Latinalicious: The South America Diaries

by Becky Wicks

  He didn’t get his way. You can barely see them from Bocagrande, the gentrified strip up the road with high-rise buildings so tall they make the place look not too unlike Miami. But the walls did create the most scenic, jaw-droppingly awesome maze of old colonial splendour inside. Back in the day, the rich lived within these walls, all the viscounts and snooty governors, while the poor crossed over the drawbridge every day to work for them. They were promptly ejected after dark — a bit like most of the tourists are now, when they’re ushered back onto their cruise ships.

  The next morning I woke up late feeling ill in my curtained bunk, thanks to sitting up most of the night drinking rum shots and listening to a famous Colombian guitarist who, as a friend to the ponytailed Carlos, played an impromptu acoustic gig in the common area. With an aching head and still feeling tipsy, I stumbled back onto the streets for a coconut (because they always cured my hangovers in Bali) and found myself lost until I was found again in the rabbit warren of the walled city, taking in the Christmas trees and flickering, swaying decorations, even more colourful street art, hat stalls, vendors with plastic cups full of watermelon slices … and dodging cruise passengers in their hundreds.

  These gaggles of lost-looking crinkly folk are dumped in Cartagena while their captains run off and seduce hot young Colombian girls with salsa moves and sweet-nothings in darkened corners, probably. It appears to be the unwritten rule that, while on land, these passengers must run around spending as much of their money as possible in extortionately priced gift and clothes stores, before heading back to their ships, drooping with perspiration and shopping bags. Judging by what I’ve seen, most do play by this rule. The rest sit in Crepes & Waffles and moan that they’re too hot and that there’s not enough whipped cream on their super-sized, calorie-laden sundaes. Like me.

  With a fading rum-over, I eventually found myself at the home of what my free, downloaded audio iPod tour told me was the home of Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez, the Colombian novelist, screenwriter and journalist. ‘Gabo’, as he’s known here, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. His most famous books perhaps are One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), which was also, if you remember, a great but ultimately depressing movie. I’m told that this tale of brooding love and suffering in the time of a cholera epidemic was in fact a slightly exaggerated version of his mother’s life story.

  As a writer with no home, I was quite excited to see this famous writer’s house, which stands in full ochre-coloured glory just beyond the seafront. I could almost imagine a writing room inside, with one of those old clunky typewriters and a window looking out over the ocean, and all those romantic couples, pecking at each other’s cheeks and lips like lovebirds from their perches on the wall.

  Gabo penned stories of the endlessness of death, of loneliness, the beauty in solitude and the search for peace and truth. And as I sat with my coconut, as close to his house as possible, I imagined him gazing at the same sights and felt inspired by the thought of him feeling inspired. Gabo has a very impressive home, it can’t be denied, but I bet he doesn’t have a bunk with a personal sliding curtain around it. I love Cartagena!

  11/12

  Candles, muggings and machetes …

  I keep forgetting how hot it is in Cartagena. Today, in my bedraggled, slightly deluded state, I decided to take the tour bus. The first stop was within staggering distance of the wall on the outskirts of the historic centre, about a five-minute walk from the hostel, so all I had to do was hand over my money to the nearest ticket tout and cross the road. It didn’t require any thought or brain power whatsoever, which was perfect.

  The tour bus is one of those big, red, double-decker embarrassments that you instantly hate yourself for boarding. As I climbed the steps clutching my ticket, I saw the Japanese couple with their huge Nikon camera, and the American ladies with their bleached knee-length shorts and varicose veins, and their husbands with T-shirts too bright for their fading skin tones and I thought, Jesus, Becky, has it come to this? Can you not even think for yourself anymore? Is it really so hot that you can’t plan beyond getting off a bus and then onto it again, two hours later, shuttled about on a pre-arranged schedule like a sheep with tourists?

  And then I thought, yes, yes it is that hot! It is that bad! And I am a tourist! I plugged myself into the American man talking history through my headphones in the air-con and off we rolled around Cartagena. I actually learned quite a lot.

  I have fallen in love with Cartagena in a way I never expected to. I feel like I’ve embarked on a beautiful relationship, one of colour and music and romance … just minus the man. I decided to extend my stay at Casa Nativa because I know everyone there now and, even though it’s a bit more expensive than some other hostels (AU$15 a night), I’m loving the privacy curtain, and you always need to pay more for air-con anyway. And also, ponytailed Carlos and Juan Carlos, the manager (you can never meet too many men called Carlos in South America), were both really nice to me after ‘the incident’.

  It’s kind of hard to talk about ‘the incident’. I guess I should start by telling you that a few days ago, on 7 December, it was Día de las Velitas, or Candle Lighting Day. It’s one of the most observed traditional holidays of Colombia and is celebrated every year on the same date on the eve of the Immaculate Conception.

  Día de las Velitas is a country-wide public holiday and the unofficial start of the Christmas season. It’s the time when people place candles and paper lanterns on their porches, on the pavements, on their windows, balconies, in parks, streets and squares late at night and let them burn for twenty-four hours.

  Looking forward to the event, Naomi and I, and another girl we met at the hostel called Jen, went out to see the sunset, as I’ve done every day since I’ve been here. This time we watched it from a table at the famous Cafe del Mar, which is an overpriced tourist trap on the wall overlooking the sea and the Bocagrande skyline. When we arrived, the serving staff seemed to be having a competition among themselves called ‘Who can look the most uninterested in customers?’ A group of corpses would have done a better job.

  Here’s a tip. If you’re going to watch the sunset in Cartagena, go down to the marina at Manga, which is much less touristy, or settle yourself on the sand close by, in front of some seriously luxurious holiday apartments. Alternatively, if you want to stay in the walled city, buy yourself a cheap bottle of rum and a couple of coconuts and go grab yourself a cannon to sit beside, up the way from Cafe del Mar a little bit. If you’re lucky you’ll be able to bag yourself one of the arched windows in the wall, which are big enough for two to sit in. These are frequented by snogging teenagers. I always get slightly envious when I see them, because I can’t help but think back to when I was their age and how the most romantic place to snog a boy in my town was on the window ledge of Woolworths, or in a phone booth.

  After Cafe del Mar we drank some more beers on the streets, chatted to a million more people and discovered that, contrary to what we’d been told, they weren’t going to celebrate Día de las Velitas in the historic centre, and if really we wanted to see people lighting up thousands of candles between 3 and 4 a.m., we would have to go out of the city in a cab. Feeling a bit deflated, we started walking back to the hostel. It was, after all, after midnight at this point. And then we met Jonny.

  Jonny told us all about his nightclub and how he would love it if we went inside so he could get his commission (not in those words exactly). A lot of the guys in the historic centre are employed to be nice to tourists on the streets, in order that they visit their various shops and restaurants. When we told Jonny that we really just wanted to experience the Día de las Velitas celebrations, he beamed and said, ‘Well, I’m finishing up now, why don’t you come to my neighbourhood? We’re having a party and we’re all gonna be lighting candles!’

  Of course, the last thing you should do as a trio of slightly drunk girls is get into a cab with a guy going to a distant neighbour
hood, in Colombia, at midnight but, like I said, we were a trio of slightly drunk girls and … well … Jonny seemed nice, and we really wanted to see the candles! So we hailed a cab and drove roughly fifteen minutes out of the city, with Jonny in the front seat telling us how his girlfriend’s mum was going to be so glad we could come.

  At one point, the driver stopped and put some black, mesh screens up over our windows, which I thought was a little odd because it meant we couldn’t see out, but pretty soon we pulled up outside a house, where we were promptly thrown into a scene from the movie Step Up.

  People were dancing on every balcony and front porch, music was blaring from a host of different speakers, and groups of people drinking from bottles and plastic cups were sitting around what looked like open sewers, running like concrete-walled rivers through the streets. It smelled a bit iffy. A few small fires were burning on the sidelines but Jonny ushered us along (after making sure we had paid for the taxi) to a little shop, where he made sure we paid for the bottles of rum he said were essential.

  Then, gradually gathering more and more people behind us as we all walked through the streets, Jonny led us to his girlfriend’s house. A large lady called Mama Maria (her mum, we assumed) welcomed us in, took one bottle of rum, which we never saw again, and started pouring shots with the other. We started dancing. We spoke to everybody, although no one spoke any English. We were clearly the stars; the only white people for miles.

  I was dancing with a guy on the porch, with my back to the railings and a giant pillar, when suddenly the side of my head was yanked into the pillar at full force at least three times. It took me a second to realise that someone was grabbing the strap of my bag from behind the railings and, seeing as the strap was around both shoulders, they couldn’t get it over my head, so they just kept pulling me instead. Naomi tried to get the bag over my head so that whoever it was could just take it and stop whacking my head against concrete, but after a couple more attempts the mugger ran off and I never even saw who did it. I reached up and felt the giant golf-ball-sized lump forming on my head and realised I had gashes on my arm and neck from the strap, too.

  All hell broke loose in the neighbourhood. It was Step Up mixed with City of God all of a sudden. Mama Maria ushered me into the house, followed by Naomi and Jen, and we were instructed to climb a ladder up to the attic. We crouched on the floor while a man with a towel around his waist — I’m assuming Papa Maria — ran outside with a machete. People were shouting. Jonny’s girlfriend, who I’d been dancing with, too, was trying to touch my head, sobbing hysterically like she thought I was going to die in her house, while I just thanked my lucky stars it wasn’t my actual face he’d smashed against the pillar. He could have broken my nose!

  He was also a shit mugger because he didn’t actually get my bag. After all that, he didn’t even break it and it was only a cheap, shitty thing from H&M. You’d think he would have been a bit smarter and brought some scissors to at least cut the strap but, as it was, he completely failed in his mission and got chased with a machete. I dread to think what happened to him, but I’ll never underestimate H&M again.

  Just as we were wondering how to make our escape, one of Jonny’s mates pulled up in yet another car with blacked out windows (which now made sense) and sped us off through the streets like we’d robbed a bank or something. On the way back to Cartagena we saw a lot of candles being lit along the streets, which is what we went out in search of anyway, so it wasn’t a total disaster. Mind you, it could have just been that I was seeing stars.

  We thanked Jonny as he made sure we got back to our hostel safely. He also made sure we paid his mate 25,000 COP for driving us ‘the scenic candlelit route’, and him 10,000 COP extra for escorting us home. He also kept our rum. Thanks, Jonny.

  So, hmm, it wasn’t a very nice ending to the night, but it hasn’t stopped me falling in love with Cartagena. We shouldn’t have been in that neighbourhood but you can’t just sit in air-conditioned tour buses and Cafe del Mar when you’re trying to explore a new city, can you? Besides, everyone else, apart from the shit mugger, was really nice.

  I just emailed my friend Charlotte (the girl I met on the dreaded Colca Canyon trip back in Peru) and she’s decided to travel up this way to spend a ‘British’ Christmas with me, purely because I’ve been going on about how awesome Cartagena is since I got here. We can’t let one guy ruin things now, can we? I was having one of the most exciting and fun nights of my entire trip so far, before that happened. It’s not every day you get to be in a street scene from Step Up.

  If he’d managed to nick my iPhone and credit card, however, well, that would have been different.

  16/12

  Playa Blanca and a bit of blubbering …

  I only went on today’s excursion to Cartagena’s most popular beach destination, Playa Blanca, because I’d already bought the boat ticket. Plus I had a red wine hangover the size of Colombia, having spent most of last night chatting to random guys in a bar in the walled city I’ve come to frequent called La Bistro. I thought a day ogling hot Colombian boys with no shirts on might ease the pain.

  Farzana was right, by the way — the men are delicious here. They all seem to have very white teeth, the gift of the gab, and rhythm.

  The guy behind the bar at La Bistro, Klaas, regaled us all with tales of his woebegone yet ongoing relationship with a Colombian girl, which involves a lot of dramatics, by the sounds of it. In spite of the bar being very busy, Klaas took a lot of time out to do things like lean forward on his elbows and bury his face in his hands and make a sort of muffled scream before checking his Facebook page again on his phone.

  ‘This morning I found out she’s single,’ he said incredulously. ‘Can you believe that? We’ve been living together for two months and she changed her relationship status to single this morning without telling me!’

  The poor guy was more perplexed than distraught. I didn’t want to say it but by now I’ve heard plenty of stories involving men who’ve embarked on relationships with South American girls on their travels. While I don’t think any continent’s population of females deserves to be stereotyped, it does sound like the girls here are a lot more … shall we say, demanding. And passionate. One guy I met suggested that the females in these countries spend a lot of time sitting around watching the terrible novelas — South America’s infamous soap operas.

  These badly acted shows, bursting with botoxed, trout-lipped, large breasted ladies and long-haired lotharios sleeping their way through well-respected family circles, can be seen crackling from a screen in the corner of pretty much every family shop or restaurant. Each episode is filled with such blubbering angst it’s a wonder they don’t issue Prozac with the sale of every TV set.

  They’re very low budget, these soaps, usually. I mean, we’re definitely not talking EastEnders here, although I suspect much of the budget is spent on tubs of Vaseline, or whatever it is the actors have to rub into their eyes to make them cry.

  The theory goes that women are subjected to this nauseating melodrama from the word go and, therefore, they grow up making similar scenes in front of men who don’t turn out to be perfect.

  ‘I think she’s mad at me because the other night, when she asked if I would cry if she died, I didn’t say anything,’ Klaas said, shaking his head as though this grave mistake was going to haunt him his whole life. ‘I mean, who asks that?’ he continued. ‘I’ve been living with her for two months. Is that not letting her know I care? Does she really need to ask if I would cry if she died?’

  Later that night, Klaas’s girlfriend strolled into the bar after totally erasing their relationship from cyberspace, dressed in the standard Colombian female uniform for a casual evening out — tight white jeans and a halter top with glittering platform heels — and announced that she had terminated their unborn baby (of which he had no idea). She said that when she’d changed her status to single she had actually meant to announce that she was one person again instead of two. Then she kissed
his cheek and ordered a drink and went on as though nothing had happened.

  Back to the beach trip. Playa Blanca is, as the name states, a white sand beach. It lies on Isla Baru, one of the largest islands in the Islas del Rosario cluster, which is in turn one of the forty-six national parks of Colombia. I’d bought a ‘direct’ ticket and was hurried onto a boat at 7.30 a.m., where I was instantly perturbed by the ear-bangingly loud Caribbean salsa music blaring from a large set of nightclub-worthy speakers.

  A Colombian family, two of whom were respectable-looking women in flowery dresses and sun hats, were drinking Aguila beer from bright yellow cans and screeching. Another guy was falling over the seats, singing a song of undying love at high drunken volume, and a child with beaded dreadlocks was running between them all, begging for attention. The rest of the boat passengers were eating orange-coloured fried goods from folds of tissue, which I’m told are yummy pasties filled with meat and plantain. One day I’ll try one, but they always look so dangerously carcinogenic to me, even with a hangover.

  We sat there for about forty minutes, ears bleeding in this heinous acoustic mess, while more people piled on, along with vendors trying to sell us cigarettes and bananas and overly sweetened coffee in tiny cups. The music never stopped but occasionally a woman on a megaphone, or at least it sounded like a megaphone, would yell something into the mix that was so muffled it sounded like she was chewing on socks.

  One such announcement made the drunk man cheer, crack open another Aguila and dance around everyone, stopping midway to straddle his wife and grind his crotch in her face like a horny monkey. This made the other tourists on the boat, like me, who’d come for a peaceful morning boat ride to a lovely island, want to slit our wrists. I could tell the lady to my left, a sweet oldie who looked American, wished she’d just gone to Crepes & Waffles instead.