Latinalicious: The South America Diaries

by Becky Wicks

  Cali is the kind of mysterious city that, while being exceedingly large and hectic, is not particularly full of ‘things to do’. You can pretty much do all the touristy things in one afternoon, leaving the rest of your days free to learn salsa and then exhibit your new skills at night in a series of dance venues. At a club called Zaperoco we were instantly shown up by a crowd with similar skills to Alejandro. Luckily, though, everyone seemed only too happy to dance with us gringos. All people want to do in Cali is dance, it seems. Or head out of the city altogether for something completely different … like the brothers and I did yesterday, when Maaaaaaario recommended a day trip to San Cipriano.

  Now that was interesting.

  As Jesus, our driver, shot around another corner with the velocity of an astronaut attempting to launch us horizontally into the side of an alien planet, The Lion and The Crab and I grabbed at what we could in the back — namely each other — and said a small prayer that we’d make it to San Cipriano alive. We only wanted to go tubing, for God’s sake, but it was looking highly likely we’d end up nose-first in the back of a cattle truck, or speared Final Destination-style onto a lorry-load of wooden poles we saw hurtling along the motorway at the speed of light.

  Almost three hours later, having made it in one piece, we rearranged ourselves and boarded our bruja. A bruja — a word that means ‘witch’ in Spanish — is a motorbike niftily attached to the side of a long, open seat made of boards with wheels underneath it. This runs magically fast along the old train tracks, making you feel a bit like a kid on a fairground ride — or a wicked witch on a broomstick.

  With the wind in our hair, the guys and I, and a German girl called Rebecca, soon put the car ride from hell behind us and were promptly deposited in a tiny village, whereupon we were led to wash away the last of our worries in a crystal clear river. ‘One of the top five clearest rivers in the world,’ Jesus told us proudly. He gestured to its shimmering greatness, already playing host to numerous local families, most of whom had set up tents on the pebbles close by.

  Rebecca and I swam in the shallows. The Lion and The Crab both jumped from rocks roughly ten metres high into the twinkly depths. Jesus rewarded his questionable driving skills with a ginormous spliff. And then another one.

  San Cipriano is a tiny town of 500 inhabitants, predominantly of African descent (though there were just ninety-two people living in the part Jesus took us to), close to Buenaventura in western Colombia. To live here you have to be born here, apparently, but in spite of this, there was a disappointing lack of people with six toes and hunchbacks in the vicinity, proving that incest isn’t practised quite as much as pumping iron appears to be, here. Most of the men we saw (or ogled at, in my case) were bare-chested hulks with bulging forearms and six packs so impressive it was difficult not to reach out and stroke them. Are these the hottest guys in Colombia? I did wonder.

  After a lunch of fresh fish cooked on blazing coals, we were led down a dirt track beside the river. As we approached the rapids with our giant tyres, we tried not to think about the fact that, beyond the fluttering yellow tails of endemic ‘mochilero’ birds making hanging basket-style nests from the trees, and the fleeting rainbow streaks of toucans’ beaks, lurked members of the FARC with machetes in one of the most dangerous rainforests in the world.

  We had no reason to fear the guerrilleros in our midst, anyway. Jesus is a well-respected man. Not only can he drive a car like Michael Schumacher on acid, in his spare time, when he’s not tubing stoned and bleary-eyed down the river, he practises paragliding, kite surfing, kite boarding and was once even pretty famous in the soccer world. It’s all about who you know, in the rainforest.

  On the river rapids we were swept along on alternating wild swirls and calmer currents for at least two hours, maybe even longer. I kind of lost track of time (as well as my sunglasses, which are now clinging to the bottom of the river somewhere), imagining a million unseen eyes training on me from the treetops: monkeys, parrots, snakes and more sleepy sloths all peering out from their hidden homes. The jungle world unfurled around us as we spun in frothy circles and, once I’d successfully stopped my tyre from squishing a few sunbathing spiders splayed out in eight-legged abandon on the rocks, it was hard to think anything other than ‘Wow!’.

  Wow. This is the real Colombia.

  Also, I couldn’t help but think, as we drifted along in the quiet, of my gran, who recently died. Being away from home made me feel a bit useless at the time, and sad, and sorry, and I thought of the last time I spoke to her and how she told me to take care and have fun. While I said goodbye, I never knew it would be for the last time.

  I couldn’t help but think of how it probably didn’t matter if I screeched like an excitable child on those rapids, or tilted my head upside down over the back of the tube to feel like I was floating in the sky, or yelled at the brothers to do the same in case they missed the parallel world I’d created for us all inside my head.

  These are the moments, spinning through the elements with eyes completely open to every wonder (albeit bruising my arse on every hidden rock) that I love this gypsy lifestyle and I realise I’m changing for it. Who cares what other people think, really? Life is short, and it’s a gift.

  As it was, my bruised arse was soon numbed by the peanutty potency of a local drink called bicho, which The Lion liked to call ‘a gypsy moonshine.’ This is made locally (in a woman’s house, I think, as that’s where we were taken to buy it) with nuts and sugarcane. We bought a bottle for the bruja ride back to the car. It tasted a bit like a peanut butter smoothie with vodka in it.

  Thankfully this moonshine also served to lull us into a false sense of security as Jesus rocketed us all the way back to Cali, managing to get stuck in the blessed calm of a huge traffic jam for at least an hour — in a tunnel. Hmm.

  Getting to and from San Cipriano isn’t the most tranquil experience, really, but take it from me, it just means you’ll be even more glad of a homemade smoking contraption fashioned from an apple, or a semi-naked salsa-dancing pool party, or a bit of drunken freestyle rapping when at last you make it back to your friends in Cali (I confess, all of the above has commenced within our mansion walls).

  I’ll be a bit emotional leaving Colombia after all this time, especially as only Kelly and Ron are coming to Rio for the Carnival and The Lion and The Crab are going off to Peru to zen out in the Sacred Valley. I never got to go to the Sacred Valley, apart from Machu Picchu of course, but I’ve heard the landscape and spiritual energy there is pretty special. I’m sure I will see the brothers again, though. You meet people all the time when you travel, every day. But there are those who really do leave their mark on your heart. Sometimes you know it instantly … the ones who’ll be friends for life.

  It’s hard to imagine Brazil can be any more incredible than some of the stuff I’ve seen and done here, but I’m about to bus it to Bogota where my friend Zac from The Dreamer in Palomino is now working as a teacher, and then I’m flying into the frenzy on my ridiculously overpriced one-way ticket to Rio.

  Hopefully seeing my old friends, Russ, Koulla, Charlotte (another one!) and Sara again will fill the void. They’re coming all the way from London and I’ve not seen them in years, except for Russ, who came to see me last year in Bali. Russ and I will be going on together afterwards on a trip with Dragoman Adventures, which is an overland trucking company. It’s the only way we could find of getting through the Brazilian Pantanal (one of the world’s largest tropical wetlands) and through Amazonia back into Peru. It will take us through some of the least visited and hopefully more interesting parts of this massive country. We’re boarding after Carnival and will travel until 8 March with a group right through to Cuzco. Apparently the oldest traveller is in his seventies, the youngest is just twenty, and the trip involves long, long, looooong drives and a lot of bush camping. Things could get interesting.

  For now, though, we’ve hired an apartment via Airbnb in Copacabana overlooking the beach, so I’m imagining
— or at least hoping — that a few caipirinha cocktails and a week spent dancing on the streets will sweeten the transition between countries. Colombia, for all of its craziness, sexiness, weirdos and yes, even the attempted mugging, has been my favourite leg of this incredible journey by far. I know without a doubt that I’ll be back.

  12/02

  Carnival carnage …

  If the planet earth was a giant, dancing, naked body, Rio would be its throbbing penis. I’ve never felt so much sexiness in the air in one place! Entering Colombia was different in that, compared to the russet-toned, wrinkled faces of the stocky Andean people in Bolivia and Peru, it finally felt like the real Latin America. Suddenly there were tall, bronzed or black and dazzlingly handsome humans everywhere. But it’s nothing compared to Rio in Brazil. Most people here don’t even wear clothes.

  I just lost a bunch of my friends, including JP, who I first met in Medellín, Kelly, Ron, Koulla and Russ, in a heaving huddle the size of a Wembley Stadium evacuation. I think the point at which I found myself in the armpit of a transvestite in a peacock headdress adorned with plastic penises was kind of the final straw, especially as his/her pit was a little bit fuzzy and more than a little bit sweaty. I don’t mind when people don’t wear clothes, I just mind when they rub their bits against me in a juice bar. Plus, the deaf ear that troubled me in Bolivia and cleared in Iquitos after the ayahuasca camp has blocked up again. I don’t know why, but not being able to hear out of one ear is throwing me even more off balance than all these caipirinhas.

  I was just forced to abandon ship and flee in fear, so I’m now holed up in my apartment waiting for the noise to stop. You have no idea how crazy it is on the streets right now. One million people in one place is not normal, no matter how prepared Rio claims to be a year ahead of the 2014 World Cup, not to mention the 2016 Olympics. And apparently, I’ve not seen the half of it.

  ‘I went to a blocko last year with two million people,’ Ron told me the other day as we all sat sipping said caipirinhas outside a restaurant called Arab in Copacabana.

  ‘How did you cope?’ I asked. Blockos are street parties held all over Rio during Carnival. I find these things suffocating.

  ‘Oh, I’d just arrived so I wheeled my suitcase right through it and danced as I went,’ she said. Ron’s hardcore, if I haven’t mentioned. Personally, having spent the last month or so in quiet Colombian havens, most of the time here in Rio I’m walking around with eyes wide as saucers, not sure whether to be enchanted or petrified.

  Still, I can’t deny that this city is impressive. Two days before Carnival started I found myself with JP and a rock-climbing champion from Illinois with the biggest arms I’ve ever seen, watching the cariocas (Rio residents) and tourists from a beach towel by the sea in Ipanema. I thought to myself, well, how crazy can it actually get? I mean, look at this place, look at the lolling blue waves and the smooth white sand and the grinning coconut sellers. Look at the circling, swirling cormorants, the jutting brown rocks poking out of the turquoise water like ten-storey buildings in a fantasy movie. Look at these waxed to perfection women, sporting bikini bottoms invisible from behind, eaten up by pert, luscious buttocks standing firm in a way that make my own droop even lower in misery … How can a simple thing like a party change any of this? This, that has to be the most spectacular cityscape in the whole wide world?

  An abandoned feathered headpiece on the top of a mountain? Only in Rio.

  On day one, a couple of cable cars took me, Russ and co up to the infamous Pão de Açúcar, or Sugarloaf Mountain. Here we snapped a million photos of a glittering sunset and donned some abandoned Carnival costumes, for kicks. These were truly spectacular, complete with huge pink feathered headpieces. Whoever left them must have been mad. I wore mine for at least an hour and I would have worn it for longer if an Aussie bloke hadn’t literally stolen it off my head and run off with it. The swine.

  There are monkeys up here, too, which made up for my loss. They’re so small that they’ll sit on your hands, reminding you that behind the concrete and glitz, and the rundown favelas on its outskirts (in which a staggering twenty per cent of Rio’s people reside), the city is in actual fact a paved over paradise by the sea, which once teemed with wildlife far more wondrous than the jaguar-printed swimsuits that prowl its beaches today.

  Equally impressive was Cristo Redentor, of course, Jesus the Redeemer, who stands tall on Corcovado with his arms outstretched in an eternal pretend airplane pose for the city … although I was a bit shocked by the size of him up close, to be honest. He seems smaller than I’d imagined, and he’s not very detailed. Almost half-sculpted, in fact. Not that I could have done better, but I guess I was expecting something huge. Apparently it’s more impressive from a helicopter, but we couldn’t afford that. Personally, I think it’s more thrilling to spot Christ hovering in a cloud of afternoon mist from elsewhere in Rio, like a distant reminder of heaven.

  Two nights into Carnival, much of Rio was hell. Having ridden the Metro round all day with old women in sparkling hot pants, and men dressed as women dressed as semi-naked sexy Spongebob Squarepants/court jesters, I was sitting on the same beach in Ipanema watching a stream of blokes pissing up against the wall, unashamedly making a public urinal out of paradise. A group of teens in harlequin masks were puffing away in a cloud of marijuana smoke on the sand, an array of speakers were blasting samba in all directions, and strolling along the beach was not unlike I imagine wading through a landfill might feel.

  Still, the waves rolled in and out like a pensioner struggling for every breath, clearing the filth as it did so and harboring some vague hope that, soon, things in Rio would return to normal.

  ‘I’ve never seen streets that have to be cleared by a JCB before,’ my mate Russ observed the next day as we made our way from the apartment over to the beach at Copacabana. The JCB (or digger as you may know it) was pulling half of a shipping container full of trash along behind it and the smell of piss and shit was clinging to my nostrils like a tiny, invisible homeless man.

  We were nursing hangovers from our night in the Sambadrome, which, incidentally, was insane. If you can imagine 85,000 people screaming, drinking beer, eating terrible ‘Bob’s Burgers’ of the sort you’d usually only find in vending machines, and attempting the Mexican wave, you’ve only pictured a portion of it. The floats that made their way down the catwalk of the Sambadrome for almost seven hours straight in a constant procession by fourteen of Brazil’s samba schools came surrounded by marching bands, semi-naked dancers in heels the height of buildings and thousands of people in costumes the likes of which I’ve never seen anywhere else in my life … not even at Disney World. Your average man in a Mickey Mouse suit has nothing on Rio during Carnival. If birds had to die in the making of all these feathered headdresses, there would be no birds left on earth.

  At AU$130 each for the tickets, a seat in Sambadrome is not cheap, but if you’re going to Carnival, you have to go. It’s essential, the very essence of the celebration itself. Each samba school has an hour and twenty minutes to make it down the walkway, accompanied by their own samba-euredo (or theme song) and this procession makes even the most riotous blocko seem tame … almost.

  It was one such blocko that had made a proper mess of things outside our apartment in Copacabana. These blockos are basically moving parties that start at a designated spot and follow a live band on some sort of float, or truck, around the block. Sometimes these parties are stationary but more often than not you’re moving with the crowd, very, very slowly, squished up against pirates, or pineapples or just naked men covered in paint, creating one huge, sweaty ocean of people who can barely put one foot in front of the other. Some blockos have themes. For example, there’s a Beatles one soon, during which the band will play samba versions of all the Beatles songs and people will sweat profusely into smelly Sergeant Pepper outfits.

  Generally it’s expected that you’ll dance at these things and, believe me, we’ve tried. But dancing is kind of
hard when you can’t physically move. I’m not usually claustrophobic but just now, during a particularly crowded blocko, I had what I can only call a panic attack and found myself squeezing my way back here for some personal breathing space and an anti-oxidising açaí berry smoothie (a super food, don’t you know?)

  While it’s totally great being here with my friends … when I can actually locate them … I can’t help but think I’m perhaps a bit too old and boring for Rio Carnival these days. It’s one big hen and stag night gone awry and there’s just no escaping it.

  I’m kind of excited about joining the Dragoman tour now with Russ and making my way through the more serene regions of Brazil, and back to Cuzco. If anything, it will be good to drink something other than caipirinhas for a while. There’s another reason why Jesus watches over Rio above any other city. It’s positively sinful, I tell you.

  22/02

  Alien visitations and ear probing …

  This morning I decided I should finally get my deaf ear sorted out. It got worse again after I slept on a particularly hard pillow, and Dave and Daniele, our Dragoman truck drivers, said it would be best to get it fixed now, rather than risk going totally deaf somewhere in the Pantanal or the Amazon, where I wouldn’t be able to hear their cries of ‘tarantula!’ or ‘anaconda!’ or ‘fanged sloth!’ or whatever else lives out there in the middle of Brazil.

  While everyone else in the group was out splashing in a nearby waterfall, seeking out capybaras (sort of like giant guinea pigs), and exploring a landscape forged of quartz crystal and multi-coloured sandstone in the Parque Nacional da Chapada dos Veadeiros, I took myself on foot to the local hospital here in Alto Paraíso – a town they say lies on the same energetic lines as Machu Picchu. This makes it one of the most powerful and spiritual places in South America, a fact the hippies have certainly bought into.