Just Another Day At the Office
Before I showed up to Medellin Bill had filled me in on the great business idea he had been playing with for the last several weeks. Saddles! “You mean like for horses?” I asked him at first? Yup, turns out Colombia is known for making high quality, hand-made leather saddles. “But I don’t know anything about horses or saddles” I told Bill. “That’s ok” he assured me, “neither do I.”
Bill is one of those guys you want to hang out with just so you can hear his stories. It’s been 5 years since he sold his commercial lighting business and he was ready to do something, anything again. It’s been at least 9 months since I put in an honest day of work, and I guess I was ready for the same. Bill had the entrepreneurial spirit, and I was all for playing apprentice. We’ve always had a great time hanging out together, probably because he reminds me so much of myself only 20 some years older, and I assume the same in the other direction. I was sure this would be no different.
So we spent the next two weeks visiting various saddlery shops to check out their stocks, learning about the shipping routes through the Carribean, discussing visa requirements with lawyers over three martini lunches and learning the right way, and the wrong way, to negotiate a contract in Medellin. We learned about the difference between fiber glass hulls versus wood, metal horns versus leather, and the thickness required to etch patterns on leather surfaces.
In our down time, which was fairly common, we argued about the usage of the subjunctive tense in Spanish, experimented with different footwork for performing the “Dile que no”, smoked dried out Cuban cigars, made several promises to quit drinking rum and comiserated in our tortured love lives.
With the recent news out about Fidel we decided we should try any get Bill’s half written travelogue about Cuba tidied up. Then we talked about how cheaply designer jeans could be made in Colombia and that somehow worked its way towards exporting and distributing a well known line of Colombian lingerie to the US.
Bill started to apologize at some point, “I don’t want to make it sound like we’re just throwing a bunch of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks, but…” Not to worry, I assured him. “Throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks is one of my favorite pastimes.”
We had both agreed early on that the whole point of this exercise wasn't just to make a bunch of money. Although, that would be nice of course. It was about financing a lifestyle. Well actually we went back and forth on it quite a bit. After about 45 minutes and half a cigar we agreed it was more like 50% about the lifestyle and maybe 30% about making money and a remaining 20% about just having something to do.
After three weeks we’ve gotten to the point where we have about 4 or 5 lines in the water. The plan now is to see which one, if any, of them gets a bite. I’m getting ready to continue my journey north, head to Santa Marta and find another beach to bask in. Maybe one of these projects will turn into something, maybe not, either way it certainly felt good to be something close to relatively productive again. I suppose that’s what you call hanging out with a good friend for 3 weeks.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Songs in the Key of Life
The apartment that Bill and I rented had an agonizingly slow cable modem. It was enough to drive a man to drink. But I had my laptop with me and plenty of free space on my iPod so I knew what was to be done. My sister had done a pretty good job filling the thing up with music before she gave it to me, but there were a million songs running through my head that I wanted to hear again.
After a few days, a new found appreciation for BitTorrent and 15 GBs I was feeling like my old self again. And just in time too. Next Monday was some national holiday, Colombians sure do love their national holidays. They have something like 30 days off a year, which makes for a lot of 3 day weekends and great excuses to travel. Marta and I decided to head to Armenia to check out the Parque Nacional de Café. And my goal was to get enough new music on my iPod to keep us occupied for the 7 hour bus ride each way.
Lately I’ve been hearing Crosy Stills Nash and Young in my head a lot. Just the one song, they keep telling me to love the one I’m with. It sounds like such good advice, but like most bits of good advice it’s much harder to put into practice.
The trip to Armenia started off most disastrously. A ½ hour into our journey the skies burst open and let out one of the torrential rains that Medellin is famous for. Traffic came to a standstill and we sat around and inhaled diesel fumes. Turns out some power lines were knocked down, combined with the long holiday weekend and that meant that the single road out of the valley in which Medellin was nestled in was packed from end to end.
Eventually we did make it to Armenia. On the way there Marta found one of the few Spanish songs I had on my iPod, “Algo Mas”. Not the version by La 5ra Estacion, but the one from a relatively unknown Cuban vocalist I’d fallen in love with. In what will no doubt prove to be one of the most ironic twists of fate I’ve ever stumbled across, Marta decided she loved the song and it perfectly summed up our relationship. She must have played that song 100 times over the span of one weekend.
Armenia is gorgeous beyond compare. The rolling green hills you see everywhere in Colombia are full of coffee and banana plants and a nice cool breeze keeps the heat of the sun at bay. Marta and I spent the entire next day exploring Parque Nacional del Café, walking over bamboo bridges, riding pontoon boats out on the little man-made like and pretending to be Juan Valdez.
As I went through all the movements and said all the things that sounded so right and felt so wrong I couldn’t help but hearing Fiona Snapple in my head telling me about feeling like a criminal. I’ve come to the conclusion that doing the right thing is really hard. In fact, that’s how you know it’s the right thing to do, because you just really don’t want to. It’s far more easier to just do what will get you through the next moment without having to feel the pain and anguish that accompany the truth, only the pangs of guilt that eat you up inside.
As we found ourselves traveling back to the north on our ride back home I couldn’t keep my eyes open. As I laid my head down to sleep I put on Dylan’s “Idiot Wind” I glanced out the window and watched as the Colombian country side turned slowly into autumn. Things weren’t going as planned, they seldom ever do, but I though to myself I just can’t help it if I’m lucky.
The apartment that Bill and I rented had an agonizingly slow cable modem. It was enough to drive a man to drink. But I had my laptop with me and plenty of free space on my iPod so I knew what was to be done. My sister had done a pretty good job filling the thing up with music before she gave it to me, but there were a million songs running through my head that I wanted to hear again.
After a few days, a new found appreciation for BitTorrent and 15 GBs I was feeling like my old self again. And just in time too. Next Monday was some national holiday, Colombians sure do love their national holidays. They have something like 30 days off a year, which makes for a lot of 3 day weekends and great excuses to travel. Marta and I decided to head to Armenia to check out the Parque Nacional de Café. And my goal was to get enough new music on my iPod to keep us occupied for the 7 hour bus ride each way.
Lately I’ve been hearing Crosy Stills Nash and Young in my head a lot. Just the one song, they keep telling me to love the one I’m with. It sounds like such good advice, but like most bits of good advice it’s much harder to put into practice.
The trip to Armenia started off most disastrously. A ½ hour into our journey the skies burst open and let out one of the torrential rains that Medellin is famous for. Traffic came to a standstill and we sat around and inhaled diesel fumes. Turns out some power lines were knocked down, combined with the long holiday weekend and that meant that the single road out of the valley in which Medellin was nestled in was packed from end to end.
Eventually we did make it to Armenia. On the way there Marta found one of the few Spanish songs I had on my iPod, “Algo Mas”. Not the version by La 5ra Estacion, but the one from a relatively unknown Cuban vocalist I’d fallen in love with. In what will no doubt prove to be one of the most ironic twists of fate I’ve ever stumbled across, Marta decided she loved the song and it perfectly summed up our relationship. She must have played that song 100 times over the span of one weekend.
Armenia is gorgeous beyond compare. The rolling green hills you see everywhere in Colombia are full of coffee and banana plants and a nice cool breeze keeps the heat of the sun at bay. Marta and I spent the entire next day exploring Parque Nacional del Café, walking over bamboo bridges, riding pontoon boats out on the little man-made like and pretending to be Juan Valdez.
As I went through all the movements and said all the things that sounded so right and felt so wrong I couldn’t help but hearing Fiona Snapple in my head telling me about feeling like a criminal. I’ve come to the conclusion that doing the right thing is really hard. In fact, that’s how you know it’s the right thing to do, because you just really don’t want to. It’s far more easier to just do what will get you through the next moment without having to feel the pain and anguish that accompany the truth, only the pangs of guilt that eat you up inside.
As we found ourselves traveling back to the north on our ride back home I couldn’t keep my eyes open. As I laid my head down to sleep I put on Dylan’s “Idiot Wind” I glanced out the window and watched as the Colombian country side turned slowly into autumn. Things weren’t going as planned, they seldom ever do, but I though to myself I just can’t help it if I’m lucky.
I’m not dead yet
Turns out if you happen to travel to a country with a history of violence and bloodshed and a 40 year old civil war and not talk to anyone for a couple of weeks, people start to wonder what happened. “I wonder if he got kidnapped?” they say. “Maybe I should drop him a line” you hear. Well you need not worry, the times I have been living in indeed have been exciting but neither the Farc, the ELN nor the Colombian paramilitaries have succeeded in, or to the best of my knowledge, attempted to kidnap me.
And truly in a city like Medellin one should be far more aware of the desperation that rampant poverty produces than the dangerous mixture of revolutionary political ideology and the ungodly profits of narco-trafficers. Truth be told, the civil war that’s been raging in this country for as long as anyone can remember is no where near over, and shows no signs of ever ending. While Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe has succeeded in securing the populated commercial centers and the highways connecting them, the war rages onward in the jungles.
These days it’s difficult to know exactly what’s going on. The Farc, the largest, best equipped and financed terrorist group in the world has been dealt a series of blows as of late. But the obscene profits that they make from the drug trade with the western world means they can afford to keep doing business. In addition to financing their operations through trafficking cocaine and heroin they make a pretty penny in the kidnapping business, which as I understand it, is a well organized and highly developed operation.
As of late though, mostly as a result of the Bush Administration’s Plan Colombia, Westerners enjoy a higher degree of security here than they ever have before, which honestly isn’t saying much. But various paramilitary groups, who most believe are inadvertently funded through the foreign aid received from the United States, have been somewhat successfully waging war with the Farc for the last several years. They’ve put the word out that if a Westerner is captured, they will go after the kidnappers fighting fire with fire, executing family members, burning down homes and destroying entire villages. And since these groups aren’t directly controlled by the government, Uribe and the military can turn a blind eye to these tactics and claim they didn’t order them.
The biggest problem with the Paramilitary groups is that after they have won a battle with the Farc or the ELN they often take over the narco-trafficing and kidnapping operations left behind. And this has left many wondering if the cure is worse than the disease. Hey it’s hard to say no to a pretty profit made from a hard days work.
In theory, the Farc uses the profits from these nefarious activities to fund their communist ideology, but few believe that this war has anything to do with economic theory. The biggest challenge that Uribe faces in dealing with the Farc is that he has nothing to offer them. They are fairly content being the most successful outlaws in the world. So instead Uribe is trying to make the cost of doing business so high for the Farc that they will have no choice but to find a peaceful solution. Unfortunately the gross margins in the market place of the Farc are quite excellent and they can afford to keep doing this for the foreseeable future.
The ELN, the other smaller Marxist group of guerillas, who have never manged to establish as large or successful an organization as the Farc, has been hit where it hurts, in the pocket-book. The war raged by the Paramilitary groups has left them trying to sue for peace with what seem like desperate attacks on civilians to establish some sort of presence in the legitimate government of Colombia. They’ve even managed to successfully enlist the help of Cuba and Venezuela and hold several rounds of meaningless negotiations with the Uribe government.
Given the billions of dollars poured into this project, it’s still amazing that no one really knows if any progress is actually being made. The number of kidnappings is down dramatically and bombs are no longer going off in the streets of Medellin and Bogota. 80% of the coca fields in the country have been eradicated, but the street price of coke in the US is the same as ever and the amount of cocaine exported from Colombia has stayed constant. It seems that the Farc, the ELN, and the Paramilitaries have all just learned to import the raw product from Bolivia and Ecuador before processing it and shipping it out themselves.
Throughout all of this the typical city-dwelling Colombian go about their daily lives, desperately trying to stay blissfully unaware of the war that continues to devastate this country. And only when the passing gringo pushes them on the latest news or a point of view will they grudgingly acquiesce and mumble of a short sound bite, before changing the subject back to more important matters like futbol or whether the girls from Medellin are more beautiful than the ones from Cali.
Turns out if you happen to travel to a country with a history of violence and bloodshed and a 40 year old civil war and not talk to anyone for a couple of weeks, people start to wonder what happened. “I wonder if he got kidnapped?” they say. “Maybe I should drop him a line” you hear. Well you need not worry, the times I have been living in indeed have been exciting but neither the Farc, the ELN nor the Colombian paramilitaries have succeeded in, or to the best of my knowledge, attempted to kidnap me.
And truly in a city like Medellin one should be far more aware of the desperation that rampant poverty produces than the dangerous mixture of revolutionary political ideology and the ungodly profits of narco-trafficers. Truth be told, the civil war that’s been raging in this country for as long as anyone can remember is no where near over, and shows no signs of ever ending. While Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe has succeeded in securing the populated commercial centers and the highways connecting them, the war rages onward in the jungles.
These days it’s difficult to know exactly what’s going on. The Farc, the largest, best equipped and financed terrorist group in the world has been dealt a series of blows as of late. But the obscene profits that they make from the drug trade with the western world means they can afford to keep doing business. In addition to financing their operations through trafficking cocaine and heroin they make a pretty penny in the kidnapping business, which as I understand it, is a well organized and highly developed operation.
As of late though, mostly as a result of the Bush Administration’s Plan Colombia, Westerners enjoy a higher degree of security here than they ever have before, which honestly isn’t saying much. But various paramilitary groups, who most believe are inadvertently funded through the foreign aid received from the United States, have been somewhat successfully waging war with the Farc for the last several years. They’ve put the word out that if a Westerner is captured, they will go after the kidnappers fighting fire with fire, executing family members, burning down homes and destroying entire villages. And since these groups aren’t directly controlled by the government, Uribe and the military can turn a blind eye to these tactics and claim they didn’t order them.
The biggest problem with the Paramilitary groups is that after they have won a battle with the Farc or the ELN they often take over the narco-trafficing and kidnapping operations left behind. And this has left many wondering if the cure is worse than the disease. Hey it’s hard to say no to a pretty profit made from a hard days work.
In theory, the Farc uses the profits from these nefarious activities to fund their communist ideology, but few believe that this war has anything to do with economic theory. The biggest challenge that Uribe faces in dealing with the Farc is that he has nothing to offer them. They are fairly content being the most successful outlaws in the world. So instead Uribe is trying to make the cost of doing business so high for the Farc that they will have no choice but to find a peaceful solution. Unfortunately the gross margins in the market place of the Farc are quite excellent and they can afford to keep doing this for the foreseeable future.
The ELN, the other smaller Marxist group of guerillas, who have never manged to establish as large or successful an organization as the Farc, has been hit where it hurts, in the pocket-book. The war raged by the Paramilitary groups has left them trying to sue for peace with what seem like desperate attacks on civilians to establish some sort of presence in the legitimate government of Colombia. They’ve even managed to successfully enlist the help of Cuba and Venezuela and hold several rounds of meaningless negotiations with the Uribe government.
Given the billions of dollars poured into this project, it’s still amazing that no one really knows if any progress is actually being made. The number of kidnappings is down dramatically and bombs are no longer going off in the streets of Medellin and Bogota. 80% of the coca fields in the country have been eradicated, but the street price of coke in the US is the same as ever and the amount of cocaine exported from Colombia has stayed constant. It seems that the Farc, the ELN, and the Paramilitaries have all just learned to import the raw product from Bolivia and Ecuador before processing it and shipping it out themselves.
Throughout all of this the typical city-dwelling Colombian go about their daily lives, desperately trying to stay blissfully unaware of the war that continues to devastate this country. And only when the passing gringo pushes them on the latest news or a point of view will they grudgingly acquiesce and mumble of a short sound bite, before changing the subject back to more important matters like futbol or whether the girls from Medellin are more beautiful than the ones from Cali.
Monday, August 07, 2006
Heading Back Home
The hostel that Jose had found for me in Cali was all full by the time I finally made it into town. Maybe one of these days I’ll finally learn my lesson and decide to make reservations instead of just showing up places and hoping for the best, but I kinda doubt it. But they knew of another hotel pretty close by and that was that. Jose had offered to let me crash on his couch, but after the last couple weeks of hard traveling and the experience of losing my bag I was really looking forward to a place with a comfortable bed and a good shower. I found both without too much of a problem.
I was hoping to spend my next two days exploring Cali before heading out to Medellin. But instead I spent most of my free time aimlessly walking around like I like to do and buying clothes. I had forgotten how much I detested spending time in malls but since I only had the clothes on my back there really weren’t many other options.
After Jose got off work he and “La Duena de su Corazon” took me out and showed me around Cali. We spent a while getting caught up and I told him what I had been up to since we parted ways in Rio. I told him all my favorite stories of places I had been and things I had seen, I do love telling a good story after all. While we were out Bill, my crazy gringo role-model, called me and let me know he had everything under control in Medellin and would have a place for me to stay all lined up. This was actually an issue because I was planning on showing up in Medellin on the Friday of the Feria de Flores, the biggest party in all of Colombia, and hotel rooms were not easy to come by.
As I sat and reveled in this great news I marveled at how nice it was to have friends you can count on. It’s especially cool to have friends you can count on who live in really cool places in the world and are more than willing to lend you a hand and get you straightened out. I’ve managed to make it through the last 8 months or so by depending on the kindness of strangers and the folks I know and love alike, and I’ve only occasionally been disappointed.
I didn’t really know what I was going to be doing in Medellin or how long I was going to stay. The stop in Cali was really just an excuse to drop in a on a friend and break up the bus ride all they way from Quito. But I was looking forward to seeing Bill again and collecting the $200 he owed me. And well there were some loose ends that needed tying up there as well. I decided a while ago that Medellin is my favorite city in the entire world. All it lacks is a beach and good cheap food, although the availability of good fresh fruit is second only to Brazil.
Bill and I had been trading e-mail over the last several months about working together on some projects while we were together in Medellin. Bill seemed bored of just hanging out and was looking for something to challenge him and I was starting to suffer from not feeling productive. And Colombia seemed to provide the perfect opportunity to setup a business dealing with exporting goods into the United States, especially with the Free Trade agreement that was getting ready to be ratified by the two governments. Lots of ideas and no one to report to but ourselves, I wonder what kind of trouble the two of us can manage to get into.
The hostel that Jose had found for me in Cali was all full by the time I finally made it into town. Maybe one of these days I’ll finally learn my lesson and decide to make reservations instead of just showing up places and hoping for the best, but I kinda doubt it. But they knew of another hotel pretty close by and that was that. Jose had offered to let me crash on his couch, but after the last couple weeks of hard traveling and the experience of losing my bag I was really looking forward to a place with a comfortable bed and a good shower. I found both without too much of a problem.
I was hoping to spend my next two days exploring Cali before heading out to Medellin. But instead I spent most of my free time aimlessly walking around like I like to do and buying clothes. I had forgotten how much I detested spending time in malls but since I only had the clothes on my back there really weren’t many other options.
After Jose got off work he and “La Duena de su Corazon” took me out and showed me around Cali. We spent a while getting caught up and I told him what I had been up to since we parted ways in Rio. I told him all my favorite stories of places I had been and things I had seen, I do love telling a good story after all. While we were out Bill, my crazy gringo role-model, called me and let me know he had everything under control in Medellin and would have a place for me to stay all lined up. This was actually an issue because I was planning on showing up in Medellin on the Friday of the Feria de Flores, the biggest party in all of Colombia, and hotel rooms were not easy to come by.
As I sat and reveled in this great news I marveled at how nice it was to have friends you can count on. It’s especially cool to have friends you can count on who live in really cool places in the world and are more than willing to lend you a hand and get you straightened out. I’ve managed to make it through the last 8 months or so by depending on the kindness of strangers and the folks I know and love alike, and I’ve only occasionally been disappointed.
I didn’t really know what I was going to be doing in Medellin or how long I was going to stay. The stop in Cali was really just an excuse to drop in a on a friend and break up the bus ride all they way from Quito. But I was looking forward to seeing Bill again and collecting the $200 he owed me. And well there were some loose ends that needed tying up there as well. I decided a while ago that Medellin is my favorite city in the entire world. All it lacks is a beach and good cheap food, although the availability of good fresh fruit is second only to Brazil.
Bill and I had been trading e-mail over the last several months about working together on some projects while we were together in Medellin. Bill seemed bored of just hanging out and was looking for something to challenge him and I was starting to suffer from not feeling productive. And Colombia seemed to provide the perfect opportunity to setup a business dealing with exporting goods into the United States, especially with the Free Trade agreement that was getting ready to be ratified by the two governments. Lots of ideas and no one to report to but ourselves, I wonder what kind of trouble the two of us can manage to get into.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
Come on, how bad could it possibly be?
In the last several months I’ve had more than a handful of people warn me that I was being too lackadaisical, that I wasn’t being careful enough. I’d generally just wave those warnings away saying “well I’ve been doing the same thing for the last 6 months and nothing bad has happened yet.” Every time I said that I’d cringe a little bit inside. I’m not a superstitious person, but even I felt that I shouldn’t be laughing in the face of fate quite so openly.
Our alarm went of at 4:15 in the AM which and things kinda went downhill from there. Asma’s flight was leaving super early and I was going to the airport to see her off. It was fun having her around for 3 weeks. I don’t think we really got on each others nerves, which is pretty surprising knowing how annoying I am.
But it was cool seeing some things through her eyes. I heard a lot of “well I’ve never done that before” and it was a good feeling being able to show her some things I thought were cool and have her think they were cool too. Before she left we went over some of our adventures, hitching a ride for us and our bikes in the back of that families pickup outside of Banos, the little 10 year old girl whose mother happily let her go off with two crazy gringos she met 5 minutes earlier to cross rivers and dodge snakes on the way to that spectacular waterfall in their backyard, having our tour guide insist we hop the fence and take pictures with those 4000 year old relics.
But she was heading back to the US and I was going towards Cali for a couple of days before heading to Medellin. When I got to the bus terminal I found out most of the busses towards Tulcan, the border town on the Ecuadorean side were cancelled. Appare
ntly there was a strike going on for some reason or another. I was told my best bet was to head to Ibarra and hope I could catch a bus from there. So off I went.
Getting to Ibarra was no problem but most of the busses from there to Tulcan were cancelled as well and the few that were still running were packed to the point that there was no chance that I was getting on their with my two loaded backpacks. After waiting on the side of the road for two hours I did what I do from time to time, I decided to throw money at the problem and make it go away. That meant turning a $2.50 bus ride into a $40 cab ride. I met a Colombian, an Ecuadorean and a baby that were also heading to Cali who were willing to help out with the cab ride.
The two hours in the cab went by fast, much better than those busses that stop ever 5 minutes for some reason or another. But as we got to Tulcan we realized what the fuss was all about. It turns out the transportation workers of Tulcan were trying to unionize and coordinate the fares to the city. And they were going about doing this by shutting down motorized traffic in and out of the city. That meant we were carrying our bags by hand around their blockade and then taking a camioneta to the next blockade where we would take a taxi to the border. This was no small task given all the luggage and the baby my two traveling mates had with them.
Everything went find until the last taxi ride. Somewhere between getting the exit stamp out of Ecuador and the entry stamp into Colombia my brand new backpack with all my clothes got lost, stolen or misplaced. My new friends were wonderful and jumped through all the various hoops
to enlist the help of the Colombian DAS, the Ecuadorean border guard and the local police of Tulcan, who were all equally nice but unfortunately couldn´t really do much at this point. After four hours my bag was no where to be found.
It was cold and raining, the baby and somehow managed to stay calm through the whole ordeal but was starting to get a little cranky and we were already hours behind schedule with no hope of getting to Cali until early the next morning. Yohana, the Colombian, asked me what I wanted to do. Let´s go to Cali, I said, I can buy new clothes there.
As I sat in the bus trying to ignore the guy pitching ginseng I tried to make sense of what just happened and figure out what to do next. I was left with nothing but my electronics gear, my snorkeling equipment, 3 books and the clothes on my back. But I knew things were going to be ok. I always said that as long as I had my passport and my wallet I could get myself out of any trouble I found myself in, and now I was going to put that theory to the test.
Yohana told me recline the seat in the bus back into her lap and try to get some sleep. She gave me the blanket she had been using to keep her 8 month daughter dry. Before we pulled into Cali she gave me her brother’s phone number and told me to use it to get a hold of her if I needed anything.
I suppose if I had been more careful this wouldn´t have happened. If I had planned a little more thoroughly or thought things out more fully or been more aware of the c
razy senile taxi driver tying my bag to the back of his car. But that hadn´t happened and I doubt they will happen in the future either. 28 hours after my alarm went off I got off the bus in Cali. Things had not gone at all according to plan, but my heart was not heavy. It was light and it was free. I have nothing but love and affection for all the people I´ve traveled with.
In the last several months I’ve had more than a handful of people warn me that I was being too lackadaisical, that I wasn’t being careful enough. I’d generally just wave those warnings away saying “well I’ve been doing the same thing for the last 6 months and nothing bad has happened yet.” Every time I said that I’d cringe a little bit inside. I’m not a superstitious person, but even I felt that I shouldn’t be laughing in the face of fate quite so openly.
Our alarm went of at 4:15 in the AM which and things kinda went downhill from there. Asma’s flight was leaving super early and I was going to the airport to see her off. It was fun having her around for 3 weeks. I don’t think we really got on each others nerves, which is pretty surprising knowing how annoying I am.
But it was cool seeing some things through her eyes. I heard a lot of “well I’ve never done that before” and it was a good feeling being able to show her some things I thought were cool and have her think they were cool too. Before she left we went over some of our adventures, hitching a ride for us and our bikes in the back of that families pickup outside of Banos, the little 10 year old girl whose mother happily let her go off with two crazy gringos she met 5 minutes earlier to cross rivers and dodge snakes on the way to that spectacular waterfall in their backyard, having our tour guide insist we hop the fence and take pictures with those 4000 year old relics.
But she was heading back to the US and I was going towards Cali for a couple of days before heading to Medellin. When I got to the bus terminal I found out most of the busses towards Tulcan, the border town on the Ecuadorean side were cancelled. Appare
ntly there was a strike going on for some reason or another. I was told my best bet was to head to Ibarra and hope I could catch a bus from there. So off I went.Getting to Ibarra was no problem but most of the busses from there to Tulcan were cancelled as well and the few that were still running were packed to the point that there was no chance that I was getting on their with my two loaded backpacks. After waiting on the side of the road for two hours I did what I do from time to time, I decided to throw money at the problem and make it go away. That meant turning a $2.50 bus ride into a $40 cab ride. I met a Colombian, an Ecuadorean and a baby that were also heading to Cali who were willing to help out with the cab ride.
The two hours in the cab went by fast, much better than those busses that stop ever 5 minutes for some reason or another. But as we got to Tulcan we realized what the fuss was all about. It turns out the transportation workers of Tulcan were trying to unionize and coordinate the fares to the city. And they were going about doing this by shutting down motorized traffic in and out of the city. That meant we were carrying our bags by hand around their blockade and then taking a camioneta to the next blockade where we would take a taxi to the border. This was no small task given all the luggage and the baby my two traveling mates had with them.
Everything went find until the last taxi ride. Somewhere between getting the exit stamp out of Ecuador and the entry stamp into Colombia my brand new backpack with all my clothes got lost, stolen or misplaced. My new friends were wonderful and jumped through all the various hoops
to enlist the help of the Colombian DAS, the Ecuadorean border guard and the local police of Tulcan, who were all equally nice but unfortunately couldn´t really do much at this point. After four hours my bag was no where to be found.It was cold and raining, the baby and somehow managed to stay calm through the whole ordeal but was starting to get a little cranky and we were already hours behind schedule with no hope of getting to Cali until early the next morning. Yohana, the Colombian, asked me what I wanted to do. Let´s go to Cali, I said, I can buy new clothes there.
As I sat in the bus trying to ignore the guy pitching ginseng I tried to make sense of what just happened and figure out what to do next. I was left with nothing but my electronics gear, my snorkeling equipment, 3 books and the clothes on my back. But I knew things were going to be ok. I always said that as long as I had my passport and my wallet I could get myself out of any trouble I found myself in, and now I was going to put that theory to the test.
Yohana told me recline the seat in the bus back into her lap and try to get some sleep. She gave me the blanket she had been using to keep her 8 month daughter dry. Before we pulled into Cali she gave me her brother’s phone number and told me to use it to get a hold of her if I needed anything.
I suppose if I had been more careful this wouldn´t have happened. If I had planned a little more thoroughly or thought things out more fully or been more aware of the c
razy senile taxi driver tying my bag to the back of his car. But that hadn´t happened and I doubt they will happen in the future either. 28 hours after my alarm went off I got off the bus in Cali. Things had not gone at all according to plan, but my heart was not heavy. It was light and it was free. I have nothing but love and affection for all the people I´ve traveled with.
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