“Wooah-oh, Colombia, wooah-oh!”. As I sat on the flight from
Rio (good to see you again) to the Colombian capital of Bogota, even the
promotional video on the front of my seat gave me an idea that I was onto a
good thing. Images of colourful colonial towns, genial smiling old men, cascading
coffee beans and some frankly ridiculously beautiful scenery on the screen only
increased my excitement.
However, first things first it was time to get on with a new
adventur– couchsurfing. My first ‘appointment’ was with a 40-year-old English
teacher called Mao in Popayan in southern Colombia, keen to let me sleep on the
floor of his bedroom in return for my English skills.
And what a lot of them there were looking to learn from my
fountain of knowledge. On my first evening I was met by three from the airport
before shots of aguardiente, a sugarcane-based spirit, and for the rest of my
stay there my time was almost entirely taken up by students who wanted to show
me the city (I was given three different tours over two days), take me out for
arepas (cornflour pancakes) or take me salsa dancing.
Ah, salsa. In other south American countries salsa is all
over the radio, a key component of a night out and an excuse for sad human
beings such as the ubiquitous Marc Anthony
to continue to use up precious oxygen. But in Colombia salsa is LIFE. You can
see in the way that they conduct even mundane everyday business with the sway
in their step that only a lifetime of salsa dancing (it’s like riding a bike –
almost everyone is taught how to dance salsa by their parents at the age of 5)
can give you.
Myself, on the other hand… I thought that I could hold my
own in a salsateca after picking up a
thing or two in Ecuador, but when you find yourself in a sticky and sweaty
salsa club surrounded by those with at least 18 years experience of not just
dancing but living salsa, you realise you have a lot to catch up.
The way that Colombians meet members of the opposite sex is
by going out, dancing salsa with as many people as possible, and once sparks
start shooting between one of your partners, to continue to dance with them
until all the hip-shaking flirtations of the usual salsa steps are forgotten
and they’re basically having sex with clothes on. Once this stage is realised
then they presumably go home and have actual sex.
I think this way of hooking up is much better than the
English way of getting shitfaced and taking home whoever your confused mind
wanted at the time. For a start, Colombians stay mostly sober on nights out,
since dancing is the most important thing and you can’t dance if you can’t
stand up straight…
So this free and open attitude meant that very few girls
would refuse to dance with me. It’s just a dance after all. The only thing is
that their friendly welcoming manner soon melted away when they realised that
they’d said yes to a clumsy gringo with two left feet, and by the 5th
time in a row that a girl spent the whole song looking around bored in any
direction but mine, I was starting to wish I’d spent less time as a child
riding my bike and more time grinding my hips.
With a bit of practical tuition in my back pocket from one
Popoyan girl who found my ungainliness charming rather than unbearable, I
headed for one night in Cali, salsa capital of Colombia. Unfairly maligned,
Cali’s centre offers charms such as a church square with 30 stands offering to
type up documents on very old fashioned typewriters (how hipster) and another
square which makes you feel like you’re in a scene from The Birds, such is the infestation
of pigeons. This is presumably caused by local residents who pose for photos as
pigeons eat from both of their hands and shit on their head. Must be a cultural
thing.
So go to Cali for that, and stay in the Pelican Larry hostel
while you’re at it. A group of us gringos and gringas headed out for some
Sunday night salsa from there, finding ourselves in a huge club with a live
salsa band where many people bring holdalls full of cowbells and other
percussion and pass them around the public. I decided that was a safer option
than testing out my moves on a Cali girl, but still managed to get chastised
for bad cowbell playing by a pensioner, who then owned me in a dance-off. After
that club finished, eight of us bundled into a 5-seater car to go to a late-night
salsa club where the rule seemed to be not to dance with gringos. I went back
to the hostel soon after.
The Colombian bus network led me next to the village of
Salento in the coffee-growing zone of the country (or zona cafetera). Described as ‘charming’ by my guide, I took a
rather different view of it due to the fact that this is where I joined up with
the Colombian gringo trail and had to come to terms with seeing more of those
people that I had gone out there to avoid. The climate is usually wonderful
there, and offers the chance to go horse riding through fields of giant palm
trees and visit the charming coffee farms that are dotted around the
countryside.
My memories involve it raining so much that I could barely
see the giant palm trees that were 5m from my face, and not being helped by
some crappy Swiss people when I was bitten by a dog on the way to my coffee
tour. But hey, maybe you’ll have a better time.
One cool thing that I did get to try in Salento was the
national sport of Colombia – Tejo. This has to be played in large backrooms of
bars and involves chucking heavy metal balls a good 10m to try and land on four
tiny exploding triangles embedded in clay. It’s kind of less fun than it
sounds, but in Colombia it’s taken very seriously, with a professional league
and everything. That seems less strange when you consider that it’s possible to
be a professional darts player in the UK.
Medellin was to be my shining light to rescue me from my
salsa rejection and coffee-based trauma. What was the most dangerous city in
the world a mere twenty years ago under the reign of drug lord Pablo Escobar
has become an ultra-modern city since his death, and partly because of all the
money he invested in infrastructure to appease a population that was ruled by
fear.
Most people would agree that a man who used to have a bounty
of $1000 on every Medellin policeman’s head was a bit of a dick. However, he
still retains huge popularity amongst residents, willing to overlook all that
killing and drugs because he helped to fund a cable car up from the city to the
slums above. The view from said cable car is probably the daytime highlight of
Medellin, along with the bizarre sculptures of fat humans and animals in the
Plaza Botero.
As for the night-time highlight, there is absolutely no
contest. I went to the El Tibiri bar with a mate of a Popayan couchsurfing
student, and it was everything that you would hope for in a south american
salsa bar – located in a dingy basement with practically no ventilation,
free-flowing beer and aguardiente, incredible, joyous music, and the most
incredible salsa dancers I think I’m ever likely to see without moving to Cuba.
One girl in particular springs to mind, and one song in
particular where she was flung and spun between two partners in a flurry of
legs had most seated (and many that had been stood dancing) stopping what they
had been doing in amazement. The whole venue broke out in applause at the end.
Once again, girls were willing to dance with me, and even if I was awful, the
energy and joy in the room meant that it didn’t seem to matter. Even the
disturbing sight of an interval act where an old bloke got puppets to perform
sex acts on each other couldn’t sour the mood.
A day later, I took the bus to experience some good old
Colombian hospitality with my mate from El Tiburi. I stayed in the youth camp
where he worked and was given three hearty meals (usually rice or pancake with
some type of dark meat, three times a day) for around £3 a night, just enough
to get my strength up after an energy-sapping couple of weeks, ready to head up
to the sultry Caribbean coast to let South America throw all that it could at
me for one last exhilarating time.
