

It probably takes me another thirty minutes or so to walk the rest of the way down the hillside into Bogotá.  Around the halfway point I discover a concrete staircase, and decide to take it. It’s after 11:00 p.m. now, and I encounter no one. What idiot would be out climbing steps at 11 o’clock on a Friday night?

I mean besides me.

Eventually the steps end and I reach Avenue Alberto Lleras Camargo, the main artery back to Usaquén. It’s so late that the traffic is actually moving.

I’m guessing it’s still another 45 minutes to an hour walk back to the hotel. I search in vain for a taxi. Maybe every cab driver in Bogotá is taking the night off, or maybe headed to the airport to see if anyone’s on the 1 a.m. flight from Dallas. I do see several buses drive by, but I am far past the point of chancing another wayward bus, and another drive back up into the hills.

So I walk. And walk some more.

It’s close to midnight by the time I reach my hotel in Usaquén. I have been walking for so long that my blisters have blisters. I limp and drag my feet over uneven pavement and up steps of the hotel. The look on the night clerk’s face tells me he can’t decide whether I’m a garden-variety stumbling drunk, or the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. The look on my face tells him that it’s been that kind of night.

Colombia really is not what you think. Forget about guerillas, death squads and narco-terrorists. But watch out for those self-inflicted Bataan Death Marches down the side of mountains in the dark because you blindly jump on a bus that looks like it should be going in the right direction.

A good hat might let you fool dim-witted Canadians and get past army patrols. But it just can’t fix stupid.