Ever since childhood, stories of exotic creatures and primitive tribes have fueled a yearning to visit South America’s legendary Amazon jungle. The purpose of this adventure is to turn ‘one day’ into ‘day one’!
The trip was intended to be a solo effort, but recently smitten by a dazzling beauty named Christine, it seems only natural to ask her to come away with me. Despite knowing each other for mere months, to my surprise and delight she bravely replies ‘I’d love to’. And that is that! In the spirit of mutual adventure we leave our comfort-zone far behind to explore the mysterious continent of South America.
To begin our grand adventure we limber up our exploratory spirits on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula by visiting ancient Maya ruins at Tulum and mastering the craft of rest and relaxation on postcard perfect beaches. Sun, sand, sip, repeat; life is good. Little do we realize how things are about to drastically change!
Our plane arcs over the majestic Andes Mountains with the snowy giants clawing at the sky beneath us, and at an elevation of over 9,300 feet the landing gear thuds onto the tarmac in Quito Ecuador. Fearless and free, with gallons of anticipation and a dog-eared copy of a Lonely Planet travel book stuffed in our packs, we sever ourselves from all that’s familiar in search of ourselves and whatever may be thrown our way.
Sauntering about Quito’s cobbled streets we befriend a blue and brown eyed llama with lovely thick eye lashes long enough to plait and decide to name her Dolly. The street markets exude an array of exotic sights and scents, but in foreign lands it’s often better not to ask what you’re eating. Case in point, we’re not exactly squealing with delight to learn Ecuador’s national dish of roast ‘cuy’ is actually roast guinea pig!
Slowly getting accustomed to the thin air we bus to the town of Otavalo. Nestled near the base of the Andes Mountains, it is home to the largest and most colorful market in all of South America, with the indigenous Otavalos easily distinguished by their trademark blue ponchos, crown-dented felt fedoras, and bountiful bead adornments. After a good explore, we stop on the return to Quito at the earth’s bulging equator line for the obligatory picture of straddling latitude zero with one leg in each hemisphere.
Searching about town for information on the ethnic Tsachila, we learn the tribe resides 133 km west in the foothills of the Andes. Getting there requires acquiring both transport and an English speaking driver familiar with the area and the tribe’s tongue, but delving into the task we ferret out a guy named Amado.
Snailing along in Amado’s angelic relic over hazardous mountain roads he captivates us with the story of when a giant condor swooped down on his Andean village and carried off his young donkey in its talons! While this may be possible, we can’t help but wonder if he’s concocted the tale as a diversion from the graveyard of ill-fated transportation carcasses littering the perilously steep mountainside.
With our stomachs empty we make the blunder of stopping at a roadside shop masquerading as a food market. It disturbingly suggests a satanic ritual has taken place. Decomposing chicken carcasses crawling with flies dangle from hooks and countertops garnished with severed pig heads and other lunch-loosening ‘mystery meats’ sure to generate weaponized diarrhea! With the owners likely named Sam and Ella, we hastily depart in search of a place capable of filling our stomachs rather than turning them!
Hours later when the broken road finally fizzles into forest we abandon the car to walk a narrow squiggle of root-infested trail. Slaloming through a sea of chlorophyll we try not to choke on our anxiety from the rustling sounds emanating from the tangled jungle.
Machete in hand, Amado bushwhacks through a battlefield of green undergrowth in a hundred shades of green, and with our curiosity afire, we follow him to a bald enclave of jungle sprinkled with bamboo and palm huts. Amado tells Christine and I to wait while he alone advances to acknowledge the tribe’s chief. We’re not sure what was said but he returns with permission for us to approach.
What a sight! The diminutive eye-popping Tschila tribe has quite the mop on top with paprika colored hair plastered down from a mixture of grease and the blood-red juice extracted from seeds of the achiote tree, and their bodies have a frightening war paint look with red and blue horizontal stripes purported to protect against evil spirits. We can’t help but wonder if the tribe’s unease is because of our cadaver-like skin!
With consent from the chief, I find myself in the somewhere south of sane scenario of standing inside the jungle hut of the tribe’s shaman. The sad-sack lair contains an earth floor and a few odd items including knives, feathers, live birds, unrecognizable herbs, and a pile of the red berries used to dye their hair. We also notice a few cooking pots, which to our relief are not large enough to fit a human!
Our intriguing tribal visit concludes with the tattoo-like ritual of having our hands marked with the blue- black dye of the Jagua fruit; meaning we are welcome to come back to the village for as long as the dye remains. Back in Quito we unsuccessfully try scrubbing away the dye using everything from soap to nail polish remover but the jungle tattoo will last for over two weeks until our skin regenerates itself.
Our departure from Quito is via the ‘Train Ride to the Sky’; 288 miles of daredevil engineering traversing a near-vertical rock face via a transport called an Autoferro. ‘Old 94’ is a bus body attached to railroad wheels, that precariously clings to the side of throat-lumping gorges as it zigzags up switchbacks cut into
the cloud piercing Andes Mountains. Periodic gushing over the exquisite scenery of the ‘Avenue of Volcanoes’ helps offset the hard wooden seats of our over-experienced transport.
Seeking better photos, a Spanish guy and I sneak out the back door of the moving Autoferro and climb up a ladder onto its roof. Scrunched up among bunches of bananas and luggage we clutch roof rails with one hand and work the camera with the other, but at altitudes up to 12,000 feet the icy air quickly wreaks havoc with blood flow to my extremities and turns them numb. With a higher desire not to expire I cupcake out and put an end to my roof surfing before becoming a corpsicle to be discovered at the next station!
The villages of Yaguachi, Urbina, Sibambe, Milagro and Riobamba are all dwarfed by an endless swath of mountains, including the legendary Chimborazo and Cotopaxi. After twelve heart-palpating hours the Autoferro chugs to its final stop at ‘GUTFOOH’ (get us the fuck out of here). Actually, the dicey destination of squalor is a town called Duran, where our interest in staying peaks at nil!
We cross a murky river to Guayaquil, another town honed by hardship and worthy of ‘GUTFOOH II’ status. Owing to safety concerns from rampant drug dealers and other garden-variety riff-raff unlikely to win any humanitarian awards, all travel by bus is strongly discouraged so we opt for a cheap flight to Loja. Regrettably this means being marooned here for two more nights before being able to un-incarcerate ourselves. In case you haven’t guessed, both the ‘GUTFOOH’ brothers are soul-sucking towns in the talons of turmoil that we would highly recommend any travelers give a good leaving-alone!
After our flight to Loja we hitch a ride over dirt roads into the city in a dilapidated World War II jeep. The driver named Elvis has a snaggly-toothed grin smeared across his bronzed Aztec face, and within seconds he decisively dispels any notion about his ability to drive sensibly. The cretin’s concerted effort to spare any wear on the brake pads leads us to believe that if common sense were lard he wouldn’t be able to grease a pan.
With lodging as rare as an eel’s elbow in the Cuxibamba Valley, we can only get our bums in a bed by taking a stuffy runt of as room above a small food shop. The unpleasantness of a nipple-enhancing cold water shower leaves us less than jubilant, but unable to find another option it has to suffice for the night.
Divesting ourselves of Casa Disappointment today we dubiously board a battered ‘chicken bus’ for the next leg of our trip. After a Guinness World Record loading attempt defying the laws of physics, the driver seemingly collects everyone in the village, jamming everyone in together tighter than two coats of paint.
With a grinding of the gears the bus finally begins moving, and we think we’re on our way. Au contraire, it stops once again. You see chicken buses can never be full. There will always be enough space to scrunch in Mrs. González along with her 6 kids, bundles of veggies, and whatever smelly livestock that counts as kin!
Burping out clouds of diesel smoke the bus thuds over washboard mountain roads, and trapped inside, we’re forced to endure a chorus of squawking chickens, bawling kids, and rattling windows; along with the pervading reek of human armpits and a disgruntled pig! Too many hours later we are paroled at the isolated Andean village of Vilcabamba; eager to hunt down a room with a shower to scrub the bus off of our skin.
Hidden in the Amazon jungle in Cusco, the village is sometimes referred to as ‘The lost city of the Incas’ as it was the last refuge for the empire of the Incas before it fell to the Spaniards in 1572. After a few restful days it’s time for the spine-jarring bus journey back to Loja and from there, despite warnings NOT to, another overnight bus to Ecuador’s sketchy ‘frontera’ town of Huaquillas on the border with Peru.
Hunkered down in our seats while wallowing in our little world of weariness and woe we fall asleep on our backpacks. Tonight may be Halloween, but as it turns out there are certainly no treats in store!
Sometime in the wee hours of the morning we are rudely woken by two dick-swinging soldiers with a lousy bedside manner. Prodding us with the ‘business end’ of their rifles they demand to see our passports. Groggily fumbling around we hand them over and dread sinks in its teeth when one of the chest-out tough guys snarls something at us while drawing a forefinger across his neck in the ‘slit-throat’ gesture! As the bus journey resumes Christine and I are brooding over the riddle of the intimidation.
At 05:30 a.m. in the desolate border town of Huaquillas we warily prowl about in the dark until locating the Immigration office, and sprawl out on the sidewalk waiting for it to open. When the office opens people enter and receive clearance to carry on, yet we are motioned to sit down on the far side of the room. After half hour of trying to push back my irritation, I approach the sour looking official in charge to find out why.
Having the demeanor of a constipated camel, he offers only a dismissive flick of his wrist as if shooing away a pesky fly. With my head crowded with questions I sit once again. Approaching once again a short while later I receive the same rude treatment and the tension in the room is growing exponentially.
Clearly a front-runner as an inductee into the A-hole Hall of Fame, this sonofabitch has all the warmth of an injured cobra and is simply a shiver trawling for a spine to run up. Marinating in his ego he is ominously slouched back with his feet up on the desk having some street kid polish his blunt-toed boots.
Steeping in anger and not known for having a slow boil I am unable to restrain myself and aggressively unfold from my chair to smash a fist on his desk demanding a phone call. This is a less than ideal move, and the consequence is swift. The corners of his lips instantly crawl up his incisors, and with neck veins resembling night crawlers he reaches under his desk and pulls out a sinister looking assault rifle, pointing it directly at me. As the fear-soaked seconds tick by I wonder if he might actually pull the trigger!
Radiating contempt, the bastard barks orders in Spanish while jabbing the gun at me, motioning in no uncertain terms to sit back down! Christine’s eyes are as owlish as mine, especially with the throat-slicing gesture on the bus buzzing at the edge of our consciousness. The situation is bowstring tense and I’m now regretting getting into a pissing contest with this two-legged skunk. With my bravado faded we sit in solemn silence, brooding over how we got into this mess, and how to get ourselves out.
After a while we notice a blonde girl wander in conversing in fluent Spanish. Exasperated with our predicament I call out and ask if by chance she speaks English. Luckily she happens to be an American teaching school in Peru and we ask if she can possibly find out what is happening. Acting as interpreter, Mildred determines our problem is that we have overstayed the departure date on our passports.
Mildred pleads a good case for us, and with an artificial smile going nowhere near his eyes the official tells her that despite my asinine actions he is in a generous mood, and as a favor to her, will not jail us if we pay the outrageous sum of 4,000 Ecuadorian Sucre! This is more than baksheesh – this is extortion!
Even though he’ll trouser the cash she advises us to pay, because the same thing happened to a friend of hers and he was jailed for two weeks before receiving any food. Travel is all about problem-solving, but assessing our options doesn’t take long, as in a blinding flash of obviousness we realize we have none!
With no desire to forfeit our freedom we grudgingly fork over the money before the bastard has a change of heart. Huffing down the dust-clouded road we theorize that this pothole on the road of travel will be missed in the same way as a bad case of hemorrhoids!
With Mildred in stride we locate transport to Peru’s most northerly town of Tumbes, in order to find another bus bound for Lima. Chucking our backpacks into a cargo hold in the belly of the bus we settle in for the tedious trip, trying to be comfortable with the uncomfortable. Hours later we are detained at another army checkpoint where all passengers must get off and take their luggage with them.
After a search of the bus we’re allowed back on, but as the bus is leaving I happen to notice my backpack is still on the road beside the cargo hold. I rush up to make the bus stop, and as I step off to retrieve my pack, the morally-crippled driver shouts out his window some fuckery about me and marijuana!
On hearing this, two suspicious soldiers quickly hustle me and my scuffed backpack off into a shabby shack. Despite my protests of innocence, an exasperating search and Spanish inquisition follow, but with none of the ‘Devils Lettuce’ found I am free to go. With many more Peruvian miles ahead I get back on the bus mentally maiming the contemptible driver. Some people just need a hug … around the neck … with a rope!
In the middle of the night I go to the back of the bus and stretch out on the floor to catch a few zees. Later, when Christine wakes up and notices I’m not sitting in my seat, her panic begins to percolate. With the bus so dark she can’t see me she wakes up Mildred to question the driver. Lower than a halibut’s nipples, the douchebag sinks to uncharted depths in the sea of sleaze and tells her I got off in a town 40 miles back! Should reincarnation exist I’m pretty sure this prick is returning as a cockroach!
Aghast, Mildred and Christine search the bus before spotting me coiled up asleep on the floor under a seat. After enduring this truly shitacular few days we’re seriously starting to wonder about our travels in South America! Arriving in Lima in the early morning hours we secure our backpacks from the cargo hold and I flip the imbecilic e driver an offending middle finger. Some people come into our lives and leave footprints on our hearts; others come along and we want to leave footprints on their face!
More than 24 of bus purgatory have left the two of us truly exhausipated. Far too tired to give a crap, we pounce on the first room we can find, and flopping down on the bed we are asleep on the second bounce! The only thing intruding on my sleep tonight is a pleasant dream where the bastardly bus driver’s head is held underwater. Until the bubbles stop!
Christine is struck with one of the many stomach ailments South America has to offer, and her only recollections of Lima are of the bed and a bowl of soup with savage chili peppers nearly assassinating her taste buds! Fortunately after a couple of days ‘trot’ by she is able to continue, but by now I’m sure she is doubting these troublesome travels when she could still be relaxing in a tropical tiki bar at the beach enjoying exotic drinks that come in coconuts!
Flying from Lima to Iquitos we are stunned by the immensity of the planet’s largest rainforest and the murky Amazon River writhing through it like a prehistoric python. The mightiest river on earth is 6,400 km long and 330 km wide at its mouth, where over 8 trillion gallons flow out into the ocean daily. This equates to over 6 million gallons a minute, enough water to fill two million bathtubs each second! After the plane brings us back down to earth, a brow-mopping humidity drapes around us like a wet blanket while trying to hitch a ride into the once booming rubber capital of Iquitos.
After an exasperating search all we can find is a cobwebs-in-the-corners kind of room that even Barbie & Ken would find claustrophobic. After paying we soon discover the tiny room is destination infestation with more bugs than the Russian Embassy and to call the place shabby is a true insult to the word!
Still not fully recovered from her ailing innards, Christine is on the brink of tears as she tucks her lustrous long locks into a shower cap for protection and starts pounding at the bug-bedeviled bed sheets to obliterate anything moving, before reluctantly ‘crawling’ into bed! Do I know how to show a gal a good time or what?
Even though I’m utterly bushed, seeing her capped in the plastic bonnet completely cracks me up, but my ‘True North’ on the other hand, seems to have suddenly had a sense of humour bypass! With the unromantic abode not exactly a mint on your pillow kind of place Christine is indeed deserving of high praise for her remarkable intestinal fortitude under such aggravating conditions.
Normally Christine is the sunniest and kindest person I know; but not tonight! Her irate glance absolutely guarantees I won’t have to worry about her hurting herself in an all-out frenzy to disrobe and fling herself into my arms for a night of unbridled ecstasy!
After a lousy night we don our sandals and share a cold shower, tap-dancing on any insects we can’t drown! Longing to leave our horrid hovel and see what else the gritty jungle town has to offer, we step outside to a sight that’s enough to cause our eyes indigestion!
We’re literally shell-shocked with a scene of the bizarre. For reasons eluding logical explanation the grounds are incredulously blanketed in hundreds upon hundreds of corpses of large black beetles! Crunching underfoot, the exoskeletons of the profoundly improbable beetle apocalypse sounds a lot like a goat busy chomping a mouthful of celery stalks as we try to fast-forward ourselves out of what looks like a doomsday scenario playing itself out!
Drowning in a sea of questions, we wander about town beneath our bulky backpacks and come to a seedy bar and duck inside. Beneath a thwucking ceiling fan chopping up the morning light it quickly becomes apparent from the number of bent elbows that the swill-pit functions as the official sunblock of Iquitos!
Working the bar with a ‘Hola’ here and a ‘Habla Ingles’ there, we manage to sleuth out valuable info on an indigenous Yagua tribe as well as a remote jungle camp where we may be able to stay. Armed with this new found information we are off to ‘find our wild’.
Our geriatric riverboat chugs along the Amazon River to a shallower tributary river where we switch to a smaller boat to reach a primitive camp that will be home for the next couple of days. Due to the remoteness and lack of electricity it is not exactly Camp Bliss, but the room does have kerosene lanterns and mosquito netting enshrouding the bed to try and detain the agile intruders. Outside there is bucket up in a tree to act as a makeshift shower by dumping down muddied water from the river. Ah, life’s small mercies!
We have to pinch ourselves that we’ve actually made it into the Amazon rainforest, which covering some six million square km across eight countries is the world’s largest rainforest and one of the least explored places on the planet. With the sky fading to black and unknown jungle insects jabbering all around, the night is a most humbling experience.
While trying to read in the hut with the aid of a kerosene lantern, a gargantuan insect looking like a motorized tree branch drops from the thatched roof right onto our table. As ‘Bugzilla’ creepily crawls towards her, a bloodcurdling scream from Ms. Christine reveals that giving up her creature comforts for just plain creatures is about as appealing as snail slime!
Having a wish to fish, we hire a local with a crude dugout canoe, and five minutes into our paddle a toothy caiman worryingly sliding off the bank beside us into the tea-coloured jungle river. Nervousness abounds, being keenly aware it is a very bad idea to capsize in a river home to both the swimming bear trap and gangs of predatory piranha with a reputation for being rather peckish!
Our primitive fishing gear consists only of a hook created from a small piece of bent wire and a few feet of nylon line tied to a tree branch. But in a river teeming with fish our slipshod fishing rod allows us to catch many of the notorious red-bellied piranhas, which before we arrived had alternate plans for the day.
Our floating hollowed out log contains several inches of rain water and the peeved piranha already caught furiously fin through it. To the amusement of our flip-flop footed guide Christine and I throw our feet up in the air in a Canadian version of ‘Riverdance’ whenever one of the scaly carnivores skitters past! With all that’s been going on I suggest to Christine that we need to keep a journal about our unfolding adventures.
Back at camp the legendary champs of chomp are cooked up and served to us for dinner. The fish are delectable, but then again, our enthusiastic ingestion is most likely because when it comes to piranha, it’s infinitely better to be the diner rather than the dinner! Looking like the work of a deranged orthodontist, the weaponized jaws of the flesh-shredders have been plunked on our plates as a memento of the day!
In a rare Amazonian moment tonight a Jivaro Indian wanders into camp, apparently in exile from his own tribe after marrying a Yagua woman. The chances of this encounter you could count on one finger as Jivaro are the famed ‘head-shrinkers’, an elusive warlike tribe living deep in the unruly jungle to avoid contact with the outside world.
The tribal outcast’s eerie aura has Christine and I feeling about as comfortable as a pinched nerve, but still I regret the communication barrier, after all, I think it would be intriguing to penetrate the mind of a jungle dweller with a fondness for shrinking human skulls!
The Amazon is every bit as awesome as it was in my eight-year-old imagination. Multitudes of big as birds butterflies flutter about like self-propelled flowers, and flamboyantly feathered parrots and Toucans often swoop into camp to devour bananas left out for them. Combined with the most badass bug thugs I have ever seen, my inner Tarzan is thriving!
Readying ourselves for a jungle jaunt to reach the primitive Yagua tribe we hire a guide to pilot us through the unbounded possibilities that come with being immersed in a rainforest. Armed with machetes to go on a ‘chopping spree’ in case of snakes or other hostiles, we slog for several hours through supersized vines that cling like petrified pythons to awesome forest trees standing as tall as office towers.
Our botanical foray is certainly adrenaline pumping but we’re starting to wilt with the stifling heat and humidity now flooding our skin with sweat. Christine most definitely prefers shopping over chopping, and with the abundant snarl of Amazonian plant tentacles whacking us about like a couple of piñatas, I must admit that I’m more concerned about her using her foot-and-a-half-long machete on me rather than any hungry Amazonian anaconda!
Reaching a village of huts built on stilts, the scene before us is worthy of an outbreak of exclamation marks! Bare-breasted Yaguas of the female persuasion, some with baby clamped to breast, stand about with faces smeared in red paint, while stone-faced tribesmen in straw skirts stare at us with diligent eyes. Suddenly, home feels a million miles away.
Pet monkeys ricochet around the camp and staked out in the sun to dry is a striking jaguar skin from a kill made yesterday! My wide-eyed adventurer sidekick and I are wonderstruck by the primitive sights tattooing themselves on the inside of our eyelids. Hot damn, the fact that we’re actually in a dense jungle shared with the fearless apex predators has my boyhood dreams becoming a reality!
The village chief, who barely reaches my armpit, greets us in a feathered headdress with a blowgun in hand. It’s fascinating to see the height-lacking tribe clutching the taller-than-themselves weapons they so desperately rely on in their hunter-gatherer way of life. The blowgun darts are sharpened using piranha teeth and poisoned with curare which turns them from dangerous to deadly by paralyzing their prey.
Seeing my intrigue with the weapon the chief of diminutive dimensions demonstrates his marksmanship. With more control than an episode of ‘Get Smart’ he takes aim at a canary-sized bird about 40 feet up a tree. Then, with cheeks puffed out like a foraging chipmunk, an energetic exhale into the blowgun launches a dart that strikes the bird and drops it to jungle floor as old as it’s ever going to get.
We’re granted an opportunity to try the blowgun but we may as well be trying to catch a mosquito with chopsticks! Our embarrassing incompetence proves we’d quickly be empty-stomached if forced to rely on it as a source to gather food. Though not likely to be dunking basketballs any time soon, the Yagua appear a happy bunch living in harmony with their environment. However, a collision with civilization sadly seems inevitable, and we’re awash in gratitude for the opportunity of spending time with the fascinating tribe.
Vacating the jungle we travel back along the Amazon River to Iquitos aboard an aged river boat that has all the speed of a sedated sloth. With the withering heat and perpetual perspiration taking a toll Christine is lying on the deck as limp as overcooked pasta and I’m drooped over the rust-riddled rails like a melted Dali clock, chumming the water with the contents of my stomach! Clearly, we two are through with Peru!
Stopping in Tabatinga, Brazil to sort out visas for Colombia, we’re sardined into a scuffed VW bug driven by a daffy driver who takes us to the border via a ‘cross country shortcut’. He seems to take perverse pleasure in the liver-loosening thuds of a cartoonish conveyance causing the kangarooing car’s passenger door to repeatedly burst open! We wonder if this is an omen of what awaits in Colombia.
The river trading post of Leticia in Colombia is a hub for contraband and cocaine, and sullen citizens along with a hellacious 40 degree heat put the kibosh on any plans to stay. Instead we venture on to Bogota, the repellant armpit of Colombia and murder capital of the world! On my birthday we hear the sound of gunshots being fired, but here in life-is-cheap Bogota just the sound of gunshots means you’re having a pretty good day, because in this cartel-riddled city gun control only means using both hands!
Waiting at the airport for a flight to Barranquilla we are abruptly hustled off into to a back room by four security men. During a forensic search of our backpacks for drugs a few items are broken, and seemingly gutted at coming up empty, they put us up against the wall for an insulting pat down. Later we learn that Leticia, Bogota, and Baranquilla form the cartel’s major cocaine smuggling route in South America! Hmm, it would appear my planning for this trip has been somewhat less than extensive!
Afraid of missing our flight we grab our backpacks and bolt through the doors as if shot from a bazooka. Running across the tarmac Christine experiences a cold dread when almost blown over by the powerful jet engine blast of a nearby plane, but in desperation we keep running after the plane as it begins to taxi out! The front stairs are being withdrawn up into the plane but we somehow manage to jump up onto the back stairs and climb aboard the slowly moving plane without injury or arrest! Honestly, where else on this planet could this kind of insanity occur?
Panting from our exertion, the former detainees, now turned action heroes, collapse into our seats ever so relieved to be one step closer to disinfecting ourselves from our self-induced purgatory. To say this crazy country is putting our newly formed relationship to the test is an understatement of epidemic proportions!
After a pulse-quickening flight through the wrath of an angry lightning storm we land in Barranquilla, where goosed by the fickle finger of fate, we’re told our next flight is cancelled because of the plane being ‘broken’. Irritation is certainly no stranger to travel, but with these holidays becoming horror-days we scramble to find a bus bound for the larger city of Cartagena to try and extricate ourselves from there.
Sadly both of us are now experiencing intestinal mayhem from parasites partying in our guts, but at least we’ve made it to the old walled city of Cartagena. With our hellish trip curdling what’s left of our sanity, we still have two additional days to endure before shaking off the shackles of this volatile country.
Colombia sucks more than an anxious octopus, and we spend the time conceptualizing ways to have the grey matter in our craniums laundered to cleanse an emotional tsunami of memories from one of the most dangerous countries on earth; screwed up by the killings, cocaine, and cartels of Pablo Escobar and his ilk!
Though we’ve only been in South America for a couple of months it feels as if we have lived a year in those months. Somebody once said ‘when nothing goes right go left’, and following said advice, our ‘left’ is heading to the beaches of beautiful Costa Rica for a much needed transfusion of sanity.
Experiencing the plane’s wheels lifting off ground, and the watching the soil of South America fade away beneath us, it feels so absolutely delightful that we’re almost farting flowers!
Mark Colegrave 1981