by Steve Hely
Still, Admiral Edward Vernon of the British navy decided to attack. He was such a cocky bastard, this Admiral Vernon, that early in the attack, feeling like I got this, he sent word back to England that he’d already conquered the city. Fuck no. He lost fifty ships and eighteen thousand men and never took Cartagena.*
On April 10, a Thursday, sunset, walking the old walls, watching the waves break, everything looked peaceful. The morning before we’d landed, we’d been sailing for four days and nights and were disgusting. After a dragging-on tropical sit in the comically languid, grand but decrepit customs and immigration office, we scattered off to hostels to shower and stuff. I followed the A-Team, because they obviously knew what they were doing, and indeed they did. Within an hour or two I was clean and changed and drinking a beer in the courtyard of the El Viajero Hostel. This place was good times. All around were teenagers and twenty-year-olds having passionate and earnest conversations with strangers they’d just met from around the world. My thinking was, I was thirty-four years old. One more year and I’d absolutely be the creepy guy if I stayed in a Cartagena hostel, but I think this last spring I could sneak in, the last second. Nobody seemed to look at me strange at all ’til the last night I was there, when I gave half a bottle of rum and some weed to two Canadian kids sitting outside my door. “You want this?” I said. “I’m leaving and I don’t want to carry it.”
Then they looked at me strange all right. They looked at me like I was a glorious god of incomprehensible benevolence.
* * *
When a pirate ship, or any ship really, got to Cartagena, what they wanted to do to celebrate being alive ashore was drink and party. That’s what my shipmates wanted to do, and the first night we were there, that’s what we did.
We partied. Some of us partied harder than others, like Emma, the Australian schoolteacher, who partied so hard that her eyes became like flaming embers of pure party fire and she laughed like a crazed goddess-queen of the sea witches. But everyone partied hard. People ran into old friends they’d met up the backpacker trail of Central America, and strangers from the same parts of Australia as them, or just strangers altogether who fell in on the roving party, became best friends for several drinks, then vanished forever in Cartagena, perhaps someday to reappear on Facebook.
Around noon the next morning, pulling myself together, I thought, Well, good job, well partied, but maybe today I will just take it easy. Strolling the streets of Cartagena on a gorgeous April evening is one of the pleasantest things I’ve ever done. There are old squares and leaning churches, rows of houses with fading paint in tropical colors, kids kicking soccer balls around, dogs of independent spirit, people selling all kinds of delicious treats, empanadas and sweet pastries and also here and there drugs. There are statues of forgotten admirals and drummer boys, and you can walk for miles above the shore on the old city walls.
See, I said, this is pleasant. It is possible to enjoy life in ways that aren’t just drinking and partying. And then I ran into the A-Team, and we started partying again.
The next day, resolved, I was about to go to Cartagena’s famed Museo de Arte Moderno to experience firsthand the works of Darío Morales, famed for his bronze female nudes, when the A-Team asked me if I wanted to go with them to the beach.
I can’t tell you anything about Darío Morales. I can tell you that on the beach in Cartagena, men push ice carts through the sand and sell the most delicious ceviche you’ve ever had. Sooner or later somebody will come along offering to sell you just about anything you might want, like beers or sex with a voluptuous prostitute. The water feels nice on your toes.
We drank beers and joked around until the sun went down. I got along great with the A-Team. They were all hilarious and good storytellers and had good ideas like we should get another beer. What I liked best about them, though, was that they liked the TV shows I’d worked on. They did not think sitcoms were pablum for the masses, hell no, or if they did, at least they thought it was wonderful pablum. These guys wanted to talk about TV for hours. They’d seen all the best stuff. Their three-month surf odyssey halted often for marathons of pirated shows.
They were all terrific. I loved them. I was sorry I’d have to leave them tomorrow.
“Yeah?” said Mitch, maybe the most intense of them all, funny and a great man but unrelenting and uncompromising in his drive toward good times.
“Yeah, I’m going to Medellín.”
“Yeah? We’re going to Medellín.”
“Well, that’s fantastic,” I said, realizing by my flush of joy how much I’d missed having friends around. “What’re you gonna do in Medellín?”
“What are we gonna do in Medellín?” Mitch looked at me like there’d been some deep miscommunication or else I’d revealed with this communication some unseen imbecility. “We’re gonna party.”
And that’s what we did.
One Last Word About the A-Team
For all their own intensity, there was a friend of theirs they spoke of, a legendary man. When this man’s name was mentioned, they all paused in awe and delight. Perhaps fear as well, just a bit. He was said to be the best surfer any of them knew, though I’d seen three members of the A-Team spot a break from an underwater rock or reef at least half a mile out from anything like a coast or a beach and grab boards without hesitation to discuss or consider danger and paddle out to it and try to surf it.
This man’s name was James McAfee, and I print it here with the A-Team’s permission because the name of such a legend should be recorded.
“All you need to do to understand James McAfee,” Mitch told me, “is that all he is trying to do, ever, all he’s after, is a sick time.”
Sick Times in Medellín
Colombia was violent before there was cocaine. Extreme and desperate and ferocious fortune seekers from a Spanish kingdom emerging from centuries of racial and religious war with Moorish invaders hacked into the countryside, sometimes annihilating the native people they met, sometimes evaporating forever into the jungle, sometimes claiming some portion of the land for themselves and then fighting each other over it while meanwhile fighting whoever kept emerging from the wild mountainsides.
That’s for a start.
Before the Spanish were even exhausted of this, there were people born in Colombia who no longer considered themselves Spanish. Creole people—choice of word here could land me in treacherous ground, but Creole seems fair, agreed upon—like Simón Bolívar, born in Venezuela but you won’t cross Colombia without passing a statue of him. “The Liberator.” But he liberated what from who exactly, it’s not clear or settled. Colombia’s stories are full of people saying “You didn’t liberate us, motherfucker, we gotta do that ourselves, liberate from your sorry ass” as they start firing.
That’s my understanding, anyway. I’m sure as hell no expert on Colombian history. No way, dude, that’s a tough and thankless job. I’m not walking into that tricky thicket with my bad Spanish.
On top of history (underneath it, maybe?) there’s geography. Colombia is mountainous. Maybe the second-most mountainous country on Earth, after Nepal. I dunno, how would you measure mountainousness, really? A very beautiful Colombian woman claimed that “second-most, after Nepal” fact to me and I’ll take her word for it.
Countries are all the same flatness on a map, but they aren’t all in life. If you haven’t figured that out, plan a bus trip across Colombia and discover why it might take you twelve hours to get from Medellín to Bogotá, even though it’s only two hundred and fifty miles.
The green valleys of Colombia are lush and heavenly. Millennia of degenerating plant life leaves behind a rich, loamy topsoil that’s said to be a hundred feet deep in some places. But there’s not much of it. Only about 5 percent of the country is suitable for farming. The people who ended up with these lands wanted to keep them, while people who would like to live in them, maybe people who used to have them and were now dr
iven up into the mountains, were sometimes pretty pissed about how land was given out. That, more or less, is what a ten-year period (1948–1958) in Colombian history called La Violencia was about.
The mountainsides of Colombia are perfect for some things, though. Like growing coffee beans, and coca trees.
Medellín shares its name with the village in Spain where Hernán Cortés is from. If Cortés could see Medellín, Colombia, maybe his head would explode. Four million people. In the valley, there’s a dense downtown with skyscrapers, while up the sides of steep mountains there are slums that climb so high you reach them by cable car.
Or maybe Cortés would see all that and shrug and say sure, what else could be expected?
I’ll tell you this: Cortés and Pablo Escobar, that would be an interesting meeting. The conquistador and the cocaine kingpin. They might understand each other perfectly, or at least have the thrill of meeting an interesting rival.
You can grow coca maybe even better in mountainous (third-most mountainous?) Bolivia, or in Peru. But Bolivia’s landlocked and Peru’s so far away, on the Pacific. Colombia’s got those Atlantic ports, right on the old pirate coast, just across from the islands that’ve always been good for hiding your money.
Others can tell you the story of Pablo Escobar when he ran Medellín. The Two Escobars is a terrific documentary about him and soccer and the city and Colombia. Eventually, US Special Forces helped trap Escobar and kill him, as told by the great Mark Bowden in his book Killing Pablo.
Now you can play paintball in Pablo Escobar’s house. One of his houses, anyway. He had, like, twenty, including the mansion he lived in while he was in “jail.”
A friend of mine lived in Bogotá in 1993, the year Pablo Escobar got killed. He said in those days, you could get someone killed for a thousand pesos—about seven dollars. For that money, you could hire a gas-huffing gamin to shoot somebody.
“How come no one killed you?” I asked.
“Not that many people had a thousand pesos.”
Cocaine
Some people try cocaine, not that much happens, and they don’t bother with it again. Some people try cocaine, and their immediate reaction is to want to do all the cocaine in the world that very night. That demand is why cocaine was, at its peak, perhaps a five-hundred-billion-dollar economy, despite an aggressive complex of prisons and surveillance and ships and helicopters and paramilitaries trying to stop it.
Some people try cocaine and die. That happened to Len Bias, who was gonna be the future of the Boston Celtics, in 1986, when I was seven and the Boston Celtics meant a lot to me. That made an impression on me. I’m against cocaine.
I’m also, as a person and a writer, curious and borderline insane in my hunger for experience, so I’ve tried cocaine. You have to reckon with the fact that you’re consuming something produced in an unregulated, exploitive business that lots of people get killed in. But maybe that’s true of everything. In our hyperglobal system, who can trace what crimes we’re all implicit in? Trace back my morning orange juice and I’m sure there’s something awful along the chain.
Cocaine isn’t for me. That’s lucky. In my experience of people who keep using cocaine, dramatic problems and disasters enter their lives with a frequency that doesn’t happen to people who don’t use cocaine. Many people smart and crazy have lots to say about cocaine, but that’s all I have to say about it.
Center of Innovation (and Partying)
Medellín, today, is like a famous urban turnaround story. The Wall Street Journal and Citi named it Innovative City of the Year in 2013. I walked around the downtown parts of Medellín, and it was beautiful and peaceful. There was a cool-looking park for kids, good food, on the street and in good restaurants, and pleasant places to sip coffee and try to read the newspaper.
With the A-Team, I rode a cable car up to San Javier. The view below to the improvised streets of vertical neighborhoods was like floating over a living maze, and I could’ve stared at everything that was happening and rigged up and tottering for days. Veronica, the half-Venezuelan girl, suggested it wasn’t a wise or even really polite thing to go wandering on foot and gawk-eyed around a community like this, so when we reached the top, we turned around and rode back down.
They hadn’t forgotten why they’d come to Medellín, the A-Team. They’d come to party.
In that they succeeded. We had a sick time.
A Story of a Kidnapping
Late that night, in fact early the next morning, the A-Team and I were sitting on a balcony overlooking the downtown valley of Medellín, drinking cold bottles of Aguila beer that’d been brought to us on an enormous platter.
The A-Team’s ultimate destination was Venezuela, to see Veronica’s mother. Venezuela is a fucked-up scene. Hugo Chávez, their maniac president/strongman, had died after rigging the system so the functioning of the nation depended on him. No one had really taken his place. Former vice president Nicolás Maduro was in charge, maybe. It was widely believed that to shore up himself and his authority, Chávez had invited in Cuban troops, but now who knew who they answered to. They were a bunch of foreign mercenaries running around on top of every other kind of chaos.
Getting into and around Venezuela would not be easy. The A-Team’s menfolk were a little nervous.
Veronica figured they could do it. She’d spent time in Venezuela as a teenager, and had maybe a cynical or maybe a very accurate sense of it.
Almost casually, by way of example, she told a story about the time she got kidnapped. Here, with her permission, I’ll try to retell it.
She and her friends were in an SUV, driving to a party. Her friend wanted to stop to make a call or put on lipstick or something, so they pulled over. Veronica got a bad feeling right away. Wherever they were, it was not where you should pull over.
Sure enough, a guy with a gun ran out from around a corner, put the gun to the window, opened the door, screamed at the girls to get down on the floor of the SUV, and drove off. He was crazy high on cocaine, was Veronica’s guess, and as he drove he made the girls pass up their cell phones and he tried, as he drove, to call their parents. But it was very late, no one picked up, maybe luckily.
From the floor of the passenger seat where she was sitting, Veronica saw a sign: GUARENAS. As soon as she saw it, she thought to herself, I’m fucked, because this was a place you only heard of in stories about dumped bodies.
“Why are you doing this?” she said to the kidnapper. “Don’t you have kids?”
“Shut the fuck up,” he said. “You don’t know fuck all about my life. You’re a rich girl driving around our neighborhood, flashing yourself, rubbing our faces in it.”
He was crazy and high and pissed off.
Veronica didn’t know what, but something on the road to Guarenas startled him. He pulled over. He got out, kicked them out of the SUV, and drove off.
The girls were still miles from anyplace they knew. They still had to get back home. That was a whole other story, Veronica said. She shrugged and got another beer.
Weeks later I’d hear from the A-Team. They’d made it to Venezuela, spent a week in Caracas, and flew back to Australia.
They said it was crazy.
Good Friday in Popayán
What the fuck was I doing down here in South America?
That was what I thought when I got to Popayán.
It was Good Friday, two days before Easter. Holy Week, Semana Santa, is a big deal in Latin America. There are strange and colorful and idiosyncratic festivals and processions and parades of all kinds, in remote Mayan villages and in bursting cities. They are expressions of mixed-up and mingled traditions that evolved over centuries. I knew I’d be down here at Easter, I knew I ought to experience one. Popayán’s was the one I’d settled on, in “the white city” in the western hills of Colombia, once a colonial outpost, small and hard to get to and said to be preserved in time. Their Easter celebra
tion is on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, so you know I’m down.
Good Catholic boy that I am, Good Friday made me take a somber look at myself. What was I doing, exactly? I’d set out for the bottom of South America, and I was determined to get there. But why? Just to say I’d done it? To write it up and sell it? To gather stories?
Then what? Much as I fancy myself a wandering adventurer, the most fun I’d had was with people, partying on a boat and on the beach and in bars with my Australian friends, and when our trails split off, I was sorry to see them go. The existential questions that swirled around in my head as I meandered Popayán in the late afternoon were way less delightful as company.
This wasn’t a new or original feeling. I bet most travelers on most long journeys, from vacation to business trip to pilgrimage, find themselves asking, trying to remember, why exactly they’d come in the first place. Maybe the greatest travel writer of all time, Bruce Chatwin, collected a bunch of his dispatches from places as far away as Benin and Nepal and Russia into a book called What Am I Doing Here?
Ain’t that the simplest way to put it? That’s the question I came here to answer, and it was bigger than Popayán or South America or the whole Western Hemisphere. The question was what am I doing here, like, on Earth? In the universe? Aren’t we all just travelers on a trip where the purpose, if there is one, is mysterious to us? A journey of uncertain duration to and from points unknown to us?
The answers, if there were any, weren’t made clear to me by the other guests at the ParkLife Hostel Popayán. There was a teenage Japanese girl who stayed in the bunk bed across from me all day and all night. Whatever she had experienced or was experiencing had overwhelmed her, or else she was just really tired. I wondered if I should offer to help her, but I doubted that would do much good except to exhaust her further.
