The Lost City of Pisco Sours

Tessa and I have been climbing Mount Machu Picchu for more than an hour. The view below us is obscured by clouds. The view above us is obscured by clouds. You get the idea. Essentially we’re just climbing in clouds.

I am in the Andes, hiking some 8,000 feet above sea level. Machu Picchu – the famed “Lost City of the Incas” – sits somewhere a thousand feet below us.  It feels like I’ve landed in the opening scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Although I have to say, I’m currently much less worried about rolling boulders and poison darts than I am about dropping dead of a heart attack.

“The top has to be around this next corner,” Tessa says, as I huff my way up the ridiculously steep stone steps a few yards behind her. I said the same thing twenty minutes ago. When one of us repeats it again in a half hour we’ll still be wrong.

I nod and wipe away a small river of sweat running down my forehead. Tessa has a concerned look on her face, as if trying to envision how she’s going to manage to carry my corpse down the mountain.

Tessa is a 20-year-old student from Denver, currently studying in Buenos Aires. She had some free time so she decided to fly to Bolivia and take a bus through the Andes to see Machu Picchu. I won’t tell you exactly what I was doing with my free time when I was 20, but it usually involved a couch, a remote control, and a carton of Marlboro Lights.

“Maybe we should stop and rest a bit,” Tessa says. She’s barely out of breath, so I know she is just being considerate of her somewhat older hiking companion. She is also polite enough not to say, “Maybe we should stop and rest a bit, Grandpa.”

“I’m fine,” I say gamely. But there’s that look on her face again. “Okay,” I say, leaning against the side of a rock. “Maybe just a few minutes.” 

*          *          *

Peru in general, and the area around Machu Picchu in particular - is amazingly beautiful. Yes, I’ve seen mountains before. I’ve seen high mountains before.  But the lush, jungle covered peaks towering over the Urubamba River take stunning to an entirely new level. It’s pretty easy to see why the Incas named this the Sacred Valley, and decided it would be good place to set up an empire.

I know none of this going in. Even though Machu Picchu is world famous, like most Americans I am woefully ignorant about the country and the culture. I vaguely recall something about llamas, pan flutes, and runways built for ancient astronauts. And oh yeah, the Pisco Sour. Big fan of the Pisco Sour.

*          *          *

You are forgiven if you didn’t know that Pisco is a brandy made in Peru and parts of Chile. You might be able to order a Pisco Sour in certain American bars uppity enough to stock the main ingredient (i.e., Pisco), but I doubt you’ll find it on the laminated menu at TGI Friday’s.

In addition to Pisco, the Pisco Sour includes lemon juice, sugar, and a little raw egg white. If you like your beverages without egg froth, or if you are just a salmonella-phobe in general, this is may not be your drink. My advice, however, is to get over it. You risk a lot more gastro-intestinal distress for a lot less reward at the Taco Bell drive-thru.

I first encounter the authentic Peruvian version of the Pisco Sour on the drink-special placards lining the main pedestrian gauntlet of Aguas Calientes, a small town at the base of Machu Picchu. The battle for the tourist dollar is fierce here, with hawkers jumping into the street and trying every English word they know to suck you in to their restaurant. Every hour must be happy, because the “Happy Hour Specials” go on all day.

I see the restaurant directly outside my hotel offers two Pisco Sours for the price of one. Not bad, but I think I can do better. Farther down the hill I spot a place where the offer is three for the price of one. When I eventually reach a restaurant where the going rate is four for one, I decide it’s time to stop for dinner.

*          *          *

I came to Peru with only a vague idea of how to even get to Machu Picchu. After landing in Lima and sleeping a few hours I hop a small plane to the city of Cusco, which, on the map at least, seems to be in Machu Picchu’s general neighborhood. It’s still 70 miles away. I’m told that normally you can take a train from Cusco to the base of Machu Picchu. Except during the rainy season. And yes of course, it is currently the rainy season.

However, if you can make it to the little town of Ollantaytambo about 35 miles up the road, you can take the train the rest of the way up the valley to Aguas Calientes. Getting to Ollantaytambo? The travel options to Ollantaytambo are: a) a very expensive taxi ride, or b) a very cheap ride on a collectivo.

A collectivo is essentially an unmarked white van that drives around a particular neighborhood of Cusco with a driver yelling “Ollantaytambo! Diez soles!” I find the neighborhood, waive down the white van and pay my ten soles (about $3.00), because I am that very special combination of both “trusting” and “cheap.” After a couple of trips around the block several locals and a few other backpacking foreigners hop on the collectivo, my only assurance that a kidnapping is not taking place.

After winding through the city, the collectivo begins to climb a steep hill. We are on a road that looks like it cannot possibly be the road to anywhere, other than to a good spot to dump the bodies. The van weaves through a canyon of half-completed houses, swerving around potholes, stray dogs, and several free-range chickens.

Finally we crest the hill and turn onto “the main road.” It looks pretty much like the previous road, except that now there are four lanes instead of two. What do you want for $3.00? I hold on to the door handle as the collectivo turns right, and drives me into the Andes.

*          *          *

I finally reach Aguas Calientes by train the next day. I am so lazy and indifferent to planning or research that I don’t learn until I arrive that you have to buy a Machu Picchu ticket at an office in town before going to the ruins. In the high season, they can actually sell out weeks in advance. There is no such thing as a walk-up sale.

The tickets for Machu Picchu are multi-tiered and expensive, ranging from around $75 just to visit the ruins, to $85 or more if you want to visit the ruins and climb one of the two mountains at the site.

Do you want to climb Machu Picchu Mountain? the woman at the ticket office asks me. 

For an extra ten bucks? Sure, why not. It’s just a mountain, 9,000 feet up in the Andes.

How hard can it be?

*          *          *

Mount Machu Picchu is the highest of two peaks towering over the Machu Picchu ruins, with a summit of 3,082 meters (9,276 feet). It is the only mountain I’ve ever heard of that has actual hours of operation, roughly equating to that of a bank lobby on Saturday. The mountain is only “open” – in the sense that you can only start climbing it - from seven to eleven in the morning. The logic is not initially clear to me, but I later suspect this is done to give the authorities time to clear the bodies off the trail before dinnertime.

In addition to the admission ticket, yet another ticket is needed for a bus from Aguas Calientes up to the gates of Machu Picchu. A round-trip bus ticket cost $24, which deeply offends my cheapskate sensibility. I decide to get a one-way ticket for $12, and walk back down into town when I’m finished. You can’t walk downhill? What, are your legs broken?

I meet my de facto hiking buddy Tessa for the first time on the 7 a.m. bus from Aguas Calientes to Machu Picchu. At the entrance to the trail up Mount Machu Picchu Mountain, we are required to sign a ledger that lists our name, address, passport number, and age.

I see Tessa’s age when she signs in. The shoes I’m wearing may in fact be older than Tessa.

I actually have completed a few marathons in my day (none in this particular decade, no), and I like to think of myself as reasonably fit, with reasonableness being a relative concept. But climbing Mount Machu Picchu makes me feel like a two-pack-a-day smoker at the Empire State Building who decided to take the stairs. 

Maybe the Incas were exceptionally tall, because the stone steps of the trail seem twice as high as steps used by normal humans. We are nearly alone on the trail. Even at one of the most visited tourist sites in the world, there are very few others bold or stupid enough to be climbing this particular mountain at eight in the morning.

It takes an hour and forty-five minutes to reach the summit. We’re now above the clouds, but nearly everything below remains obscured. No sign of Machu Picchu. When we arrive about a dozen other hikers are at the summit, sitting and waiting. I am the oldest in attendance by a good 25 years.  A group of young Argentines we passed on the trail arrive after us. They immediately plop on the ground and fire up a doobie.

An hour later the clouds are still there, and Tessa and I are about to conclude that we climbed the mountain for nothing. But then it happens. The clouds part - as if in a dream sequence accompanied by harp music - and the ruins of Machu Picchu appear, a few thousand feet below. 

Not many people in the world will ever have this view. Totally worth the threat of cardiac arrest.

*          *          *

After taking a few thousand pictures Tessa and I head down the mountain toward the ruins. As we start off, “down” seems like a magical word, the good ying to the evil yang of “up.” But the steep stone steps begin to inflict a pounding on my legs, first in the quads and then to my knees. Why do I have the sense that I’m going to feel this later?

I also get another sense as we make our way down the mountain. I’ve been drinking a lot of water, and I haven’t peed since, oh, I don’t know, six thirty in the morning. It’s now close to noon. Granted, almost all liquid left my body in the form of sweat during the assent a few hours ago, but my bladder is letting me know that its patience is nearing an end.

“The first thing I probably need to do once we get down,” I tell Tessa, “is find a bathroom.”

She nods, but imagine she is ticking off one more box on the checklist in her head entitled “Reasons Not to Hike With the Elderly.”

*          *          *

Here is one of the Mysteries of Machu Picchu that you probably did not read about in your ninth-grade history book: There are no bathrooms on the grounds of Machu Picchu. They do have llamas. Llamas, but no bathrooms.

I go another two hours exploring the ancient ruins with Tessa and the other tourists, instructing my bladder to stop bothering me because there’s not a damn thing I can do about it at the moment. I’m not leaving, and no, bladder, I’m not taking a leak behind a thousand-year-old Inca sun temple as you have suggested. Just hang on.

Tessa and I eventually part ways and I head for the entrance/exit, where bathrooms are mercifully located. It’s now well after 2:00 p.m. I make a mental note to check later and see if I just set some kind of urine-retention endurance record.

*          *          *

The ruins of Machu Picchu truly are amazing, but my walk back down to Aguas Calientes becomes my own personal Highway to Hell.  The feeling in my knees goes from discomfort to stabbing pain. Every downward step feels like arthroscopic surgery without anesthesia.

I start on the trail to Aguas Calientes with another hiking buddy, a young Bolivian woman now living in Atlanta, but she abandons me halfway down for two much-less-hobbled Colombian girls.  I send them off with an exhausted “Go on, save yourselves” waive.

I’ve never had any problems with my knees, but I’m now afraid that a single day at Machu Picchu has crippled me for life, the victim of some long-standing Inca curse. Even as I reach level ground it’s still another half hour walk into town. Yes, I do realize my error in judgment: a $12 return bus ticket probably is less expensive than the wheelchair I’m likely to need for the next six months.

Still, I drag myself into Agua Calientes a proud man. I climbed a mountain at Machu Friggin’ Picchu, damn it. On a full bladder!

At least I’ll have that story to entertain my rehab nurses.

*          *          *

You know what really relieves the aches and pains of a day of climbing up and down Mount Machu Picchu? A four-for-one Pisco Sour drink special!

Maybe a couple of drink specials.

*          *          *

It’s warm and steamy back in Lima, especially compared to the mountain climate I’ve been living in for the past week. It took a few days, but I am now walking again without whimpering or using a cane.

I have one day left in Peru before I take a ridiculously early (or is it ridiculously late?) flight home at 1:45 the next morning.  In two weeks I have seen stunning mountains and mind-boggling ruins and dazzling postcard sunsets over the ocean.

I vow to spend my last day doing something equally auspicious. I step out into the tropical humidity to locate the source of what I have deemed to be Peru’s greatest contribution to modern society. I set out for Old Lima, to find the birthplace of the Pisco Sour.

The story goes that the Pisco Sour was invented in the early 20^th Century by an American named Victor Morris, who came to Peru to work on the railroad but ended up behind a bar instead. He took a Whiskey Sour recipe, replaced the Whiskey with Pisco, and a hundred years later I’m buying four of Victor’s drinks for the price of one at the foot of Machu Picchu.

I for one am thankful that the railroad gig didn’t work out.

I have it on the authority of two Lima taxi drivers (and that’s pretty much all the authority that I need) that Morris invented his drink in the bar of the Hotel Maury, located on the edge of the Old City. I envision a grand, ornate, turn-of-the-century luxury hotel, with a bronze plaque discreetly posted in an opulent, red-carpeted lobby marking the historical significance of the site.

At least I got the plaque part right.

It’s 92 in the shade as I wind my way through the noonday crowds toward the Hotel Maury. I see from my map that the hotel is a few blocks up ahead on the corner of Jirón Ucuyali and Jirón Carabaya, just on the edge of the Lima’s historic center. I put away the map, as I’m sure such a venerable, historic attraction will be easy to spot.

Instead, what I spot in the street ahead are metal barricades, blocking the way in to the historic center. About a half dozen helmeted police with stun guns and Plexiglas shields are standing at the barricade, as if the shit is expected to go down before lunchtime.

What the hell?

I take a right, a left and another left, looking for a non-barricaded way into the Plaza de Armas. It’s the same set up on the street leading in from the east: barricade, police, riot shields, stun guns. The next street I try is exactly the same.

I look over my shoulder for a hoard of protestors or terrorists or disgruntled pensioners ready to storm the Bastille. With the exception of a couple of street kids banging on drums for change, the anarchy is non-existent.

And despite the disproportionate show of force, I see the police are letting some people through the barricades into the plaza. I shrug and decide to give it a shot. If I can get through they’ll let anybody in.

I’m expecting a question, or a request for an ID, or something, but I’m waived through the barricaded gate without incident. Apparently I don’t look sufficiently disgruntled to alarm anyone.

*          *          *

After eating lunch and kicking around the Plaza de Armas a while, I resume my interrupted search for the Hotel Maury. I find Jirón Carabaya and walk toward the first police barricade I encountered, this time from the inside.  The barricade is still there, but no longer guarded. The police appear to literally be Out to Lunch, Plexiglas shields left leaning against a building unattended.

Apparently the riot has been canceled due to lack of outrage.

I look at the street signs. I am at the corner of Jirón Ucuyali and Jirón Carabaya, exactly where the Hotel Maury is supposed to be. But there is no grand, ornate, turn-of-the-century luxury hotel anywhere in sight. What I see instead is a dusty, nearly abandoned looking building with an ugly 1970s façade. A dirty glass door and two darkened windows are shaded by black awnings covered with bird shit and what looks like a good forty years of accumulated urban grime.

The windows are blocked with cardboard placards making it is impossible to see inside. One placard proclaims “Pisco Es Peru!” The other appears to say “Pisco Sour El Tro,” although the last word is essentially unreadable. I now see the bronze placard next to the doorway. This is indeed the side (and currently locked) entrance of the famed Bar Maury, birthplace of the Pisco Sour.

The Hotel Maury’s main entrance around the corner is every bit as sad, with about a dozen tattered international flags hanging limply over the awning, as if the hotel is prepared to surrender in twelve different languages.

Of course I’m going in. Although I admit that part of me wonders if during Happy Hour at the Hotel Maury every Pisco Sour comes with a complimentary prostitute.

The lobby inside is dark and apparently “under construction,” for how long would be anyone’s guess. It’s hard for me to believe that anything in the hotel is actually open for business, but sure enough, through the darkness I see a doorway leading into what looks suspiciously like a bar.

I head for the lighted entrance, halfway expecting the sound of gunplay.

*          *          *

Remember in The Wizard of Oz when everything is in black and white, until Dorothy crashes the house and opens the door to a fantastic Technicolor world of singing flowers and dancing Munchkins? It’s a little like that walking from the lobby into the bar of the Hotel Maury. Except in place of the Lollipop Guild is a bartender named Alejandro.

Incredibly, the interior of the Hotel Maury bar looks as if it has been transported straight out of a Hemingway novel, with a polished bar top, brass foot rails, a carved wooden ceiling and a wall of large, turn-of-the-century oil paintings. If Hollywood were to build a stage set of the Birthplace of the Pisco Sour, it would look exactly like this.

How something this amazing can possibly exist inside a building that from the outside looks like a place you rent by the hour to shoot up heroin is a greater mystery than the absence of bathrooms at Machu Picchu.

Thirsty and still in a bit of a daze, I ask Alejandro if he can make me a Pisco Sour.

Of course, he tells me in Spanish. They were invented here, you know.

Yes, I’ve heard that.

Just one more story they’ll never believe when I tell it thirty years from now, again and again, down at the old folks home.

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.