3 Seconds in Bogotá - a South American travel adventure.

by mark playne

  The events of

  3 Seconds in Bogotá

  occurred 25 years ago.

  Kurt Cobain had just committed suicide.

  Aryton Senna had died in his Grand Prix crash.

  And in Colombia, the one of the worlds richest drug barons,

  Pablo Escobar, had just been shot dead.

  The events detailed in this book culminated

  in the Colombian capital city Bogotá

  in early June 1994.

  A True story.

  How long is a second?

  3 Seconds

  I knew it would happen. Everyone had said it would. The travelling truism of the early 90s was that if you backpacked around South America for any length of time, you’d most probably return home with a story of having been robbed. The only question was, to what degree? Basic theft and a missing backpack? Mugged at gunpoint? Or caught in a bus hold-up involving trigger-happy bandits who had shot a passenger or two just to prove they were serious? It was all possible.

  These stories became the currency of many a late night tale that kept us back-packers not only entertained, but served as badges of honour for those that had survived, and as maps of survival for those listening. We quickly learnt that running away, fighting – or resisting in any manner – could be a fast-track to an early grave. That attempting to outsmart thieves by not carrying cash, could in itself cause rage and provoke an attack.

  Having absorbed these tales, as a precaution I carried three lots of money. The first a visible moneybag, designed to be happily surrendered at the first sign of trouble. The second batch of cash lived in a slim money belt under my belt-line. Thirdly – the real reserve with passports, traveller’s cheques and cash – was hidden deep inside my trousers within a custom-made secret pocket. It would not be noticed in a normal pat-down search and could only be accessed by undoing my belt and dropping my trousers. Since I never wore underwear, I figured this acted as a built-in safety device.

  Imagining the possible robberies, I rehearsed reactions.

  Situation A. Someone appears in front of us waving a knife.

  Plan of action. Throw them the outer money belt. Maintain eye contact. Walk backwards.

  Situation B. Find myself staring down the barrel of a gun.

  Plan of action. Slowly undo money-belt. Drop it to the floor. Keep hands visible and held away from pockets. Keep girlfriend behind me. Walk backwards slowly. Remember, don’t turn. Don’t run. Keep eye contact.

  Situation C. Bus gets held up.

  Plan of action. Don’t speak a word. Don’t make eye contact. Act like locals. Mingle and dissolve. Be invisible. Offer up second money belt before asked. Do best to keep trousers on.

  I had it all worked out. I liked to be ready for the unexpected.

  For the last six months, Luciana and I had travelled through Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. In terms of highway robbery, hold-ups or even good old-fashioned boring theft – nothing had happened. Zilch. Nada.

  Our trip was almost over and we were due to return to Britain with nothing more than a bag of gifts and a stack of treasured memories.

  We were three days away from the laughter of friends and a pint of black stout at my local pub. I visualised walking to my mother’s country cottage. The dogs racing out to greet me. My mum welcoming her wayward son home with arms held out wide. The wafts of her home-baking. A pot of tea being poured. The lavender and rosemary of an English garden in the early summer bloom. Her face reacting with mock shock to the already censored highlights of our travels. The texture of the digestive biscuits, that if she wasn’t looking, I might dare dip in my tea. I was almost home. I could feel it.

  Yet, here I was, frozen with fear – sitting in the passenger seat of a taxi after midnight in the dark back streets of some South American city, staring at a long shiny knife blade being held to the throat of our taxi driver.

  Even if something like this had been expected – even if I had absorbed the fine detail of a hundred or more stories, gleaned from the travelling grapevine – this was different to all the scenarios that had played out in my head. This situation had no label, no direct link to any memory and cause of suitable reaction. This moment in time was unique and totally unexpected.

  We were in deep trouble.

  Surrounded by at least eight men, who were reaching for the door handles of our taxi.

  Maybe there were ten?

  More were appearing from every side.

  I calculated how long it would take until the car doors were open and we reached the point of no return.

  Three seconds.

  Then it was ‘Game Over’.

  If cats have nine lives, how many do humans get?

  I didn’t know but I decided this was the time to use one up.

  Then, there it was.

  ‘IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS’.

  The casing shattered.

  I hit the pause button.

  A twitch under my eye.

  Time immediately slowed down to a snail’s pace. My mind no longer had the need to race. The image of the knife in front of me lingered lazily, moving frame by frame. Relieved from the normal boundaries of time, I had what seemed like hours to shift through a lifetime of experiences, to search the memories hidden deep, for any clue that might offer a solution.

  I just had to remember one thing, although time can be slowed down, it can never be stopped. I needed to keep an eye on the clock, as the blade, every now and again, would slip a frame forwards – one step closer to a very uncertain, and maybe, very short future.

  A calm voice echoed within.

  Right, boy. Breathe deep, relax. Listen.

  Here is the plan.

  Step one – In case of emergency break glass and press pause.

  Yeah, I already did that… Tick! Done.

  Good.

  Step two – Think.

  To make sense of this situation commence with the basics. Start right from the beginning and go through all the events leading to this precise moment. When is this? Who are you with? Why are you here?

  Search through your memories for significant, or even vaguely similar events and work out any connections that might help save you.

  Lay all your cards on the table and study them closely. Each and every happening in your life has been a tool for this moment.

  Find the pattern.

  Step three – Act.

  Take action on what you’ve come to realise.

  Got it?

  Yes. I think so. One question.

  Tell me.

  Who are you?

  I am you and you are me.

  Huh!?

  I’ve always been here, you’re normally too busy to hear me. Consider me, as your ‘in case of emergency’ instruction manual.

  Ask the right questions and the answers will come.

  Sift through with a fine-tooth comb until the solution is found.

  Or, until our time is up.

  Remember, there is only one rule.

  ‘Never give up’.

  Got it?

  Alright.

  Good.

  Right. Ready?

  Yep.

  2.9 seconds of real time left.

  Go!

  1994

  It was towards the end of May 1994. The Red Hot Chilli Pepper’s recent hit ‘Under the Bridge’ still played hourly on radio stations.

  A few weeks before, Ayrton Senna’s steering had failed on the corner of the San Marino Grand Prix, causing him to plough head-on into an unprotected wall. The nation of Brazil, as well as the world of sport, were reeling in
shock from their champion’s death.

  Affecting me more personally, Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain had recently been found dead – a shotgun in his hand. He’d died on the 5th of April. With barely a couple of weeks separating our days of birth, his death hit me in a curious way. The age of twenty-seven owned a desolate feeling. An overwhelming sense that I’d completed a life cycle as if I’d been through everything already. Would the same situations simply repeat in different ways, forcing me to learn the same lessons over and over? Was life to endlessly replay the same tune? Was my destiny to marvel at life’s complexities as if a song – with time, learning to pick out each instrument, melody and beat?

  Was there a connection to the many rock stars who had also died at twenty-seven? Not just Cobain, but Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones and Jim Morrison as well. Perhaps they had experienced the same sensations, of sensing nothing new on the horizon. To be clear I wasn’t feeling suicidal, however, I was mourning for the loss of something that I couldn’t put my finger on.

  Another loop came to mind. My favourite school track event had been the 1600m, made up of four circuits of the 400m athletics track. I recalled my tactic used, where I’d initially stay back and pace myself. The first couple of laps were for warming up. Only on the third did it become time to lengthen the stride and work hard, to catch up on the heels of the leader. The sound of the bell, signalling the last circuit, was the cue to open up the legs and give it all that was possible. If life started after leaving school, I consoled myself by thinking of twenty-seven as being lap one. It was time to sit back and enjoy the ride, even if life was to become an ever-increasing spiral of repetitions.

  But did the universe have a different plan?

  Kurt Cobain entered the world three weeks after me. Was it to be that I’d die barely six weeks after him? Could it be my fate, to join the twenty-seven club? I succumbed to the thought for a second and came to my senses. Unable to play three chords on a guitar, I’d never released a record and couldn’t even sing. Cobain was a living legend before he died, and now dead, was an immortal legend. He’d already done all that he came to earth to do. I’d achieved zero. I needed a couple more laps of the track. I was still working things out. A grown man, but full of basic confusions. I knew everything, and yet I knew nothing.

  Was I going to duck out of the race after lap one?

  No way.

  Besides, I’d made the promise.

  Never give up.

  And here I was, staring down the blade of a knife.

  In the back alley of a strange city.

  The short stubble on the taxi driver’s cheek reminded me of a forest after a fire. Jet black and dirty. Veins stood out on his neck, yet they were not pulsing. Older than me, probably late thirties. Calm enough that I figured he’d been through this before.

  His eyes resigned to his fate.

  Did he even care which way this went?

  Had he already achieved his life goals?

  Made a number-one hit record?

  Did he even have dreams?

  His indifference wasn’t helping me.

  I needed him to want to live.

  Time slipped forward one frame.

  The blade tilted a fraction, making it glint.

  Our lives depended on his survival instinct.

  ‘Our lives.’

  I was not alone.

  Luciana

  I met Luciana in London’s Leicester Square during the summer of 1992. I was street-selling with a box of jewellery that I opened up and balanced on the top of rubbish bins. She was a street dancer who cast spells on men, rendering them semi-senseless as she performed to the music. Half Incan Indian and half Mestizo – the name given to the lighter-skinned offspring of the Spanish settlers who’d mixed with the Ecuadorian locals – her skin was milk-chocolate and her hair long, thick and black.

  She’d team up with the buskers of London. Her hips would gyrate, her short skirt losing the effect of gravity as she spun and twirled. While hypnotising the crowd with her salsa, she maintained eye contact. Like all buskers, she knew once the performance finished, people would soon melt away to avoid tipping.

  Her trick was to ‘bottle’ – holding out a hat for donations – as she danced around the horseshoe curve of watchers. Pound coin after pound coin was popped into her hat to keep her dancing legs moving, and covered in a fine film of sweat, she’d not stop until exhausted.

  Once the show ended, the money would be divided equally between her and each musician. In twenty minutes, she could rustle up more than I could bring in selling jewellery on my luckiest twelve-hour day. Although dependent on the buskers’ raucous free-form music, the musicians’ income rocketed when Luciana joined them and danced. Together they worked in literal harmony.

  One of Leicester Square’s buskers, who had a distinctive scar on each cheek, openly claimed he’d be famous one day. Even though talented, Luciana and the other buskers had gently mocked his confidence, but were now proud as Seal topped the music charts.

  Once Luciana had completed a few sets, she’d flaunt past the jewellery sellers, sipping from a chilled bottle of white wine crudely disguised in a brown paper bag – a habit from her underage drinking days in the USA.

  She teased for a living. She teased not only the customers who threw money at her but she also teased the buskers, jugglers and street sellers – the men who ‘worked’ Leicester Square. Although obviously more than a handful – I’d found myself particularly vulnerable. Friends had cautioned me, yet resistance had proven temporary and futile. In fact, the warnings only added to the attraction of this wild Latin creature. Plucking up the courage, I asked her out. On several occasions in fact. She accepted every time, and with each date stood me up, leaving me alone on a park bench holding another chilled bottle hidden in a brown paper bag. White wine which I didn’t even like. I wondered if this was some kind of test. Maybe she simply had a magic number thinking, ‘If he asks me out three times, then he’s worth it’? Forced to presume she needed me to ask her five times, I tried. Then six. Then seven. Perhaps something was wrong with a meeting in the park? Maybe something was not right with the cold bottle of wine? I tried upping the stakes and meeting her in a pub. Then a posh wine-bar. Only to get the same result. Slowly and reluctantly, I started to realise, I was being led on a song and dance.

  As the summer wore on, Luciana vanished, apparently having gone home to Puerto Rico. Now at peace, my focus changed, and I became aware of the other beauties around me.

  Leicester Square – full of the talent of the buskers, the skill of the street performers and the roguish charm of the fly-pitchers – seemed to be a magnet for the girls of Europe, sent to au pair in London. Some would buy our jewellery and instead of parting ways, would stay and help us sell. Others would help us look out for the police, who if spotted, would cause us to seemingly vanish into thin air. They called us fly-pitchers because like flies, we never rested in one place for long. Some street-sellers would hide in the back entrances of the West-End theatres. Others leant on public phones and pretended to make calls. Some of us slid our selling-boards into secret hiding places, then lit cigarettes as we dissolved into the throngs of tourists – patiently awaiting the all-clear.

  Some of the girls would accompany us to our hideaway, the Imperial Pub, the fly-pitchers’ zone of safety where we retreated in confidence. The landlord had forbidden the constabulary from entering his private property and many a mini-police chase ended on the pub doorstep.

  The jewellery-selling riff-raff of Leicester Square made great customers worth protecting. His only clientele who apparently drank more were the Triad gang from the neighbouring China Town. It was also here in the Imperial Pub, that we could be found, once our pockets filled with enough earnings for us to call the daily game of cat and mouse quits, park our jewellery boards in the pub’s entrance, and like the other revellers of Leicester Square, enjoy the evening.

  During those summer months, two lovely ladies discovered that altho
ugh we were all single, things had overlapped. On this night they had me pinned to the bar – one to my left, the other to my right. However hard I tried to explain, they were not grasping my logic and lost for words, I was being out-reasoned. It was at this moment that Luciana, having returned to London, entered the bar and took in the situation. Our eyes met. A small black cloud appeared over her head. She stormed over, glared at both the girls, and yanked me away.

  “He’s mine,” she growled.

  I’d found a way to her fiery Latin heart – jealousy.

  From that day on, she rarely let me out of her sight and I was forbidden from talking to non-vetted women. It was tough. The other sellers joked that I’d met my karma. Luciana had the most amazing smile and the most fearful frown. Even though I was like a wild bird with my feathers clipped – each time she laughed or danced, I was reminded that the suffering was worth it. In awe of her talent, fascinated by her culture, I’d fallen under her spell – and it soon became known that we were together. Exotic Latin Luciana became my Lucy.

  A great friend and fellow fly-pitcher Jinxy, who had earned his nickname by his incredible luck in impossible situations, came up to me with a worried look on his face.

  “You do realise. That when this new bird of yours dances. Everyone. I mean all the blokes. They can see her knickers?”

  All I could do was nod and smile meekly.

  And here I was, two years later.

  In a notoriously dangerous city.

  Late at night.

  Down a deserted back street.

  In the front seat of a taxi.

  With Lucy in the rear.

  The driver had his window wound down.

  A knife being held to his throat.

  We were surrounded by zombie-like men.

  The butchers of Bogotá.

  Coming for us.

  My dream had become our nightmare.

  I hope you enjoyed the

  first three chapters of

  3 Seconds in Bogotá