Latinalicious: The South America Diaries (25 page)

I first saw the trio of frilly men in a coffee shop, but it was only when I saw them again in Exito supermarket discussing the price of cherries that I became properly intrigued. I stopped and asked why they were dressed in such a way.

‘We’re flamenco dancers,’ Ivan told me proudly, gesturing to the other two. ‘We have a performance soon. You should come!’

Having become firm friends in the fruit aisle, due to the fact that both Ivan and Fernandez once went to England (though sadly, Don has never been), I agreed to attend their performance a few hours later at a club called Dulce Jesus Mio in Medellín’s Las Palmas. Turning up with a few Australians I’d met at the Tiger Paw Hostel, we were all a bit unprepared for the array of neon lights that apparently stay up all year, not just for Christmas. They flickered in an epileptic’s nightmare as we were led to our seats by a lady dressed as a whore.

Dulce Jesus Mio, which translates as My Sweet Jesus, is a bit like walking into a toy shop, where everything springs to life after hours. We were welcomed inside by an array of creepy cartoon characters — the sort with eyes that follow you everywhere. Woody Woodpecker nodded and Pink Panther clapped his hands maniacally, close to Bugs Bunny’s plastic ears. A red and yellow checked stage floor hurt my eyes and that was before they switched on even more neon.
Jesus
is right.

The place was packed, even at 8.30 p.m. Having paid 10,000 COP each to get in, we were then told we had to buy
una botella por mesa
and then discovered the cheapest
botella
on offer was a whopping 170,000 COP. Begrudgingly we ordered the rum and set about watching the place fill up with even more dressed-up Colombians and people in costumes. We saw several poor Shakira imitators, a few pirates, a couple of clowns, a fat nun in a wig and a rather unsexy town crier, before I spotted Ivan flitting about near a yellow shelving unit that appeared to be full of tiny cars.

By the end of the night (which was still before 11.30 p.m.), powered by the rum and some shots from a clown’s bottle of Aguardiente, I was standing on my chair just to be able to dance. There was literally no room on the floor, they’d crammed so many chairs and tables in. After a few awkward twirls with Ivan and friends, and a surprise kiss from a painted man in plastic glasses even bigger than his own face, I was kind of ready to exit the funhouse.

We headed instead to the rooftop bar of the gorgeous Charlee Lifestyle Hotel in El Poblado. You won’t find this bar unless you know about it first, if you know what I mean, but head to the penthouse floor in the lift and you’ll be swept out into what looks like a sexy, five-star aquarium, with a DJ. Half the room is taken up by a swimming pool with one glass side opposite the bar, giving drinkers the chance to ogle whoever is swimming around in a bikini … or in exceedingly tight, tiny shorts. It’s quite pricey, but definitely worth a look for its views. I mean city views, as well as views of semi-naked Medellín folk, who are quite possibly the best-looking people in Colombia. This hotel is gorgeous, too. I got a glimpse of the rooms and they’re considerably sexier than my orange-sheeted bunk at the Tiger Paw. Shame the glam-packing days are over.

I should say that I had originally planned to stay at the Black Sheep Hostel while in Medellín (where Farzana stayed before coming to meet me in Ecuador), but the place was recently ransacked for the second time by men in masks, who showed up in a taxi and cut their way into everyone’s lockers just before Christmas. According to a Kiwi girl I met who was staying there at the time, they excused two girls in the lobby when they first went in and only mugged the blokes’ iPhones, before heading into the dorm rooms for their loot.

I’m not saying don’t stay at the Black Sheep if you’re in Medellín, as all of this was in no way their fault and I’ve heard it’s a great hostel; it’s just that I was a bit nervous already thanks to the attempted mugging in Cartagena, and I really wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night if I’d gone there. Plus, Tiger Paw is directly opposite a branch of Crepes & Waffles and you know how I feel about that.

Anyway, after that night out and a hungover morning with JP spent riding the Medellín Metrocable car up the mountain, eating
arepas
and wanting to puke out of the window, the last thing I felt like doing was catching the late afternoon bus to Salento, Colombia’s coffee-growing region. But I had the distinct feeling that any longer in Medellín would have been irrevocably bad for my health and a few days spent relaxing in the lush surroundings of La Serrana (a hostel Charlotte recommended on Facebook before she headed home to England the other day) sounded perfect. That was roughly eight days ago. I just can’t leave. La Serrana is lovely, and Salento itself is probably the nicest place I’ve been to on my South American travels yet. I feel like I’ve been placed under some kind of spell.

As I type, I’m sitting at a wooden table at the back of the bedrooms next to the dining room, looking out at the sweeping green hills and waving palm trees in the distance. Bright yellow butterflies swoop occasionally over my laptop and hummingbirds hover over a nearby hedge. There’s a cute little red bird stalking me, too. I have no idea what it is but it’s so bright, it looks like a tiny, flapping English letterbox out the corner of my eye.

I have a cup of coffee to my right, which I’ve been re-filling all morning because they provide it for free — this being the source of Colombia’s best — so my brain is buzzing in spite of being quite
tranquila
. A huge black dog called Pablo and a smaller cream one called Salt are sniffing around my bare feet. I could live here, I really could.

It’s cooler up here than in Medellín, but not so cool that you can’t sit outside feeling the sunshine warm your skin as you lounge in one of the hammocks strung from the veranda … like Nick, one of the Aussies who’s working here to save some cash, is doing right now. He doesn’t have to work too hard, to be honest. Not like an elderly man called Howie, who’s staying here in order to suss out the price of land in the area. Howie already has two houses in Panama. He told me this when he popped up next to me in the dining room on day three and, between taps to his sparkling new iPad, proceeded to ask me all sorts of important questions, such as, ‘What’s your favourite drug?’

I almost choked on my chicken curry. ‘Um … I don’t know. What’s yours?’

‘Marijuana,’ he replied, almost too quickly.

Howie works desperately hard at being cool. You can’t help but feel a bit bad for him because, if he didn’t try so hard, he might actually
be
cool. Bless him. Just after we met, I went into my dorm to find an array of freshly pressed shirts on hangers and some dry-cleaning bags hanging from the ladder to my bed on the top bunk. I have literally been sleeping on top of Howie for a week now … a most unsettling thought, all things considered. Sometimes I hear him unclipping his braces just inches from my face.

Anyway, occasionally it rains here and the whole valley below disappears into thick clouds, making you feel like you’re literally on the top of the world. This is also when the magic mushrooms sprout up in the cow fields next door … but I won’t dwell on that because, really, it shouldn’t be the reason you come … even though some people come just for that and it is quite exciting going out to pick them. At night, the fireflies dance in the fields like all the fairies and all the pixies are having a rave in the grasses, waving their tiny glow-sticks in neon swirls and confirming that, yes, you may well be in hippy trippy paradise.

Quite serendipitously, I met two girls on the way here, who I met before in Taganga over New Year. We all shared a dorm room and pool time at Casa Divanga and I had no idea they were heading here until we found ourselves in the same speeding minivan to Salento from Armenia — which is where the bus from Medellín drops you off.

Kelly and Ron (both British) and I shared a jeep, known as a ‘willy’, to La Serrana itself and, when we rocked up in the darkness, the valley was shrouded by night and all we could see was a bunch of people playing guitar out front and drinking red wine from proper wine glasses. I knew instantly I was going to love it — even more so when we were promptly led from the porch to a blazing fire in the field out back, around which we all sang songs and got ash in our hair.

La Serrana is a hostel but it’s also a working eco-farm. It’s more like a giant farm house with a few dorms and numerous seating areas, including comfy, squishy sofas and an awesome TV area perfect for folding yourself into a beanbag and watching a movie. Breakfast of fresh eggs or fruit is included. In the day, you sign up on a white board if you want to eat dinner, and in the evening you all enjoy a communal meal around giant candlelit tables in the dining room. These generally cost about 12,000 COP, so it’s better sometimes than walking the twenty minutes into town, in the dark, down a long dusty road … although town has some incredible local restaurants all offering fresh pink river trout lunches and dinners for about 6000 COP, which is probably the best and cheapest food I’ve come across so far in Colombia.

Honestly, I cannot tell you how much I have fallen in love with this place! All this awesomeness and serenity and it’s still only 20,000 COP a night for a dorm, making it by far the best value hostel I’ve stayed at in South America. We even saw a stray sloth in the tree out front a few days ago, and when he climbed down very, very, very, very slowly and hid in a bush, we were able to sweep the leaves aside and study him up close. I’ve never seen a sloth in the wild before. He was all fuzzy and had a face like a bear crossed with a monkey. He looked strangely nonchalant in the face of our poking lenses and excited squeals. He must have been extra tired.

A few nights ago, after a day of horse riding and cantering through valleys to a beautiful but freezing cold waterfall, a bunch of us walked into town for the local annual horse show. Everyone was out, standing in the main square drinking shots of Aguardiente (which by the way, means ‘fiery water’ or ‘burning water’, i.e., disgusting, but a must if you’re in Colombia) and dancing. They were also watching various people do some weird trotting movement on their horses, which made it look as though the horses were actually tap dancing.

Me, Kelly and Ron and two fun American brothers I’ll call The Lion and The Crab (like their star signs, Leo and Cancer … they’re so different), showed Salento what we were made of by kicking off our shoes and having a dance-off with some friendly locals on a specially constructed stage. Then, an Aussie guy in our group climbed on a horse that clearly didn’t belong to him and promptly cantered off around the square — much to the amusement of everyone watching. Honestly, things like this just don’t happen anywhere else.

The Cocora Valley is a must-see, too, when you’re in Salento. I went with a bunch of American college graduates who were also staying at La Serrana, so I spent the best part of five hours remembering what it was like to be twenty-two. As we wandered the five-hour loop around the valley — part of the Los Nevados National Natural Park — I learned all about kissing boys on acid, teasing ex-boyfriends with slutty Facebook photos, and how best to cook a meal for eight people on just $5.

The same group of girls later tried to share a meal at La Serrana, without realising it was a sit-down affair for everyone at the hostel. It was a bit awkward watching them decide who got to sit in the one seat they’d booked and try to divide a plate of curry into five portions. Gotta say, South America on a shoestring is not as romantic as it sounds.

The walk through the Cocora Valley is quite dramatic, the way flat fields give way to steep hills and looming giant trees. At one point I was so mesmerised by the sheer scale of a towering native Quindío wax palm that I almost lost my North Face trainer in a pit of mud. They were pretty battered by this point, so I didn’t really mind too much.

The highlight for me was the little
finca
on a hill, where you can stop to drink hot chocolate with slabs of cheese on the side and watch scores of hummingbirds drinking from special fountains.

Next to visiting one of the nearby coffee plantations and learning all about how they grow, dry, pack and sell their coffee, oh and the horse riding, and hanging out at La Serrana, Cocora Valley has definitely been the best thing about Salento. OK, I like everything. I would stay here forever if it weren’t for the fact that Kelly and Ron want us all to head to Cali and learn some salsa in Colombia’s dancing capital. Sounds like a good chance for a change of scenery.

The Lion and The Crab will be joining us, too. We’ve all kind of bonded over sloth-spotting, buzzing on coffee and trying to help old Howie as he looks for the coolest things to do around us ‘young ones’. The brothers get the luxury of having him accompany them to the hot springs up the road in Santa Rosa for a few days before they leave the area. I’m happy to let them have him. It’ll be weird sleeping without the sound of his braces snapping in my face at bedtime, but sometimes we just have to move on.

25/01

‘You have to move your feet, like this,’ Alejandro told us as I shuffled with a sweaty, sausage-fingered man from Sweden in the tiny yoga/dance studio in the garden of our latest hostel.

‘Like this?’ I asked, moving in completely the wrong direction.

‘No, like this!’

He pushed sausage-fingers aside and proceeded to twirl me in a series of eight steps I’d never have managed without being encircled in a pair of strong arms, like his. I was breathless and slightly flustered in spite of his apparent gayness. He was wearing lycra shorts and a headband and I was in a bikini top with a flowing skirt. You have to dress the part, you see, even if your two left feet mean you’re never going to look it.

Alejandro is a practised salsa dancer who makes every move seem like an act in the Kama Sutra. It’s raw sex-appeal, the type that so enchanted me during those first few days in Ecuador when Salvador (oh, sweet, cheating Salvador) danced me around the kitchen with his bottle of watermelon vodka.

I haven’t got much better since then — dancing isn’t really my strong point — but when the offer of a lesson at La Pinta Boogaloo hostel came up and Kelly, Ron, The Lion and The Crab all signed up, I couldn’t very well be the only one standing on the sidelines.

Our latest hostel is more of an old mansion house on a quiet street that we imagine used to be populated by an incredibly rich drug cartel. There’s a swimming pool out the back next to the yoga/dance studio, so we’ve been spending most days lounging around it in the sunshine, drinking beer and listening to each other’s music … oh and making friends with the Colombian manager Mario, who’s been taking us out in the evenings.

Being fans of the movie
A Bronx Tale
, The Lion and The Crab have taken great pleasure in teaching Mario about the ‘Mario Test’. Basically, one of the young guys in the movie talks about a secret test he gives to a girl by taking her out on the highway in his car and seeing if she’ll go down on him in front of a passing truck driver. If she does ‘she’s a pig and she can’t be trusted’.

This is now Mario’s most-played clip on YouTube and means we’re all going around the mansion yelling ‘Maaaaaaario’ in a Bronx accent. I guess you have to be here (ahem), but anyway, having our little gang all together like this, day-in, day-out, is quite nice right now because, as any solo traveller will admit when probed, when you travel by yourself for so long it’s actually quite comforting to find people you can laugh with and share jokes with and be yourself with for a while, like you would with your friends back home.

It’s nice on your travels when no one has to pack up and leave again the next morning; when you wake up and know that someone you know and like and trust will still be around. It’s really nice not rushing around, having the time to make real connections like this, because it’s more about the people than the place, I’m finding. You can be happy wherever you are, in whatever you do, if you’re that sort of person. But only by surrounding yourself with strangers for a period of time do you ever get the chance to make new friends. It’s been especially comforting here because my gran died a few days ago, and it made me feel quite far away from home.

Over the past week I’ve discovered that The Crab, in particular, and I have tons in common. We read the same books. We like the same music. We can sit in silence or talk for hours about everything under and beyond the sun. Maybe it’s the Scorpio me and the Cancer him, two water signs floating along on the same wavelength? We went to the zoo the other day, just the two of us, and I have to admit when we walked through a garden full of butterflies I couldn’t quite tell which ones were real and which were in my tummy.

Cali is the kind of mysterious city that, while being exceedingly large and hectic, is not particularly full of ‘things to do’. You can pretty much do all the touristy things in one afternoon, leaving the rest of your days free to learn salsa and then exhibit your new skills at night in a series of dance venues. At a club called Zaperoco we were instantly shown up by a crowd with similar skills to Alejandro. Luckily, though, everyone seemed only too happy to dance with us gringos. All people want to do in Cali is dance, it seems. Or head out of the city altogether for something completely different … like the brothers and I did yesterday, when Maaaaaaario recommended a day trip to San Cipriano.

Now
that
was interesting.

As Jesus, our driver, shot around another corner with the velocity of an astronaut attempting to launch us horizontally into the side of an alien planet, The Lion and The Crab and I grabbed at what we could in the back — namely each other — and said a small prayer that we’d make it to San Cipriano alive. We only wanted to go tubing, for God’s sake, but it was looking highly likely we’d end up nose-first in the back of a cattle truck, or speared
Final Destination-
style onto a lorry-load of wooden poles we saw hurtling along the motorway at the speed of light.

Almost three hours later, having made it in one piece, we rearranged ourselves and boarded our
bruja
. A
bruja
— a word that means ‘witch’ in Spanish — is a motorbike niftily attached to the side of a long, open seat made of boards with wheels underneath it. This runs magically fast along the old train tracks, making you feel a bit like a kid on a fairground ride — or a wicked witch on a broomstick.

With the wind in our hair, the guys and I, and a German girl called Rebecca, soon put the car ride from hell behind us and were promptly deposited in a tiny village, whereupon we were led to wash away the last of our worries in a crystal clear river. ‘One of the top five clearest rivers in the world,’ Jesus told us proudly. He gestured to its shimmering greatness, already playing host to numerous local families, most of whom had set up tents on the pebbles close by.

Rebecca and I swam in the shallows. The Lion and The Crab both jumped from rocks roughly ten metres high into the twinkly depths. Jesus rewarded his questionable driving skills with a ginormous spliff. And then another one.

San Cipriano is a tiny town of 500 inhabitants, predominantly of African descent (though there were just ninety-two people living in the part Jesus took us to), close to Buenaventura in western Colombia. To live here you have to be born here, apparently, but in spite of this, there was a disappointing lack of people with six toes and hunchbacks in the vicinity, proving that incest isn’t practised quite as much as pumping iron appears to be, here. Most of the men we saw (or ogled at, in my case) were bare-chested hulks with bulging forearms and six packs so impressive it was difficult not to reach out and stroke them. Are
these
the hottest guys in Colombia? I did wonder.

After a lunch of fresh fish cooked on blazing coals, we were led down a dirt track beside the river. As we approached the rapids with our giant tyres, we tried not to think about the fact that, beyond the fluttering yellow tails of endemic ‘mochilero’ birds making hanging basket-style nests from the trees, and the fleeting rainbow streaks of toucans’ beaks, lurked members of the FARC with machetes in one of the most dangerous rainforests in the world.

We had no reason to fear the
guerrilleros
in our midst, anyway. Jesus is a well-respected man. Not only can he drive a car like Michael Schumacher on acid, in his spare time, when he’s not tubing stoned and bleary-eyed down the river, he practises paragliding, kite surfing, kite boarding and was once even pretty famous in the soccer world. It’s all about who you know, in the rainforest.

On the river rapids we were swept along on alternating wild swirls and calmer currents for at least two hours, maybe even longer. I kind of lost track of time (as well as my sunglasses, which are now clinging to the bottom of the river somewhere), imagining a million unseen eyes training on me from the treetops: monkeys, parrots, snakes and more sleepy sloths all peering out from their hidden homes. The jungle world unfurled around us as we spun in frothy circles and, once I’d successfully stopped my tyre from squishing a few sunbathing spiders splayed out in eight-legged abandon on the rocks, it was hard to think anything other than ‘Wow!’.

Wow. This is the real Colombia.

Also, I couldn’t help but think, as we drifted along in the quiet, of my gran, who recently died. Being away from home made me feel a bit useless at the time, and sad, and sorry, and I thought of the last time I spoke to her and how she told me to take care and have fun. While I said goodbye, I never knew it would be for the last time.

I couldn’t help but think of how it probably didn’t matter if I screeched like an excitable child on those rapids, or tilted my head upside down over the back of the tube to feel like I was floating in the sky, or yelled at the brothers to do the same in case they missed the parallel world I’d created for us all inside my head.

These are the moments, spinning through the elements with eyes completely open to every wonder (albeit bruising my arse on every hidden rock) that I love this gypsy lifestyle and I realise I’m changing for it. Who cares what other people think, really? Life is short, and it’s a gift.

As it was, my bruised arse was soon numbed by the peanutty potency of a local drink called
bicho
, which The Lion liked to call ‘a gypsy moonshine.’ This is made locally (in a woman’s house, I think, as that’s where we were taken to buy it) with nuts and sugarcane. We bought a bottle for the
bruja
ride back to the car. It tasted a bit like a peanut butter smoothie with vodka in it.

Thankfully this moonshine also served to lull us into a false sense of security as Jesus rocketed us all the way back to Cali, managing to get stuck in the blessed calm of a huge traffic jam for at least an hour — in a tunnel. Hmm.

Getting to and from San Cipriano isn’t the most tranquil experience, really, but take it from me, it just means you’ll be even more glad of a homemade smoking contraption fashioned from an apple, or a semi-naked salsa-dancing pool party, or a bit of drunken freestyle rapping when at last you make it back to your friends in Cali (I confess, all of the above has commenced within our mansion walls).

I’ll be a bit emotional leaving Colombia after all this time, especially as only Kelly and Ron are coming to Rio for the Carnival and The Lion and The Crab are going off to Peru to zen out in the Sacred Valley. I never got to go to the Sacred Valley, apart from Machu Picchu of course, but I’ve heard the landscape and spiritual energy there is pretty special. I’m sure I will see the brothers again, though. You meet people all the time when you travel, every day. But there are those who really do leave their mark on your heart. Sometimes you know it instantly … the ones who’ll be friends for life.

It’s hard to imagine Brazil can be any more incredible than some of the stuff I’ve seen and done here, but I’m about to bus it to Bogota where my friend Zac from The Dreamer in Palomino is now working as a teacher, and then I’m flying into the frenzy on my ridiculously overpriced one-way ticket to Rio.

Hopefully seeing my old friends, Russ, Koulla, Charlotte (another one!) and Sara again will fill the void. They’re coming all the way from London and I’ve not seen them in years, except for Russ, who came to see me last year in Bali. Russ and I will be going on together afterwards on a trip with Dragoman Adventures, which is an overland trucking company. It’s the only way we could find of getting through the Brazilian Pantanal (one of the world’s largest tropical wetlands) and through Amazonia back into Peru. It will take us through some of the least visited and hopefully more interesting parts of this massive country. We’re boarding after Carnival and will travel until 8 March with a group right through to Cuzco. Apparently the oldest traveller is in his seventies, the youngest is just twenty, and the trip involves long, long, looooong drives and a lot of bush camping. Things could get interesting.

For now, though, we’ve hired an apartment via Airbnb in Copacabana overlooking the beach, so I’m imagining — or at least hoping — that a few caipirinha cocktails and a week spent dancing on the streets will sweeten the transition between countries. Colombia, for all of its craziness, sexiness, weirdos and yes, even the attempted mugging, has been my favourite leg of this incredible journey by far. I know without a doubt that I’ll be back.

12/02