Paragliding

It’s my birthday. I’m turning Old Man. I’m in a fourwheel-driven crosscountry Jeep on a thinstripped road leading up, up, up the mountain.

It’s me, M, two guides and their tattooed little helper, and an italian guy who’s also supposed to strap on a saftey-seal and soar like an eagle. The Jeep is one of concentrated silence.  I’m looking over the verge. We’re so high up now it has become ridiculous. It’s to unreal to make you nervous.

We have to wait for a few minutes on the top due to strong winds. Me and M walk up to the steep end of the jump-off ground. I catch a glimpse of Merida way down there between two mountain peaks.

I get strapped to the safety-seals. My guide, Pablo, says it’s his first time as well.

His giving me instructions. As soon as the chute starts to fill with air, run for the edge. The chute is thrown, it starts to fill, I take half a step before both me and Pablo gets jerked a couple of meters back, I have a split second to think “this can’t be right?”, but then we’re picked up by the strong mountain currents and we’re away.

I can’t describe it as anything else than peaceful. I compare it to meditation although I’ve never tried it. We’re up, away, a roaring river beneath looking like a line of spit, the city of San Jose like a puzzle.

We hardly say a word during the forty minute flight. It’s unnescessary.

After the flight, on our way back to Merida we stop at Pablo’s little childhood village and after a few beers everybody becomes a lot more talkative. After a while M gets nervous, she’s wondering who’s gonna drive us home and when she raises her concerns with Pablo he only half-jokingly dangle the car-keys in front of her, galantly offering her to shoulder the part of the designated driver.

M:s pissed off, Pablo is a little bit ashamed and grabs a couple of Pilsen for the road and off we go.

The whole way home Pablo talks about how much it would cost him in bribes if there was a police check-point along the way, and also stressing the dangers of south-american traffic in general and Venezuelan traffic in specific.

Then he smiles and swipes a gulp from the 90% saliva remainders of his last Pilsen.

And poof, just like that, we’re home.

Interlude in Mérida

There´s a wildlife guide here living just up the street from our hostel. He talks like Scarface and struts like Jagger. His name is Anthony Fernandez. He´s had 45 days sober but today came crushing down. We´re all out drinking. Anthony is torned between angst and anger. His family life is a mess. He selfmedicates with weed.

He says “I am a good man”, it´s a battlecry, almost like an excorcism. We rid the demons with Cuba Libres and the soft mist is descending around the parc, shrouding the glow from lampposts and carlights. Everything dizzy, foggy, mysterious.

Anthony cries “I am a good man! My kids come to me for money I say here, take it, whatever you need, I give you.”

I´m chainsmoking like I´m trying to compete with the mist. I order two more beers. I wish I could help him in some other way but I recognize the state his in. There´s a swedish song, roughly translated, “tonight I´m no good for myself”, and when your in that state you´re dead-set on whatever selfdestruction that may come your way.

“I am a good man!”

Well, I think you are Anthony, and I wish you the best of luck.

The Border

Despite the bad-boy image still clinging to Colombia like powder residues to a nosehair, in comparison to its next door neighbor Venezuela, Colombia is a reformed criminal, dressed up in suit and tie, not trying to hide its battlescars and prisontattoos- just trying to move on.

Venezuela is more of a thug still out prowling the streets; chaotic and paranoid, wild and raw.

But also painstakingly beautiful.

We arrive at the Colombian bordertown of Maicao, step one foot outside the bus and get instantly swarmed by peddlers selling their “por puesto” seats in one of the many beaten up old Chevvys lining the parking lot. They´re scratched and torned, patched up with ducktape.

We pay 27 pesos a head, sharing a once upon a time maroon Chevrolet with a Venezuelan couple. You´ll need to cross the border in one of these cars in order to get all the necessary stamps in your passport.

The driver pops his trunk with a screwdriver. The interior is draped in a fluffy sincity-red, a piece of metal at the treshhold to the door hangs loose, the panel seems stripped out. He mounted his instrument panel- horn, speed, gas- on a list by the windshield.

The only thing up to date is his stereo system and we´ve got four big speakers breathing down our necks in the backseat. And the driver likes his Venezuelan folkmusic LOUD. He only presses pause when a military checkpoint forces him to.

Still on the Colombian side, we get off to get our passports professionally scanned and stamped, everything computerized, organized.

On the Venezuelan side a woman with no interest in new people takes a recentful brake from her tell-tale magazine to scribble the information from our passports on a piece of paper.

For the first hour on Venezuelan soil, the land where the cockroaches fly, there´s a military checkpoint every two minutes. The wave us in, every time, we show our passports, every time. The only positive thing about it is it means a few seconds of respite from the accordians and vibratos of our drivers, Pedros, favourite artists.

Charming at first, after a few hours of non-stop blasting, I come to think of Guantanamo and the sophisticated method of torture where they put Metallicas “Enter Sandman” on repeat and turn the wheel of volume to max.

Another checkpoint. We pay a little something not to have our bags checked. A heavily armed MP makes the international sign of “roll your window down”. He looks serious. But looks can be deceiving. He´s got a small snake wrapped around his wrist, wiggling its forked tongue in the air.

We all start to laugh, him too, the stern look of hierarchy and discipline melt away for a mischievous kid.

Pedro has to be the fastest driver on the trail between Maicao and Maracaibo. A speedbump to him is only the perfect opportunity to squeeze by a couple of more cars. He´s not interested in lanes, if he feels the need to he pulls out into oncoming traffic, forcing them to balance one wheel at the verge of the ditch on the dusty roadside.

He only slows down to do the Venezuelan pick-up line to a woman pushing a chart with coffee and cigarettes. He says: “kss-kss”. Pussycat. Meow. She obviously knows him , she laughs and calls him “Loco”.

We´re told this trip should take four hours. He does it in three. We´re there. He turns off his stereo. I´m willing to confess to anything.

Taking the nightbus from Maracaibo I´m told to shut the curtain to my window, since longdistance buses with gringos are much appreciated as target practice for malandros. I´m told a woman and her baby were shot dead a couple of weeks ago, right through the window.

Welcome to Venezuela.

Playa Blanca II

We got stuck in Playa Blanca.

I know it´s a fact hard to draw any sympathy from, especially when back home it´s below freezing and you´ll wake up to the sound of the snowpatrol on duty, spreading hard bits of crude sand to make icy streets walkable; and we´re stuck with the caribbean ocean just a breath away.

But I´ve got some work to do, deadlines to keep, and Playa Blanca is in many ways a makeshift shantytown with paradisic settings. After dark you´ll hear the shaky thunder from generators feeding flickering power to the beach-hut bars and restaurants; a few bulbs wired to wooden-poles, gas-stoves sizzling with hamburgers and fresh fish. Candlelights rooted in sand in plastic containerns turned chandeliers. The rest is just darkness and wild guesses.

There´s no internet here.

We got screwed on our return-ticket. Come monday, we discover all the speedboats are filled with daycruisers, and nobody is interested in validating the piece of useless proof we´re waving in the faces of stern captains; I´m up to my waist in water, backpack on, trying to persuade the powers that be, in my retarded spanish, to take us on board.

It doesn´t work. We´re here for one more night.

But Isla Baru isn´t just traveltorned backpackers and local ladies selling massage and/or fresh fruit: Isla Baru has a fancy side. We can see it glittering at the southside curb of the island. It´s all neon and modernity. So me and M decided to take a morning walk in the waters edge towards this outpost of civilization, in the hope of me borrowing a few hours of worldwide connection.

We´re being naive. Isla Baru is as much a divided territory as Cartagena with the old wall. There´s a man-made graveyard-deep canal separating Us from Them, with a military checkpoint on the other side, making the southside into a fortress of luxury. A man transporting some locals in a small boat laughs at our efforts at crossing. You need a special pass.

You need an Armani-suit and a swiss bankaccount. I´ve got a few wrinkly pesos in my backpocket.

We get on one of the slow boats the next day, big enough to room all the inhabitants on Barú a couple of times over.

I miss my deadline.

Cartagena

Cartagena is a two-faced Joker; the demarcation line between black and white drawn by the 14:th century stonewall still encircling the Old Town.

Inside is beautiful, well-kept colonial buildings, brightly coloured, voluminous flowerarrangements overwhelming quaint wooden balconys, churches and parks, small squares providing shade and conversation. But to me it all feels like an architectonial Disneyland.

You have your backpackers and your cruiseshippers, your cops but no robbers; maybe the occasional pusher but that’s all a part of the local charm. There’s streetpeddlers trying to sell you more or less the same kind of merchandise from wall to wall, restaurant and bars with prices adjusted for westerners with bulgy pockets.

The stonewall still seems to be serving its initial protective purpose; only in these modern times it’s the locals who get stopped and search at checkpoints set up in the walls vault openings.

It is in many ways a semi-gated community, for the viewing pleasure of the visitor, but where non-authorized locals isn’t welcomed with the same warm embrace.

We stay two nights inside before we move just a stonethrow away, to the Getsemani area, close enough to see the walls but still a world away. I’m not trying to romanticize it, the Calle Media Luna is still littered with hostels, much as the whole area, but here at least you get the feeling that people actually live, breath, eat, shit, cry, laugh.

In the Old City, noboby laughs. They take pictures.

Like this.

Playa Blanca

Here´s a Baz Luhrman tip for a monday morning: wake up in a hammock underneath a straw-hut roof, swing your legs over and place your bare soles on soft white sand. Yawn.

Brush your teeth by a saltwater lake separated from its ocean mother by the thin stretch of backpacker delight called Playa Blanca. Take a piss in the open. Watch the birds. Stretch. Fart.

Take a walk around said saltwater lake. Bring two of the beach-bum mutts that´s been guarding your hut all night with you; so if you´ll get attacked by a junglecat maybe it´ll go for the dogs first.

Stop for a moment. Watch the sunrise. Then keep on moving until you´ve made it full circle. Grab your towel. Gaze in both directions of the beach: no people yet. Walk into the caribbean foam, knee-deep, take a breath.

Take a swim.

Remember Faith No More? But it really should be: “I´m easy like monday morning.”

Pablo Escobar

To those of you who in the past been complaining about my posts running too long: Fuck Off And Read Something From The New Age Section.

Here comes a novel: we´re picked up outisde the Pit-Stop hostel in a white minibus, we´re in Medellín, not far from the zona rosa. We´re going for the Pablo Escobar-tour.

The driver has a standard joke, he opens his cooling bag, filled with sodas and beers, looks at us, “I´m sorry, no cocaine”.

There´s an english guy in the seat next to us, he looks like he´s been up all night with white powder, he´s been waiting all his life to come to Medellín and walk in the footsteps of the Capo De Capos. He gets kind of starstruck when he meets Pablos brother Roberto; half blind, half deaf, after an enemy planted a makeshift bomb in his car.

Roberto likes the girls. We get a couple of minutes with him and he gets a young swedish lady to walk up to him and he talks more about how he´s gonna take her on a submarine trip, then on an airplane,  and then on a spaceship, then he does about his famous brother.

Roberto lives on the upper floor. Downstairs is the Escobar museum. It´s all kind of sad. We´re wallowed around like a group of sheeps. Looking at bulletholes, looking at pictures of Pablo and family. Visiting the cemetary, everybody hovers over his gravestone, me included.

We mill outside the house of Pablos last showdown with the reinforced police. We take pictures of the roof where he got shot.

Our guide is conflicted about doing the tour, her parents would kill her if they knew she says, everybody wants to get it out of sight out of mind. But she sees it as an important part of both Medellín and Colombias history; if nothing else, to get visitors to spread the word that the city famous for its cartels isn´t the almost civil war-torned streets of the early 90´s anymore.

So this is me spreading the word.

I guess this wasn´t so long after all.

Valentines Day (Armenia)

We got a few hours to kill before boarding the nightbus to Medellín.It´s Valentines Day. A is sound asleep, stretched out on row of bright orange plastic seats.

Me and M are sharing a bottle of water and a bag of chips. We´re watching a bad movie on one screen and the Colombian version of the X-Factor on another. We´re scratching a stray dog who seconds before frantically rubbed his back against the polished terminal floor to scrub off some fleas.

We laugh about it, comparing this to a Tapas restaurant a few years back: candle-lit dinner, red wine (beer for me), music finely tuned in to the mood of fifty other couples desperately trying to bring romance on cue.

The dog wags his tail. The locals look at us with disgust for even being near him. An elderly black man gets really excited towards the end of the movie although it´s one of those you know within five minutes how it´s gonna play out (man, woman hate- man, woman marry, get a baby) but he´s shouting and gesturing towards the screen, like a kid at a theatre, “watch out behind you”, me and M brake the last chips in exactly equal halfs, holding hands.

Changing positions every two minutes because our asses gets numb from the uncomfortable chairs.

Salento II

I´m in a hammock below the kitchen patio. Gently rocking. It´s dark. The light from the patio falls sharply on the branches of thick vegetation no more than 6 feet away, making that part of jungle stand out like it´s almost manufactured with pin-sharp details, leafs looking plastic. The rest falls deeper into black.

M just went in because the mosquitos plagued her. They bite me too but I want to savour this moment: fireflies flickering, crickets cricketing, the sound of something moving out there.

A moment like this calls for a cigarette.

Salento

We´re staying at the Plantation House. A landmark of oppression turned into a quaint mini-village of dorms and private suits. At the end of the garden: the hills and valleys of the Colombian coffee district. A few years ago this was a zone of combat. Now, we take an organized ride down by the river rushing alongside the foot of a mountain. The horses know the trail by heart, so all you really have to do is hold on when they lightly buckle mid-stream at a crossing.

The name of the hostel isn´t just for show, it comes with an coffee plantation still up and running. The owner of the plantation/hostel hosts a coffee tour. We slip and slide down a muddy road that on Bolívars time were the main stretch to Bogota. The plantation itself rests on a tongue of dry land; overlooking a patch of bamboo-jungle, overlooking pineapples growing ripe, and that almost sedating view of hills caressed with greywhite mist.

The town is a square and a couple of streets. One of them littered with restaurants and bars. At Camino Real they have a log-fire burning at the open-air part. The sky goes pitch black fast, the flames breathe on our faces, they play the kind of 90´s rock that makes a lump of nostalgia in my throat.

I down my last cuba libre for the evening, cue music, end credits: we´re strolling down deserted streets, fireflies sparkling around us, “November Rain” plays over the soundtrack.