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.
* * *
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.
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.
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