Simply Colombia.

Colombia? Well, as you all know, this country gets some real bad press. Awful in fact. And OK, if you are a politician or businessman, or even related to one, you are probably going to get kidnapped, threatened with death or murdered at some point in your life. It has the highest amount of kidnappings for any country on earth. If you score an own goal for the Colombian football team you may get shot dead in a bar (although that famous story is actually massively misconstrued). The country supplies 80% of the world's cocaine and has one of the highest day to day murder rates of any country on earth. There is, in effect, an ongoing civil war between right-wing paramilitaries, the left-wing Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the government (who somewhat help the right-wingers). But in despite of all this sometimes nonsense sensationalism (which thankfully keeps most travellers away), I really did want to come here because every traveller that I've spoken to who came here - really loved it, with no exceptions. And anyway, travellers are generally as safe as in any other Latin American country, as long as you follow the general rules like anywhere else. The people are very friendly, down-to-earth and fiercely proud of their nation. And so they should be.

For the first week in Colombia I spent my time between Santa Marta and Cartagena. Santa Marta is a dusty and sometines busy little beach town, mostly a base for other places to go nearby like Taganga and the Parque Nacional Tayrona. Though the people are friendly and relaxed and the living cheap. I stayed at the Hotel Miramar, apparently a hotel that has been mentioned in a few travel novels and has a legendary reputation and a colourful history (I have been told backpackers have been shot there), though nowadays it's a lot quieter, but still with relaxed rules. I spent three days in Cartagena, a city about 4 hours away from Santa Marta, with it's old fort protecting the old city and small cobbled streets. A nice place for a visit, not much else, unless you head out to Playa Blanca on Isla Baru. Apparently it's very good so I may go there again just for that.

After meeting up with a couple of French guys and Patrick arriving from Venezuela, I decided to do the 5 day trek to ´Ciudad Perdida´ (the lost city) in the nearby Parque Nacional Tayrona. The lost city is a set of ruins at 1100 metres in a tropical rain forest which takes at least 2 days walking to get to, it is still inhabited by a few indigenous Indians whose way of life has to be seen to be believed. The park is known for it´s guerilla and paramilitary conflicts, not to mention cocaine production. Being a national park, the spraying of coca fields with chemicals that destroy them is not allowed, and so this attracted both right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerillas who want to control the coca-growing industry there much to the detriment of the local population. There was a famous guerilla kidnapping of tourists in the park in 2003 by the left-wing guerillas who snatched about 5 or 6 trekkers- but they were eventully released unharmed. It is said now that most of the fee you pay for the trek goes to the paramilitaries stationed in the park for protection money, guaranteeing your safety, but you can´t really trust these guys either, they are some of the most evil people in Colombia. The park itself is beautiful, a tropical rainforest with coca-growing farms scattered here and there.

The group we had was about 10 people from all over like France, Holland, Czech Republic, Israel, Wales!, Sweden, Colombia and a guy from Belgium who somehow had one of the most convincing Scottish accents I have ever heard. I found the trek itself to be reasonably physically demanding, not being the fittest person in the world myself and a bit of a moaning b*****d, although we didnt´t walk a great deal of hours each day there were many hills to be ascended and descended with rivers to be crossed and mosquitoes to be fed by our skin, all the while sweating like a pig in summer. It was on this trek that I discovered that if I can avoid having to sleep in a hammock - I bloody well will! Ridiculously uncomfortable for sleeping and a literal pain in the neck. On the trek itself you don´t see a great deal of wildlife except for a few frogs, donkeys, horses and maybe a snake or toucan if you are lucky, but it doesn´t detract from the fact that it is fascinating to see the indigenous Indian´s way of life. The Indians are known as the Kogi, the women and men live in separate huts, live off the land, don´t use money and have a chief they call mama who can have many wives. You get to see a few villages along the way where the people live in small wooden huts with thatched roofs, sleep on the floor, gather food from the forest, wear fascinating indigenous clothing and perform centuries-old traditions. In all honesty though, I really don´t think it´s a good thing that they let tourists into their world - if it continues, I believe they´ll eventually lose their way of life and end up like us wearing baseball caps and eating fast food, being well versed in the bullshit ways of the West. It´s great to snatch a glimpse of their way of life but we really are doing more harm than good, which was my only negative thought of the whole trip.

The trek was good fun with lots of crossing through knee-deep rivers, drinking from rivers and streams, eating bananas straight off the tree, swimming in natural pools, getting bitten to death by all sorts of insects, seeing wild pigs, chickens, sleeping in smelly and uncomfortable hammocks and drinking strong colombian coffee and mate de coca.

A very interesting end to the trip was our visit to a cocaine-producing laboratory hidden in the jungle. For a small fee a guide will take you on a ten minute walk through some forest and muddy paths to a primitive laboratory where they produce cocaine paste, not quite the finished product, but it´s where most of the process takes place. A few of the group understandably didn´t partake in this optional part of the trip for moral reasons, but I was fascinated by it so I went. The guide/owner takes you through the process of converting the coca leaves in to the paste by using gasoline, water, a cement based product called Cal, sulphuric acid, salt, water and finally Acetone. Apparently he produces about 4kg every 4 months for the narco-traffickers. He had samples at each stage and actually makes the cocaine past right there in front of you! Crazy but interesting. Worryingly, he happily lets you take pictures of him and the whole process! I am sure the people he supplies to can´t be best pleased, but hey, it´s his life.

I am now back in Santa Marta at the hotel Miramar and planning on visiting the nearby beach of Taganga soon, although I am thinking of ditching plans to visit the beaches of the Tayrona national park because all the places to stay have hammocks - so sod that! I´d rather sleep between a rock and a hard place. I am not sure where I´ll be heading in the next few weeks but it maybe towards Medellin or Bogota, further inland in Colombia. I am also having a few more spanish lessons here before I go onwards to pastures new.

Anyway...

I am slowly but surely getting pissed off with the very few places in Latin America where you can exchange books, usually hostels, because everywhere I go almost all of the books available for exchange are in German or French!?! What's all that about? The last place I went to exchange a book, Casa Viena in Cartagena, had a straight choice between The autobiography of Dickie Bird or three copies of the Da Vinci Code... everything else, as you guessed, in German of French. It turns out I read the Da Vinci Code at the hostel in under two days. It's a real page turner but written for 10 year olds by a man who's never had contact with other human beings it seems, due to the number of cardboard cut-out characters in the story. So now I am reading the autobiography of Dickie Bird! I have come all this way to read the life story of an English cricket umpire! But, still, it is better than the Da Vinci Code. But luckily I've met an Aussie guy who wants to swap it for his copy of the Howard Marks autobiography (the legendary Welsh drug smuggler) so all is not lost.


Speak soon,

Jamie,
Santa Marta,
Colombia.

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