Incidents of Travel in Latin America

by Lars Holger Holm

  To put things in proper perspective: we did have moments filled with intense action too. The most noteworthy was doubtless the day when we were supposed to pick up our grocery and wine delivery from Turbo. We had been told that the boat carrying our items would, for some reason, not arrive in Triganá but in the next settlement down the coast. To walk there along the shore should take us about 45 minutes. Not too cumbersome one would imagine. But it’s one thing to walk over there empty-handed and another thing to carry a box with ten wine bottles back from it. The village itself is even smaller than Triganá and there isn’t much else to do there than to watch the iguanas as they in turn patiently wait for the hens to leave their eggs unattended. As a matter of fact, we once made the experiment of putting an egg on one of the lower branches of a tree where our largest iguana habitually spent his indolent afternoons. Neither Asíle nor I ever actually saw him snatch it, although our eyes were glued to the tree, specifically to the portion of it where the egg had been lodged. As he descended he must have seized it with lightning speed, because gone it was. Which goes to prove that the hour long immobility and inertia of reptiles stands in direct inverse ratio to the sudden swiftness of their attack.

  In a sense, our expedition to San Francisco was quite similar to such an attack. In a state of more or less zero activity we had to remind ourselves that the boat expected for landing on the other side of the bay in 45 minutes wasn’t going to wait for us. So we jumped to our feet and strode down the beach, parts of which had further disintegrated from the morning rain and the ocean swell. A group of boys sat on a porch tacitly assessing the damage done: half of what only yesterday had been a sizeable portion of terrain between the house and the sea had vanished, making the present location of the house precarious to say the least. The only notable measure taken, however, had been to move the barbed wire closer to the shacks so that people could still pass outside the fence while having a minimum of ground under their feet.

  We arrived in a San Francisco that was basking in the sun and so relaxed during siesta that not even the harbour kiosk was open. The concrete pier — by necessity sturdier than the one in Triganá which only had to withstand the soft tides of the bay, as opposed to the open sea shaping San Francisco’s shoreline — lay abandoned. There was nothing to betray the imminent arrival of a fully charged passenger boat, but appearances were soon to change. After half an hour — as boredom began to infiltrate stillness — a speck appeared on the horizon. It moved quickly and eventually revealed itself as the boat we were waiting for. While the speedboat approached, the surroundings too sprang to sudden life. By its arrival some curious bystanders had gathered. Neither they nor the boat’s crew would help disembarking passengers. The procedure of deposing an elderly woman and her daughter on the pier took a quarter of an hour and several times threatened to end in a catastrophe, the prospect of which failed to impress the crew. Finally, I managed to get a grip on her arm and with the aid of her daughter pull the bruised and exhausted woman out of the vessel.

  We didn’t have time to further cater to her comfort, though, since the boat was about to leave without its crew showing much interest in delivering our cargo either, which we had a hard time describing since we hadn’t boxed it ourselves. It was eventually found and thrown onto the pier. The boxes turned out to contain all we had ordered except a bottle of whisky — that rather surprisingly was actually delivered two days later. The most immediate concern was how to get all merchandise to our village. I happened to remark to a bystander that it was a bit strange that the boat wouldn’t stop in Triganá considering it being so close by. ‘But of course it does’, he happily answered while the roar of the engines excluded all verbal communication with the boat’s captain, now steering his ship towards the very shores we had just left behind. This made me irritated and I unjustly blamed Asíle for not knowing that the boat was actually stopping at our village too, as though she somehow had an obligation to be better informed than I. There was nothing else for us to do than to charge ourselves like two mules and return whence we had come. Realising I had been unfair to my fair lady by letting my bad temper get the better of me, I insisted on carrying as much of the load as possible. But Asíle, though not very talkative, held fiercely on to her heavy charge. Even though she hardly responded to my efforts to put the irritation behind us, she carried on bravely. Upon entering the village we were very thirsty. We drank water, rested up a bit in the shade and finally reached our abode, where the rest of the afternoon, after cool showers, was spent in tranquillity. In the end harmony was restored and as the sting of the emotional skirmish began to wear off it, too, turned into a potent spice of love.

  Turbo

  In this and similar manner we stayed put for a week. Then we felt the need to break the spell. To do this we again had to risk our lives on the high seas. The two little dogs that had watched faithfully over us accompanied us to the pier and could be seen running along the beach wagging their tails while the speed boat headed for the open sea and the vegetation vanished into the glistening morning mist. The skipper was no exception to the ones we previously had encountered, and I might easily have injured my back this time too, had I not been mentally prepared for the ordeal ahead. Once again we were forced to take seats close to the prow, which, it must be emphasised, is the worst location for a passenger. Luckily the sea didn’t get heavier but smoother as we went deeper into the Gulf. The proximity to Rio Atrato announced itself by muddy waters effectively concealing massive logs or tree branches that the captain, steadily maintaining maximum speed, would have no chance of seeing, let alone avoiding, before it was too late. All the same we safely made it across to Turbo, the regional hub on the eastern shores of the bay.

  Here the Colombian army, from having been quiet and discreet in their presence in the Darién, gave everybody reason to believe that no one was safe. Every boat had to report to a group of stone-faced young soldiers, who didn’t even bother to turn the points of their machine guns away from the passengers while questioning the captains. We were let through and came to behold something seemingly taken straight out of Africa. Even though I have never been to Freetown, Liberia, or Conakry, Sierra-Leone, this is exactly what I imagine them to be like, judged on personal experience of similar African ports. The only tangible difference was that this African port was primarily Spanish speaking. Otherwise the setting was a perfect backdrop to the opening scenes of Heart of Darkness.

  Asíle was visibly depressed by the lacklustre appearance of the rundown ships anchored in the estuary and ramshackle edifices lining the piers. Some people were hanging off ship ladders, some swimming in the oily waters. There were fires. One of them must have been fed rubber or some other noxious substance since thick, black smoke billowed out from it. It was a hot, unforgiving monsoon afternoon waiting for its first lightning to crack the heavens open. But though the clouds looked menacing there was so far no sign of rain. We reached our destination without a single drop falling on our heads. On the other hand: like wasps attracted to syrup local helping hands were all over us. I got a firm hold of our luggage and blazed a trail through the mass of arms offering to help us carry it the twenty-five steps to the taxis outside. I don’t know if Asíle even realised how quickly I managed to get us out of the docks, past the crowds, into a taxi and from there into a minibus taking us straight to our next port of call.

  Necoclí

  From our comparatively comfortable position inside the bus I jestingly suggested to Asíle several interesting venues for sightseeing, all of which she vehemently rejected. I further suggested we should move in to one the harbour area hotels to get to know the locals a bit better. Judged by their appearance these accommodations were indeed abject, but it was fun to taunt her since she would close her eyes, shake her head and present such a cute facial expression of utter horror. Had I been alone on this trip it’s possible that I would have stayed a bit longer in this town just to check it out its exoticism: a mirror held up b
y South America to Africa!

  But now we were under way to an even smaller township located an hour’s ride to the north. The landscape on this side of the Gulf is hilly, but less mountainous than the one in the Darién. It is also to a large extent cultivated and has large pastures with grazing live-stock. There are cows and horses — and real Indians! Midway between Turbo and Necoclí is an Indian reserve. It announced itself by women carrying heavily charged baskets on their heads. Other women were sitting by the road side with small children playing around them as the bus, at full speed, brushed past them within inches. I involuntarily closed my eyes but when I reopened them neither the Indians by the road side, nor the driver, seemed to think anything out of the ordinary had happened. As for myself, I once again had to accommodate myself to the apparent fatalism of people living under a tropical sun. Even though the situation was indeed fraught with danger, no menace or even disrespect seemed to have been intended on the driver’s part. But, having the entire road to himself, why did he have to pass so close to this little family group? And how could the woman allow her kids to play so dangerously close to the traffic? The answer my friend, the answer my friend, the answer is blowing in the wind...

  On our way we also passed a restaurant named Don Tranquilo, a name that immediately struck us as the most perfect title for our hotel manager in Capurganá, who wouldn’t make the slightest effort to have the overfilled, stinking trashcan emptied even as myriads of worms and insects were crawling inside it. Instead he was glued to his computer, looking for girls on Facebook. He was your Don Tranquilo all right, unperturbed in his sweet daydreams even in the face of the most abject reality.

  Once having arrived in the small town of Necoclí — an Eden by comparison to Turbo — we proceeded to have lunch and then squeezed ourselves and our luggage into a moto taxi that took us out of town and some miles up the coastal road to a small seaside hotel named Tiki Lounge. Elena, the female owner, was a friend of our hosts in Triganá and that’s how Asíle, charging herself with the mission of finding us accommodation, had ended up making a reservation over the telephone. Although our room had no more than basic amenities — a door to close, a ceiling fan, and a mosquito net in the window frame to keep insects at bay — it seemed a grand, almost unheard-of luxury. Not having to hermetically seal off a mosquito tent from the inside before going to bed was in itself a great relief. And not having to expect giant frogs at bedside every time there was a drop of rain an even greater one. There was also a kitchen at our disposal. It’s large, rectangular air holes on the contrary neither had windows nor mosquito nets, with the consequence that all sorts of not so delicious looking black bugs, attracted by the intense glare of the electric bulb, fell head long into the food under preparation. But we got used to that as well and patiently fished out dead insects simmering in boiling water or even in the occasionally uncovered pasta sauce.

  The sandy beach, at the time of our arrival filled with flotsam and jetsam, wasn’t very attractive in a conventional tourist perspective and hardly invited to walks. The water had the colour of bad coffee and although Elena enthusiastically went for her daily swim there an hour before sunset, neither I nor Asíle felt tempted to follow her example. We were even more astonished to learn that the water at this time of the year was at its very clearest and the debris at a minimum. It consisted mainly of driftwood but it took several days before anyone began arranging the logs and palm branches in pyramids destined for bonfires — I believe some of my own palpable efforts to initiate this process eventually rubbed off on the staff. Some days later the beach was cleared and one night — the sparks competing with the stars for attention — we lit up a beautiful fire, raging sky high in celebration of Guitche Manito, the Indian Master of Life (more about him later on).

  That same day a special guest had arrived. It was the owner of a boat sitting on the sand next to the main building, and he had come in order to bring it over to the other side of the gulf. It turned out he had his own house in the same Aguacate we had visited some ten days earlier. But his house was not located on the tranquil side of the village. Instead it sat right on the coast facing head-on the strong trade winds. I think this was all part of his plan. He wanted things to stay a bit on the rough side. It was therapy to him. I do insist on that term since he was a former Colombian psychoanalyst who had lived in Paris for twenty years and studied with Jacques Lacan. He had also been the secretary and translator of Jean-François Lyotard for many years and still admired the man. In other words, he had been a part of the post-Freudian Paris school of post-modernism and deconstruction (Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze are two of its prominent representatives) that so dominated the intellectual Left by the last quarter of the 20th century, and perhaps continues to do so to this day.

  I don’t know if he himself is Jewish, but I doubt it. More likely he’s one of many rather typical South American intellectuals engaged in the still ongoing debate on how to best free this vast continent from its colonial ballast and minimize its nations’ submission to Uncle Sam. In so doing they tend to overlook the more monstrous aspects of communist heroes such as Che Guevara and Fidel Castro — in much the same way as Sartre in the 1940s and 50s had made himself deaf and blind to the crimes of Josip Stalin. However, as the steam, by the 1990s, was about to run out of existing communist societies in the world, and the horrors perpetrated in their names began to seep through the cracks of their crumbling edifices, the French Left, true to its goût du néant9, took refuge in ‘post-modern’, dialectical abstractions (heritage of Karl Marx) amounting to a complete negation of the validity of any attempt to create meaning or even a simulacrum of cohesion in science, politics, art, music and letters.

  According to Lyotard, we must question not only the official story, or the latest mediatised story in vogue, but any story (narration) pretending to universality, or even general intelligibility. One could go so far as to say Lyotard holds that the very criterion of a false pretence is that it aims at being generally accepted and/or understood, at least as long as it is advanced by state power, or some other societal authority that can be linked to capitalism, usurpation and colonialism.

  Lyotard’s militant Marxist stance was formed by his direct experience of French troops trying to ensure French supremacy over Algeria in the 1950s. Although in the 1960s he became a renegade, his philosophy remained an ardent advocacy of the underdog, allegedly muted into virtual non-existence by the arrogant prejudice and repressive social mechanisms of ruling elites. As a consequence of his defence of, and identification with, emotionality and instinct as valid categories of argument even within the judicial system10, his own prose turned quite fanciful in its refusal to conform to logical conventions. He also remained very French in his paradoxical way of arguing for emotionality — while denouncing all pretensions to generally acceptable standards of reason and logic as a set of arbitrary language games — by inventing and stockpiling new verbal and philosophical abstractions, ultimately a habit derived from abstruse phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.

  In other words, knowing that the man seated in a chair next to me, thoughtfully sipping on his marijuana joint, blowing the thin smoke into the bonfire, at one time in his life must have been heavily influenced by Lacanism, post-modernism, post-structuralism — or whatever one would like to call these contemporary efforts to philosophically underpin the doctrine of pluralism and anti-hierarchism as an indisputable cultural value — I also realised that his life since must have taken a 180 degree turn. He wasn’t just hanging out from time to time in Aguacate; he lived there permanently for several years. This man certainly was very dissimilar from the usual intellectuals of this kind, urban flowers as they are, unable to see any meaning whatsoever in exploring horizons beyond the Hudson River or the Left Bank of the Seine.

  Together with an Indian guide Alain had crossed the Darién from the Atlantic to the Pacific; a five day trek in each direction. Even though he c
ommented very casually on the experience, I can only imagine the interior of the Darién, by many standards, to potentially be a quite dangerous, unmapped territory. The wilderness in itself is of course a challenge of the first degree — needless to add that I would most probably find it impossible to sleep during the night in the midst of a jungle and thus be exhausted in the day when I needed the strength to walk many miles through rough and steep terrain. That is one thing. But there is also the possibility of drug traders and other criminal elements hiding out there. Or military men ‘mistaking’ you for one of the bad guys… Add insects and mosquitoes... Each one of these circumstances would have been enough for me to refuse such a strenuous hike, even in younger days. But as I voiced these fears, he shrugged and smilingly assured me it was very peaceful out there and nothing to fear.

  Apart from that, living in Aquacate on a permanent basis must in all respects be the very antipode of living in Paris. True, there is both a community of Antioquians in self-imposed cultural exile and some expats from foreign countries (apparently even a young Swedish couple from Gothenburg), but on the flip side of the natural spectacle, there is the remoteness of civilised commodities — such as viable electricity, a school, a grocery store with tomatoes, a hospital — and, inversely, the laid back, at times even backward attitude, of the local population. But of course, if one doesn’t mind leading a rustic life in that famous harmony with nature (not always so harmonious herself), Aquacate surely is a refuge to count on and the properties there are as rule nicely maintained, helping by their mere appearance to infuse wilderness with a degree of civility. This said, I happened to know where Alain’s house must be located and can only conclude that for me to live exposed to the vigorous winds there would drive me nuts.