Illegal immigrants, Tuesday 8 August
The ramp serves a village of low mud shacks. One of the men fetches fresh water and rinses salt from the bikes while we explain the mathematics of the price agreed on the hell ship minus the ten dollars paid to the two men already disembarked. The men are wonderfully good-natured, friendly, curious. They laugh among themselves and at the weak jokes I attempt and they accept the maths.
I long to ask why black people do all the heavy work. Is this an all-black village? Or is Colombia similar to the rest of the world?
The Honda fires first kick. The Suzuki is electric start. We ride down a deserted street of dry rutted mud with first light paling the horizon. An hour later we are in a small town, San Bernardo. We find a police station. A disinterested cop listens to our story and studies our passports in that way officials do when they would rather be doing something else. He imagines filling forms and more forms. Ming’s 650 Suzuki Endurance with its nine-gallon gas tank is more interesting.
Where do we intend going?
Cartagena.
Then go to Cartagena.
We need food and drink. Our dollars are useless. The bank won’t open for another ninety minutes. We ride to the next and larger town. We eat fresh-baked sweet rolls and drink great coffee on a small square across from a bank. Colombians surround us. They, too, are friendly and curious. After Colón, this is heaven.
The bank opens. They don’t change dollars. The four ATMs in town are down.
Our predicament is discussed on the café terrace. A small boy leads me through the market to a hardware store. The elderly owner has a Jewish name and wears a gold crucifix on a gold neck chain. He changes twenty dollars at a punitive rate of exchange. We pay for breakfast and ride towards the coastal resort town, Tolu, midway to Cartagena.
I lead. Ming follows. Cops stop us at a roadblock. They ignore the Honda. They ignore our passports. The Suzuki has their total attention and their total admiration. Are they bikeists or biggists? Your call.
We ride through ranch lands towards Tolu. The ranch houses are of a richer class than those I have seen on this journey. There is greater taste in the use of the land – countryside as art as in much of the United Kingdom. There is less litter.
The Bank of Colombia is in the central plaza in Tolu. A kind ATM spits pesos at us. We head on to Cartagena. We are illegals. We hit a roadblock every twenty or so kilometres. Most times the cops wave and pass us through. Those that do stop us do so to admire Ming’s Suzuki. They find us an odd couple and they laugh easily. Perhaps we are odd.
Slender Chinese Ming, the putative Zen Buddhist monk, is ageless and rides a vast bike.
The fat Brit on his pizza delivery Honda is Caucasian and clearly well past his prime. As travelling companions go, definitely odd.
We have enjoyed little sleep over the past three days. We have waded ashore. We have ridden for eight hours. Ming is in shorts and a T-shirt. I wear a long-sleeved red-cotton shirt and chinos that had seen better days when they were new. We are unwashed. We stink. And we are illegals.
We follow the signs to the historic centre of Cartagena. The road swings round the bay and we spot a yacht marina. We need advice and Colombians who deal with yachts deal with customs and immigration. Alirio de Avila Lora is boss of warehousing and imports at Todomar Marina S. A. He listens to our story and despatches us behind a guide to the Office of Immigration.
We explain our case to an official. His boss must decide our fate. We wait nervously on an old sofa in an outer office.
Four female officials occupy the office. One is dealing with two young foreign women, one of whom is bored and reads a book while her friend has her fingerprints entered. Reading strikes me as neither politic nor polite. A middle-aged Italian complains loudly at another desk. His voice is brutal and he jabs fingers at documents he presents and at papers that the woman official peruses. The woman catches my eye and raises her eyebrows in exasperation. I reply with a grin of sympathy.
The exhausted Ming has dozed off and is tilting sideways. I dig him in the ribs. The boss returns. Once more we recount our story, apologise for our appearance, explain that we came directly from the road. He asks how long we intend staying in Colombia.
We say, ‘Ten days, possibly two weeks.’
We return to the outer office. I ask one of the women what nationalities she finds most courteous and which are the most arrogant.
She answers without need for thought: all Ecuadorians are courteous. Italians are invariably rude and arrogant.
The boss returns our passports. He has written sixty days on a Cartagena entry stamp. ‘Hurry,’ he tells us, ‘and you will reach the customs offices before they close.’
Our guide has been guarding the bikes. He leads us to the customs. We are directed to a large open-plan office. We relate our adventure to an official, who finds us hilarious. He gathers his fellow officials. They find us hilarious. Ming is the centre of attraction. Ming is a make of cellular telephone imported from China.
What does ‘Ming’ mean?
‘It is my name,’ Ming says.
‘But it has a meaning?’
‘People,’ Ming says. ‘Ming is people.’
We are part of an ongoing joke between our official and the boss. The boss is a dark tall elegant man. He speaks with Ming in English – not about our bikes or illegal arrival in Colombia but about matters of language and Ming’s past. And didn’t we consider that travelling with smugglers was dangerous – that they could cut our throats and dump us in the sea?
Meanwhile import papers for our bikes accrue signatures as they circle from desk to desk. A beautiful young woman enters their numbers in a ledger. The boss adds a final signature and we can leave.
I say to the boss that I am reluctant to leave when faced by such beauty. The boss laughs. The woman asks for a translation.
‘Be satisfied,’ her boss says. ‘Satisfied that it was extremely complimentary.’
I kiss her hand and we leave.
We are legal.
I remark to Ming that, were this England, we would have been filling forms for a month.
Ming says, ‘Chinese and a weird beard – in the States someone would have shot us on the beach.’
We have rooms at the Hotel San Philipe. The hotel faces across Centenary Square to the Old City. The elevator works. The rooms are large and air-conditioned and have good bathrooms with warm-water showers. We have three beds each – all air-conditioned rooms have three beds. I wish to know what particular Colombian custom this satisfies. The receptionist giggles.
We check email at an internet café and report our safe arrival to family and friends. Ming admits to a band of students that he is a US citizen. The students accuse the US of having stolen Panama from Colombia. To become a US citizen, Ming passed a citizenship exam. The syllabus didn’t mention Colombia.
Cartagena, Wednesday 9 August
I, who wake for a pee three or four times a night, sleep the sleep of the just, eight hours straight. Ming does likewise. We breakfast at the hotel (ham and eggs, juice, coffee). We walk the old city. We stroll unafraid for five hours in the morning and a further three hours in the afternoon. We visit museums and churches and peep into private houses and ask permission to visit the shaded patios of official and unofficial buildings.
Cartagena is Spanish colonial at its best, painted in soft pastels of blue, white, red and ochre. The buildings are cared for. There is little litter. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. And the people. Students from the university spill off the pavements, sensuous and light of spirit. The gene pool is bewildering.
In the evening we drink cold local beer in a square beneath the city walls before progressing to an open-air restaurant. The owner is so obviously Italian (I ask, and am correct). A tall, handsome man. His walk retains a vestige of youthful swagger. The weariness and anxiety in sunken eyes betray him. A smile that switches off the moment he turns his back; the greying hair long at the back and lifeless after years of late nights and kitchen heat, the necessary cigarette: all these contribute to the portrait of the immigrant in an uncertain political and economic climate.
Ming and I order the dish for which Cartagena cuisine is famous: a fish and shellfish stew. The stew is rich with prawns and baby octopus and clams. We are surrounded by the perfect architecture of the sixteenth century. We have escaped from the hell of the ship and of Colón and find ourselves in heaven. We have shared an adventure that was often stressful, mostly uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous. We have become friends – not in a casual ‘Hey, do you know my friend Ming?’ sort of friendship but a friendship of true affection and of shared thoughts. Tomorrow we will part. Ming has a friend to meet and I have my work. We plan to meet in Bolivia.
Cartagena, Thursday 10 August
Today I work. I walk and walk: first to the marina to thank those who helped me and Ming with advice when we first arrived. My Mexican bags have holes. I buy new ones in the market and watch a cobbler for a couple of hours while he adds reinforcing. I find a good road map and a book of Spanish verbs at a bookstore in the historic quarter. I bring my writing and correspondence up to date.
Supermarkets sell fat-free yoghurts. I buy two, take them to a juice stall and have the lady spin me a smoothie. In the evening I walk past the second-hand bookstores on the square to the prawn and oyster stalls and dine on a huge prawn cocktail for two dollars. Each stall has a few plastic chairs, good for people-watching. For cabaret I watch teams of speed-bladers circle a banked concrete hippodrome. Finally I head back into the historic quarter for a beer. A genius did the lighting of the cathedral. The three domes for the Trinity and the clock above the main entrance glow a pale soft gold against the midnight blue of the sky. Ming has gone but Ming is here. The calm with which he ponders leaves a comfortable aftertaste.
Tomorrow is a day of rest. I will eat more prawns, enjoy the architecture, admire the people and enjoy myself.
On the road again, Saturday 12 August
I am mobile and South America lies ahead. The sky is blue. The few clouds are charming puffs of white. I have escaped the rain.
Although wet, Central America was easy. The countries are small and crossed in two or three days. South America is vast. Colombia is vast, even that half that has roads.
In heading directly south to Medellín, Ming re-rode our first day’s travel. I decide to circle. I head northeast along a coast of beaches and brilliant blue sea to Barranquilla. I spot a Honda agency in Barranquilla. I need a replacement for a mirror broken while unloading from the hell ship. No mirrors – however, the agents (husband and wife) insist on giving the Honda a quick service – free of charge. A young mechanic works while we chat. My travel impresses. I feel a fraud. I have ridden a bike, no big deal. I have enjoyed myself, met interesting people, made new friends, made a few dumb mistakes.
From Barranquilla, I continue along the coast towards Santa Marta. The highway runs between sea and lagoons. Fisher families live either side of the highway. They live in flimsy shacks crammed one against the other on salt flats that frequently flood. The shacks must be damp. The heat on the coast is intense. The air stinks of hot wet salt and last week’s fish. Canoes under small square sails slip across the varnished surface of the lagoons. Photograph them and you have beauty. Photograph reality and you come close to hell.
Highway 45 to Bogotá splits from the Santa Marta highway fifty kilometres from Barranquilla. Truck traffic is heavy. Many trucks are empty I discover later that these are coal trucks returning to the mines. The mines are US-owned. My informant is an ardent supporter of the Venezuelan president, Chavez. He tells me, ‘Gringos take everything and leave us with nothing but disease.’ Presumably he refers to silicosis.
The empty trucks spit coal fragments. My face stings. My gloves and shirt are black. Traffic is too heavy for enjoyment of the countryside. Soldiers guard the road, seldom a kilometre between posts. Police roadblocks are frequent. Most police wave me through. Those that stop me don’t ask for documents. They are merely curious as to how far I have travelled and how far I intend travelling. I answer that I fear wasting my last few years rather than seeking new experiences.
They enquire of my family and what my wife thinks of my travels.
I reply that she would rather have an old dog that hunts and sometimes brings gifts back from the field than one who hardly moves from the hearth.
Navigating the truck-infested highway is exhausting. I stop early at a town that has no reason for existence other than to service trucks and drivers. I find a reasonable room with bath, fan and lock-up parking for six dollars. I sit on the terrace and drink soda with fresh lime. A gang of curious ten-year-olds and a young waitress sit with me. They question me on life in England, bikes and travel. I question the children on family, school and ambitions – and the waitress on boyfriends, wages and her opinions of the town (jail from which she hasn’t sufficient schooling to escape).
I drink a beer with a dinner of rich chicken and vegetable soup followed by steak and onions with plain boiled rice. Trucks thunder by. None of the drivers is black – why do I notice such things? Early to bed: I intend reaching Girón tomorrow (420 kilometres): a small Spanish colonial town that is a national monument.
To Girón, Sunday 13 August
Both Ming and I had imagined the Darien gap as impenetrable swamp. Instead we sailed past fold upon fold of jungle-covered mountains. Colombia has an image problem and Hollywood is a lousy PR agent. Hollywood projects images of brave US citizens (Harrison Ford) fighting cocaine barons of Medellín and Cali. The scenery is jungle. The men wear grease in their hair. Tom Clancy is a great promoter of the same image. I am on the road by quarter past six and travel for six hours through a vast parkland of great trees and lush paddocks, clean streams, fat cattle and sleek horses. Everything is cared for and there is almost no litter – but why fences, I wonder? Surely where shrubs grow fast, hedges would be more economical and more decorative. To my left rise mountains and the border with Venezuela – dangerous territory.
Trees line the road and I ride in a green tunnel from which soldiers in camouflage emerge every kilometre or so to wave at the weird old man with a beard on the small white Mexican bike.
I pass plantations of oil palms. Crossing a river, I note that cormorants float low in the water. I recognise but am unable to put a name to a pair of birds, black with thin curved beaks. Neither can I name a small raptor with white patches on tail and wings. Fun to carry a bird book – but I don’t have space.
A ride of 420 kilometres: I am beginning to tire, my butt hurts and my hip joints ache. The final section threads through green hill country. Roadside notices advertise campsites and swimming holes in the rivers. I am too tired to enjoy the views.
The side road to Girón forks right off Highway 45A a few kilometres short of Bucaramanga. Girón is a whitewashed Andalusian town transported to a bowl in the Colombian mountains. A small river winds through the town. All roads are cobbled. Most houses are single-storey; all have pantiled roofs and wood shutters. I find a room on the first floor of a beautiful boutique hotel on the Plaza Central. Trees shade the plaza. Sunday and the town is full of daytrippers.
I shower and rest an hour before taking a second shower and venturing out. This is the hour of the Sunday passeo. Courting couples hold hands and giggle. Their elders are more taken by the food off street stalls (corn, grilled meat, beef sausages, ice-cream). Bells ring. The religious enter the church for evening Mass or cross themselves.
Girón is bliss. I walk and walk and people smile and greet me. I find two smaller squares. Both are shaded by trees. A small, simple, sixteenth-century church overlooks the first. A storyteller performs in the square to an attentive and appreciative crowd. He relates the fable of a German immigrant family and their Alsatian. The punch line is that there is no point to life without heart.
I watch the kids seated cross-legged on the cobbles. Spellbound is a good description. No wriggling, no ‘Mum, fetch me a Coke’.
The Polish yachtsman with the giggly Brit in Portobelo is a software engineer. Ming is an electronics engineer. Tonight I eat dinner on Girón’s central square with a chemical engineer. A Bolivian of German and Serbian heritage, he lives in Girón and has established the first bio-diesel plant in Colombia. Palm nuts provide the raw material. Three of his plants have been sold in Bolivia. Although in his sixties, he remains as enthusiastic as a kid (dumb statement – so many kids complain of being permanently bored).
To Villa de Leiva, Monday 14 August
The highway from Bucaramanga follows a green river valley a short way before hitting mountains. The Honda and I are well rested. We face only 300 kilometres to Villa de Leiva. No reason to hurry and I am at one with the bike as we swoop into the curves. We climb and climb. These are dry mountains. Even the air feels brittle. Brilliant sun sparkles on rock. Views are astounding.
A statue to the Virgin Mary blesses the inside of a curve near the head of the ascent. Headlamps rather than flowers are the offerings. Some of the lamps are connected to a power supply. At night, the statue must be a beacon.
I stop at a café at the summit of the pass and ask the woman serving behind the bar why headlamps for the Virgin? Surely this a special cult, a celebration of some extraordinary occurrence, a miracle, a vision?
‘Lightbulbs last longer than candles,’ she tells me.
Travelling brings such wondrous surprises.
The woman asks where I have come from and where I am going and refuses payment for my coffee.
Turn a corner and I have changed climate and landscape. Here all is green. Dairy cows graze upland paddocks. Silver-grey moss drapes trees shading coffee bushes. Honey is for sale beside the road, and apples and pears. I pass patches of tobacco, the drying barns open-sided. What tobacco grows at this altitude, so different from the humid climate of Cuba to which I am accustomed?
These uplands farms are so different from the industrialised agriculture of the United States. Fields have been created by centuries of back-breaking toil. I think of upstate New York and those small fields of the early settlers now uneconomic and abandoned to woodland.
The highway leads to Bogotá. I take a left fork to Tunja. The road rises to around 2500 metres. I ride through a narrow defile, a stiff chill wind blows in my face and the Honda is a little breathless. Beyond are fell lands that recall the Cheviots and Westmorland, although without the drystone walls. The road drops into Tunja, a university town, and then zigzags upwards and upwards across barren mountains. A final drop takes us into a wide bowl. Villa de Leiva is to the right. All the houses are whitewashed. Most are single-storey. Cobbles are small: the streets of Villa de Leiva are paved with river boulders. The Honda bumps and skitters. I find a pretty room with bathroom at the hotel Villa del Sol and negotiate an out-of-season nightly rate of ten dollars for two days. The hotel is spotless, the shower piping hot.
Villa de Leiva, a chill evening and the vast cobbled plaza is deserted. It is a space that demands movement, cattle, horses, market stalls. Its emptiness threatens my composure. I feel very alone as I walk uphill to a restaurant recommended by the woman of all tasks at the hotel. She is a woman to be admired and trusted, very matter-of-fact. She tells of her daughter, five years old. No, no husband – most men here are irresponsible. Better to remain single than share life with someone for whom you have no respect.
She is a good guide to a good meal. I have fasted all day and order churrasco (grilled steak). The steak is vast, tender and full of flavour. I flirt with a young woman, two years old. Her father is French, chief chef at the French embassy in Washington. The mother is Colombian. They met while Bertrand was chef at the embassy in Bogotá. He and I drink coffee together. He talks of his future. He has a reputation in Washington. He would earn top money in a restaurant. The thought of living in the US horrifies him. Everything revolves around money. I hear Ming speak and the Korean monk on the beach in Mexico and the Polish software engineer who deserted a top job in Boston.
Bertrand’s wife wants to move home to Colombia. Bertrand would like to try Chile. An opening at the embassy in Santiago would give them an opportunity to sample the life. He has already researched fees at a good private school: 2500 dollars per annum.
Villa de Leiva, Tuesday 15 August
Villa de Leiva is a classic example of early Hispanic urban planning. All streets meet at right-angles. No house is sufficiently tall to block the breeze from its neighbours. The exteriors are simple – display of wealth was both dangerous and vulgar. Peek through doorways and you glimpse greenery and perhaps feel a soft breeze cooled by a fountain or pond. So, yes, Villa de Leiva is very Spanish. It is also very Moorish.
Hundreds of years of Moorish occupation must have left few Spaniards of pure Hispanic blood, whatever that is. I am part Spanish. Thus, almost certainly, I am part Moor – and also Italian, German, Scots and God knows what besides.
That Spanish-Moorish part imagines those settlers in 1570. They were men of small stature, small education and many superstitions. I scan the parched mountains that surround the flat green valley of which the town is kernel. I imagine that the mountains must have made those settlers from across an immense ocean finally feel safe: safe because the mountains enclosed an understandable space, and a space they could defend. I wonder how many (or whether any) closet Moors were of their number. Historians tell us of closet Jews. We remain in ignorance of Muslims. Strange.
I cross the plaza to admire the Carmelite convent. Founded in 1645, the convent remains occupied by nuns of the order. The walls of the houses opposite are recently whitewashed. Spattering of whitewash on the cobbles shoots me back in memory to a rented house in Ibiza Old Town with my two elder sons, Antony and Mark. I am overcome by a longing to hold them in my arms as they were then, silken-skinned midgets bronzed and bleached by the Mediterranean Sea and sun. In my longing they meld with their half-brothers at the same age. The sense of loss leaves me exhausted and I sit on an oblong marker stone in the plaza. French chef Bertrand and his family pass by and I take their photograph. The pain ebbs. The sun shines. I watch people cross the cobbles.
A group of Spanish-speaking black people are obvious tourists. Few black Colombians live up here in the mountains. Villa de Leiva is Indian, white Hispanic and a mix of the two. Yes, and a sprinkling of incomers drawn by beauty and a low cost of living.
I need Bernadette. I head for an internet café and check email. Bernadette reports that two of my sons, half-brothers, have been discussing universities on the telephone. Melding.
To Tunja, Wednesday 16 August
I eat breakfast at the Hotel Villa del Sol. The owners and staff are in the kitchen. The quietness with which they speak and work reminds me of the San Blas Coona. I expect cold on the pass to Tunja and dress in long-coms, thick chinos, high socks, thermal vest, cord shirt, short-sleeved jumper, windcheater. I was tired on Monday and anxious to reach Villa de Leiva and suffered the mountains merely as a barrier to cross. I am fresh today and glory in the climb.
Centuries of erosion have stripped the mountains bare. The rock has a rose tint that darkens as cloud shadow snakes over the ravines. A few minute vegetable gardens nestle among the rocks. Reach the crest and I am back in Westmorland and the Scottish borders. I stop at a police post to discover the altitude. A cop tells me – close to 4000 metres. He and his partner shake my hand and wish me well on my travels.
A university city, Tunja is full of students. In architecture it is a mix of the historic sublime and mediocre modern. A policeman accompanies me to a car park and instructs the guard to watch over my bike. I am about to pay. The policeman tells me to put my money away and walks with me to visit a church that has been converted into the municipal library. Few books are new. The librarian shrugs dispiritedly: governments have other priorities.
I attended seven o’clock Mass this morning at Villa de Leiva in the parochial church on the plaza (the only time it was open during my visit). The church is big and plain. I like plain. We were a congregation of twelve. I felt nothing. Here, in Tunja, I visit the church of Santo Domingo. Built in the final years of the sixteenth century, the church is small and panelled wall to wall with carved wood, richly gilded. I don’t like ornate and yet I am overawed.
Two early colonial mansions remind me of houses I have visited in Morocco and in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. These are homes built in the first half of the sixteenth century. They are simple in construction, unclad wooden beams, polished board floors, plain plaster. One of the homes has a view from the upper gallery of the Carter Bar, except that this is Colombia rather than the borders of Scotland. We are at 2800 metres above sea level. I walk a couple of hours without feeling breathless and buy a smart rain jacket marked down to twenty-eight dollars.
Small, dark cafés abound where students can discuss metaphysics, revolution, rap artists and football. I find a light café and eat fresh strawberries without cream or sugar. Two pretty young women enter. They select a huge pastry filled with berries and cream and topped with ice-cream. I warn them that guilt-free pleasure in such joys is for the young. ‘Enjoy while you can.’
Tivasosa is forty-eight kilometres northeast of Tunja. I have been told that it is unique both in colonial architecture and in having a woman mayor and a woman chief of police. The town is small, tidy and clean. The central square is pretty, no more. The mayor is a man; so is the chief of police. So much for my informant! I ride back to Tunja. Friesian cattle graze small fields protected by small woods. The hills are so Westmorland that I expect to meet a friend, Tom Lowther, walking a lurcher. Even the thin drizzle is familiar and I am cold, despite the addition of the new jacket. I am also happy – loneliness has no place in this familiar landscape.
I book into a modern hotel on the outskirts of Tunja and am welcomed into a group seated on couches in the lobby and drinking great coffee. The couches are upholstered in shiny brown fake leather. Two elderly farmers (OK, probably ten years younger than me) are buying a new trailer for what they call here a ‘mule’ or ‘tractor-mule’ – the part of a trailer-truck that has the engine and driver’s cab. The trailer is an investment. They wear thick grey ponchos all evening. They sit side by side on a couch half listening to the conversation and half watching the TV news. They are accompanied by a younger man, fifties, tall and sort of city, who leafs though a trailer catalogue. A fourth man is from Bogotá and sells cured hams. I undergo the usual inquisition: Where am I going, where did I start out, what are my impressions of Colombia?
I reply that I knew of Colombia only from the movies and books. The Colombia I have ridden through came as a surprise. It seems so normal and so agriculturally rich and developed – so European.
‘Americans know Colombia only for cocaine,’ the city man says.
‘And Europeans,’ the ham man adds. All foreigners think the same.’
‘It’s the movies,’ I say.
‘American movies,’ the city guy says. Americans finance the drug trade and they blame Colombia. Drugs are an American problem.’
I had heard the same in Guatemala from both a senior police officer and the head of a security company: that ninety per cent of crime in Guatemala was financed by the US.
Through Bogotá, Thursday 17 August
Colombians are extraordinarily kind. This morning the ham salesman takes two small painted amulets of the Virgin and Child from round his neck as a present to protect me on my travels.
I ride away from the hotel at seven. I have added an extra undershirt and a second pair of trousers against the cold. I need a ski suit. Mist shrouds the highway for the first twenty kilometres. Sun breaks through and I find myself in a land of lush green hills that are even more reminiscent of Westmorland and the Scottish Borders than those of yesterday. I funk Bogotá. I am not in the mood for big cities. The traffic terrifies me. The young driver of a new blue GM Corsa draws alongside to ask where I am going and wish me good luck. So do two cops on a big police bike. Try riding a small Honda through Bogotá traffic while sandwiched into a three-way conversation. I yell to the cops that I am trying to find the Pan-Americano. The cops activate their flashing blue light. The cop riding pillion beckons me to follow. The police hurtle across an intersection. My memory of the following ten minutes is blank. I suspect that I rode with my eyes shut.
Beyond Bogotá the road drops, following a river. Each side of the road sprouts weekend homes and hotels and restaurants with pools. Why would people build on the verge of a busy highway? Colombians must enjoy noise.
I stop and peel off a pair of pants, two jackets and a shirt. A great flat hot plain lies ahead. I ride between huge paddy fields, vast fields of cotton and a few fields of tarragon that my informant believes is used in brewing beer. Trees shade much of the road. I pass Giradot and cross a long bridge frighteningly high above a river that flows through a narrow gorge of greenery. Ibaque is next, and then the Quindio Pass – 3350 metres at the crest.
Colombians regard double yellow lines as a challenge. Drivers of huge trucks overtake on blind curves. Add a car on the outside hard shoulder and a couple of bikes whipping through on the nearside hard shoulder and you have the picture. One further detail – the almost sheer drop.
All Colombian drivers drive in the same manner, understand the rules and are miraculously good-natured. The cops wear camouflage and would be invisible but for phosphorescent chest stripes. They stop the occasional bus and check papers. Mostly they are umpires ready to call foul on one or other driver in a collision.
Meanwhile local farmers carry on their trade as if they were farming a flat field rather than a precipice. Lose your footing and you slide a few thousand feet. Terrifying! The men are small and dark and wear hats and boots and ponchos. Vegetables are the product. Posts and wires for tomato vines march up a near-vertical slope. A dozen packhorses carry sacks of potatoes.
Farms give way to pine forest for the final few kilometres. I have both my jackets back on. Cloud closes in. Wind hits at the summit of the pass. Visibility clears. Way below, pale fluffy cloud rolls against the mountain face. Overhead, darker cloud threatens rain. I have underestimated the time needed for the climb and head downhill in a race against nightfall. I have to brake to a halt three times or be crushed by oncoming trucks both overtaking and swinging wide on a curve.
The city of Armenia lies at the foot of the mountains. A young cop stops me in heavy traffic on a bridge into the city. By law, Colombian bikers display their bike plate numbers on their chests and back. I don’t. Why don’t I? A police sergeant arrives and tells the young cop to stop being stupid. The sergeant then stops a local bus to ask the driver for directions to a hotel.
I have commented previously on the extraordinary helpfulness of Colombians and of their friendliness and the interest they take in my journey. I do so again. They help and they help and they help.
An earthquake in 1999 destroyed much of Armenia. I feel churlish in adding nothing more to my description of the city. I don’t have anything to add.
To Popayán, Friday 18 August
Glorious day. I ride towards Cali across what I believe to be a flat open valley. Hedges surround huge mansions built by coffee barons in golden years. Coffee prices are rock bottom. FOR SALE and FOR RENT signs are common. A gorge opens to the right. A gorge opens to the left. What I had believed to be a flat valley is a promontory that narrows and narrows. I ride down onto a vast plain of sugar fields and cotton. A small stream borders a field of cotton. Giant bamboos grow along the stream bank. The cotton is in bud. The surface of the field is white. The feathery fronds of the bamboo are a pale brilliant green.
I stop at Buga.
Here, on the Guadalajara river, Christ appeared to the early Spanish settlers in the years from 1570 to 1575.
A huge redbrick basilica celebrates the visitations. The basilica was completed in the early 1900s. It has been further modernised with lighted red signs marking the bookstore and the office that receives applications for Masses of remembrance.
Inside the basilica, a video of the service is projected on flat screens attached to the pillars. Electronic noticeboards display the time of masses. The arches supporting the main dome are lined with electric Christmas lights. Gold leaf abounds and so do worshippers; the pews each side of the central aisle are three-quarters full for midday Mass. The priest is in mid-sermon when I enter. He is in mid-sermon when I leave. This is religion for the TV age, Catholicism designed to compete with TV evangelists.
I gaze down from the entrance at an avenue of shopping arcades. All the shops sell religious tat. The streets leading left and right of the basilica are similarly lined. The whole forms a cross on which is crucified both religious and artistic taste. A recreation of the tower of the original church stands beside the basilica, the church built by the original settlers. It is small, simple and unadorned.
A right turn off the freeway takes me eighty kilometres through hills to Popayán. A cop on a Yamaha toots a greeting and waves as he speeds by up the first hill. I think of the horrid little American with the yacht at Portobelo. Of Colombia, he said, ‘The cops will shake you down.’
The road to Popayán follows the crest of a ridge for part of the way. The sky is almost black directly overhead; to the east a long clerical-grey blanket drapes the peaks of the Cordillera Central. The mountains to the west are further away; pale grey cloud clings to their lower slopes; their spiky summits are brilliantly sunlit. Between lies a hilly land of paddock and woods. Sunlight penetrates gaps in the cloud; hills are a patchwork of light and shade.
On one hill, a Renault, overtaking across double yellow lines, has smashed head on into a truck. The impact has hurled the Renault across the retaining barrier. Cops are measuring skid marks. A parked ambulance presumably contains the dead.
On the next climb, I catch a second ambulance, lights flashing, and follow it into Popayán.
At 1760 metres, Popayán is cool and served the early sugar planters as a hill station. The centre is white Spanish colonial. Dusk and I search for a colonial-type hotel with atmosphere, as recommended by my guidebook. The first no longer exists, the second is full and I can’t find the third. I pull up beside a late teenager on a scooter eating a creamy dessert out of a plastic container. She leads me to the third: the hotel is full. She takes me a short way out from the centre to a modern hotel without atmosphere but clean and with parking and hot water.
My guide is a final-year medical student. Her first name: Lady.
Popayán, Saturday 19 August
Popayán is in three sections. The universities have their own barrios, while a modern commercial city has expanded beyond an unspoilt sixteenth-century core that occupies a round-topped hill. All the houses are painted white in the historic zone. The streets run at right-angles. Look down any street and you see greenery at the end, either trees or hills or mountains. The plaza occupies the crest of the dome. The plaza has a cathedral and banks and government buildings. It also has an arboretum. A bronze statue of a martyr of the War of Independence is the kernel. A ring of massive conifers surrounds the statue. Royal palms ring the conifers. The outer ring offers a mixture of different trees, two of which are clothed in pink blossom. Offices, factories and universities are in the modern barrios so the city centre is semi-deserted much of the day and the churches are closed.
In Colombia, churches open for the celebration of the Eucharist or for Mass, weddings or funerals. They are not offered by the priests as tourist attractions. I find myself attending a funeral at the church of San Francisco, a celebration service at half past four in San Francisco, a celebration of the Eucharist in the cathedral, and portions of three Masses at San Augustín, La Encarnación and Santo Domingo. A congregation of only twenty-two is at Mass uphill at the tiny La Ermita. The church has a good feel and the young priest delivers a kind sermon. The priest might notice if I leave before the end of the service. He might imagine himself at fault. And I don’t wish to be rude.
A juvenile U2-soundalike performs in one of the other churches – I don’t recall which. Would guitars have been standard fare when the churches were built? Apart from which, what can I write? That Popayán has it in spades over any other Spanish colonial city I have visited on this trip. The feel of the city is right. It is a city where you could live. It isn’t purely, or even more than minimally a tourist destination. It is a city where local people work and study and bear families and struggle to survive. It is clean and the architecture in the centre is beautiful. The people are friendly.
I was directed to a great truckers’ and farmers’ restaurant last night. I was served a steak big enough to give a tiger indigestion.
This evening I discover a café with six pool tables and seven slightly bigger tables without pockets and an advertisement at the door for an anthology of poetry. Tables in the entrance are occupied by elderly gentlemen drinking beer: you can’t make a living serving coffee in Colombia; too many places give it away free. Later I mingle with the young at a cultural centre. Tomorrow I head for the border.
To Ipiales, Sunday 20 August
I lie in bed early this morning with a depression for company. I feel old and I am very tired. I want to give up, go home, sleep in my own bed with Bernadette, talk with my four sons, cuddle my grandchild Charlie Boo, drive over the Malvern Hills to see my brother and my sister-in-law, cook for everyone, sit among my own books, mow the lawn, prune the roses, bore everyone to tears.
I can’t give up.
I lie in bed and remember testing myself on that first mountain pass in Mexico. I had to prove to myself that I could make it. Pass the test and I could reach Tierra del Fuego.
And riding a bike is far easier than writing a novel.
So I get up and dress in warm clothes, finish packing for the umpteenth time, lug the bags downstairs, strap them on the bike and wheel the bike through the lobby and out to the road. The staff watch as I lift the choke on the carb. The bike fires first kick. I feel more confident. Right, let’s do it! Three hundred and seventy kilometres to Ipiales. Brmmm, brmmm, brmmm.
The day starts out chill. The road rises a while and then drops fast in a series of swooping curves, dairy farms, coffee, everything green with a few splashes of blossom colour, blues, pinks, vivid bougainvillea. Big mountains, left and right, are harsh as they close in on the road and suddenly I am in near-desert. The temperature is way up in the thirties. The road follows a river with bathing pools advertised, and Sunday people in swimming clothes carrying towels and a couple of small kids wearing inflated animal rings on the main street, or only street, of a gas-station-and-bus-stop sort of town.
The valley narrows to a gorge and up we go again, up and down, weaving through mountains scoured of soil and crumpled in a giant’s hand, hairpin after hairpin tracing the sharp folds. I cross a terrifying bridge from which I dare not look down, and then up again on the last long climb. The bike rides oddly. My gut tightens. I ease into the concrete ditch on the side of the road. The rear wheel is punctured. Damn, damn, damn.
On the way up, I had noticed a farm on the left-hand side. I ride back slowly, stop at the gate and walk down a concrete ramp to the farmhouse. The farmer meets me at the door, a square, well-muscled man in his forties – a child’s plastic wheelie toy out in the yard, no sign of a wife. Sure, he tells me, of course I can park the bike back of the house. I need anything? A drink? Any help?
‘I’m fine,’ I reply, although I am nervous. I last took a wheel off a bike somewhere back in the early sixties. I tell myself that mechanics is logic. I lay out the tools and set to work. No problems. The farmer tells me to leave my kit in the house, drives me to the last town to have the tube repaired and insists on waiting, and then drives me back.
Thank you, farmer.
He is a widower with two daughters, the eldest with children of her own (hence the wheelie toy in the yard). He farms onions and pigs. The pig manure keeps the soil rich and he grows two crops a year on the terrace by his house and on a couple of terraces lower down the gorge. He has a good house, modern kitchen, modern bathroom. The floors are tiled, the furniture a little formal. He drives a Mitsubishi jeep, ten years old and immaculately maintained. He is dressed in clean chinos, clean boots and a fresh white T-shirt. He notices that I find his Spanish difficult and speaks carefully. He is about as far from the Hollywood version of a Colombian as you could get. He knows the image outsiders have of Colombia and Colombians and it irritates the hell out of him.
To me he is one more typically kind, generous and thoughtful Colombian. I have met none other on my journey through a country against which everyone warned me.
At nearly 3000 metres in altitude, Ipiales is cold. A thin drizzle doesn’t help as I consult the guidebook. I pass a hotel and find that it is recommended by some masochistic lunatic. It is a four-dollar dump. I don’t have the energy to search further. I dump the bags on a bed. I don’t unpack. I find an internet café, do my mail and eat a piece of rubberised boot leather and cold gooey rice in an icy restaurant where all the locals are wearing ponchos and keep their hats on in case their hair freezes.
Readers may wonder what there is to do in Ipiales on a Sunday evening. I don’t have a clue. I am in bed by nine. Thank God there are two beds in my room. I add the blankets from the spare bed to my bed and huddle down.
Good riddance, Ipiales, Monday 21 August
I clamber out from under the weight of blankets at six and shiver as I scratch my four-dollar bedbug bites. I drag the clothes back on that I wore yesterday, take my morning pill and head outdoors. I want the bike serviced – two hours until the Honda concessionaire opens. I search a breakfast place with doors. The citizens of Ipiales – at least the restaurateurs – dislike doors. Maybe doors keep customers out. They might keep the cold out. Perhaps Ipialesians enjoy cold.
I eat scrambled eggs and drink coffee in the most crowded restaurant open at that hour – the more people, the more heat. Not in Ipiales. Ipiales is on a one-city campaign to offset global warming. I wait outside the Honda concessionaire until half past eight before someone tells me the shop is shut for the day – a private fiesta of some kind. So much for Ipiales.
I flee for the border. There, beside the highway, immediately outside town, is that hallmark of Anglo-Italian enterprise: a Forte Travelodge! True, I swear to God.