The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America

by Brian Kevin

  “Los vientos pasan sobre nuestras cabezas,” he said sagely. The winds pass right over our heads.

  There is a second explanation, it turns out. As Sky and I toured the town, we noticed clusters of young men and women at work, wearing yellow jumpsuits emblazoned with the words “La Escuela Taller.” As our hostel manager later explained, students at Mompós’s “Workshop School” learn hands-on skills like woodworking and metallurgy, which they use to maintain the city’s historic infrastructure. They’re easy to spot, laying cobblestones or tending to one of Mompós’s elaborate wrought-iron gates. Interestingly, much of the school’s funding comes from the Spanish government, which has a keen cultural interest in preserving the colonial architecture. It’s a peculiar setup—imagine the British paying upkeep on Colonial Williamsburg—but it illustrates how the town’s historic vibe, once just a product of its isolation, has now become a legitimate point of pride.

  One evening, while drinking beer at a riverside park that seemed to double as an outdoor bar, Sky and I met a pair of local teenagers who, for a fee, offered to take us in their jhonso to the nearby Ciénaga del Pijiño. Shallow backwater wetlands called ciénagas are plentiful along the Magdalena, acting as a sort of reserve system that stores water during the spring and fall rainy seasons and returns it to the river during dry spells. They also tend to be strongholds for wildlife, and in giddy, broken English, the would-be teen guides promised us we’d see plenty of “i-gwaah-nahs” and “mung-keys.”

  In his memoir, Márquez waxes nostalgic about the wildlife-rich river trips he’d taken as a young man, recalling the sound of the manatee’s cry and the sky-darkening flocks of herons that would alight at a steamboat’s approach. But he also laments the loss of biodiversity along the river since. In Cholera, his steamboat captain seethes at manatee-hunters aboard his ship and mourns the birds that seem to have disappeared with the receding foliage. I was curious to see whether and how wildlife along the Magdalena had rebounded.

  So the next morning, we showed up at the waterfront and climbed into a long, canopied boat. With our two young guides, we motored up the Magdalena’s Mompós branch and turned off at a narrow side-channel. It was an hour-long ride between dense and bushy banks, and the teens spent most of that time sitting in the bow, sharing a large joint and excitedly telling us the Spanish names for various fish and waterfowl. The herons were called garzas. The catfish were bagre. In the trees, we spotted gray-black hawks called gavilanes, and egrets and other waders were abundant in the shallows, their long necks bent like question marks. We did indeed see dozens of iguanas as well, lounging passively on tree trunks, plus a few families of spindly howler monkeys crouching in the canopy. Every so often, one of the guides clapped his hands, laughing as he scared up clamorous flocks of waterfowl.

  Fish, meanwhile, literally leapt into the boat. Twice we had to throw back tiny sardinas that flopped aboard, sending the guides into fits of giggles. I regretted not packing a fishing rod, wondering what sort of flies would entice the silvery bocachico or fat mojarra lora that seemed to be a mainstay on dinner menus in Mompós.

  The ciénaga itself was a broad, shallow lake ringed with marshy vegetation and small farms. All along the banks were clusters of woody cassava shrubs, grown for their starchy and edible roots, plus small trees crowded with Colombia’s peculiar green oranges. Swallows swept here and there across the surface of the lake, skimming the water in small squadrons. After a while, Cheech and Chong killed the motor, and we all stripped down for a swim. It had been a dry few months along the Magdalena, and the water level in the ciénaga was low. At the center of a lake that the teenagers told us was often twenty feet deep, Sky and I found several places to stand with our heads above water.

  To me, the whole scene came off as rich and exotic and authentically wild. But of course, in Márquez’s day, those farmlands would likely have been thick tropical forest. Colombian biologists estimate that the middle Magdalena rain forest has dwindled by as much as 88 percent since the mid-twentieth century. And those copious mojarra lora fish? An invasive species of African tilapia, introduced in the early ’90s with disastrous consequences for native species. In fact, the catalog of wildlife I saw that day pales alongside the list of creatures that were absent: critically endangered caimans and manatees; tapirs, foxes, and jaguars that are all but extinct in the Magdalena valley; hundreds of bird, snake, and reptile species decimated by twentieth-century trappers for feathers and skins. This is the insidious thing about species loss—you don’t even know what you’re missing.

  Back at the hostel that night, I heard howler monkeys for the first time, bellowing in the trees outside. If you’ve never heard the sound, imagine a belching contest between Homer Simpson and Al Bundy, but louder and more menacing. Considering that Márquez and his companions would have heard those howls together with a whole chorus of other primate species, it’s a wonder that anyone on those riverboats ever got any sleep. I stayed awake listening for hours, and felt conflicted about allowing my appreciation of “what is” to be tainted by my knowledge of “what was.”

  Pineapples, it turns out, make less-than-comfortable seatbacks. We left Mompós with a produce vendor named Jaisson, who offered us a lift in his fruit-filled jhonso while he made a run to his family farm, about 150 miles upriver. His twenty-year-old boat had only a small outboard motor, so we moved up the slow brown channel at a leisurely pace, reclining amid his crops. The scenery remained unchanged, with tall white garzas fishing along the banks and evidence of small farms and ranches onshore—here an acre of corn, there a cluster of cattle. Every so often, we passed an abandoned-looking dugout canoe, pulled up on the beach in an area that otherwise showed no sign of human habitation.

  Along the way, we stopped at a pair of tiny villages where Jaisson took orders for pineapples and yuca. His is a disappearing lifestyle, he explained. Although he still has a handful of competitors selling produce along the river, they’re far fewer than in decades past. It would actually cost him less, he admitted, to make his deliveries by truck, taking the ferry onto Mompós Island, and I thought, Aha!—another river romantic. But it turned out the initial investment was simply more than Jaisson could afford. Anyway, he said, the ferries were unreliable. The year before, a car ferry on the island’s south end had shut down for months when drought rendered the river too low for anything but dugouts and jhonsos.

  Jaisson let us off in a town called El Banco, where we spent the night before continuing upriver to an industrial port city called Barrancabermeja. From El Banco, fiberglass speedboats called chalupas make the three-hundred-mile trip in about eight hours. The chalupas—from the same root as the English word “sloop”—constitute a sort of ragtag commuter service along the river’s middle section, humble crafts run by co-ops of independent owners. Schedules are notoriously unreliable, but $20 can get you quite a distance upstream, provided you’re traveling light and willing to huddle with thirty other people in what is essentially a large motorized bathtub. At one point, our chalupa picked up a young man with a small monkey tied to a piece of yarn. He sat behind me, holding the monkey as it screeched, and I spent the better part of two hours waiting for it to leap up and gnaw my ear off.

  After a long trip, we were welcomed into Barrancabermeja by the sight of a half dozen looming refinery towers, their torches sending thick columns of smoke into the sky. Barranca, as it’s sometimes known, is the nation’s petroleum capital and the port of call for many ships sailing inland from the coast. It’s a sweltering urban crossroads, and it was here in 1962 that Thompson had to disembark to change boats.

  Halfway through his river trip, Thompson seemed to be getting cranky. His letters share exactly none of Márquez’s enthusiasm for the journey. If he saw any wildlife at all from the deck of the beer barge, you wouldn’t know it from his writings. The only creatures that seemed to warrant coverage were of the six-legged variety. “There is at this moment,” began one note, “a beetle the size of god’s ass on the table about si
x inches from the t-writer. It is worse than anything Kafka ever dreamed.” Most of Thompson’s ink on the Magdalena is devoted to complaints about the bugs, malicious glances from the crew, and the heat—exacerbated by the lack of opportunities to break into the beer cargo. He dismissed Barrancabermeja as just “an oil village on the Magdalena River,” but even in 1962 that description would have fallen short. Colombia’s first oil field was discovered nearby in 1918, turning Barranca into a sort of boomtown. In 1961, a year before Thompson’s arrival, the state-run oil concern Ecopetrol took over the refinery, contributing to the city’s cosmopolitan flair by importing workers from around the world. Had Thompson been in higher spirits, it might have been just the kind of rough-and-tumble town he would have enjoyed.

  Today, Barranca is a gritty metro of more than 200,000 people, built around the colossal refining facility. It is also a perennial hub of guerrilla violence, once firmly controlled by the FARC, then later by the right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, the same paramilitary whose former members are muscling in on the smuggling biz in Guajira. Colombia’s paramilitaries were initially formed by wealthy landowners as protection from the FARC and other guerrillas, and they often served as an unofficial right hand to the overextended military—a hand less shackled by international treaties on human rights. But as the Colombian conflict continued to spiral, the AUC ran amok, massacring civilians, displacing communities, and themselves dabbling in the drug trade. After years of negotiations with the Uribe administration, the AUC formally demobilized in 2006, but Barranca was the one place in Colombia where Sky and I had nonetheless been warned to stay on guard for paramilitary activity.

  More cheerfully, Barranca is also a port of call for a large and colorful boat called the Florentino Ariza, a scaled-down, tourist-friendly replica of one of Márquez’s cherished steamboats. The boat was christened in honor of Cholera’s protagonist by a government agency that works to restore the river’s health and navigability. The agency’s plan had been for a tourist attraction that could help promote the Magdalena as a natural and cultural resource, running cruises for vacationing Colombians and educational tours for students. And the plan worked—sort of. After the Florentino Ariza was launched to great fanfare in the summer of 2005, it operated short tours from the town of Girardot, the same historic terminus that Sky and I hoped to reach. Girardot has some fine surroundings for a cruise, situated as it is on a section of the river where the mountains close in tight, making for some ruggedly beautiful scenery. While the views are lovely, however, the upper Magdalena around Girardot is also lower in volume, and in recent years drought and sedimentation have again hindered navigation for large boats. So Sky and I arrived in Barranca to find the Florentino Ariza sailing a sort of “consolation route”—offering scenic cruises alongside the national oil refinery. We bought tickets immediately.

  The boat itself looked pretty regal, a double-decker affair with an enclosed cabin below and open-air seating up top. The exterior was a freshly painted white, while the rails, waterwheel, and chimneys were done variously in Colombia’s national colors of yellow, blue, and red. Of course, the latter two elements were only for show, as the Florentina Ariza is actually powered by three large diesel engines in its stern. Passengers for the Sunday-evening cruise seemed to consist primarily of middle-class Colombian families on holiday, including dozens of pregnant women and young mothers pushing strollers.

  The boat shoved off fifteen minutes behind schedule, adhering to the rule that, in Latin America, no form of transportation ever sets out until it has exceeded maximum capacity. We grabbed seats on the upper deck, where a house vallenato band played softly as we sailed past tugboats pushing flat-bottom barges. The flatboats, called planchones, were probably identical to Thompson’s beer barge, but loaded down instead with construction equipment and shipping containers. Some carried oil drums, and on those stood groups of heavily armed Colombian soldiers. Drifting past them was a bit surreal, the fading sunlight glinting off their M-16s while the band cycled through its repertoire of sad Colombian love songs.

  The trade-off for Colombia’s newfound security is a significantly increased military presence, especially in long-besieged towns like Barrancabermeja. Before we’d boarded, I’d overheard Sky chatting with one of the young soldiers positioned along the waterfront, each one clad in fatigues and shouldering a large assault rifle. Sky had asked him, half-jokingly, what the FARC would want with a rusty old planchon anyway, and the soldier had just shrugged. “They want the oil,” he said, simple as that. “But it isn’t 1990 anymore,” Sky had replied. “Isn’t the FARC long gone?” The soldier just shook his head and said somberly, “Those sons of bitches just won’t die.”

  Sky wandered around the boat shooting photos, and I settled in against a railing on the lower deck. Dusk was falling, and from the waterline the refinery looked like a city itself, a dark dystopia alive with fiery towers and sweeping searchlights. We floated close enough to smokestacks and derricks to hear the hiss of escaping steam, the hypnotic clanking of metal on metal. Beside me, leaning over the rail, a father and son sipped silently from soda bottles, admiring the whole industrial spectacle. The boy caught my gaze and grinned shyly. “Es muy bonita, no?” he asked.

  It was pretty, I thought, in a Beyond Thunderdome sort of way. The pipelines and fiery citadels had an alluring asymmetry to them, a sculptural quality that I admired. And in fact, Barranca’s most recognizable landmark is an eighty-foot Christ statue made to resemble the skeletal framework of an oil derrick. El Cristo Petrolero rises above a ciénaga on the far side of the refinery, his arms raised in benediction, silhouetted against a skyline of distillation towers. I liked how the whole mechanized fortress was juxtaposed against the faux-historicity of the Florentino Ariza. In my mind’s eye, I pictured the boat from above, its primary colors looking cartoonish among the sooty buildings and the rusted metal barges. The refinery’s countless electric lights lit up the waterfront, a constellation rivaling anything in the night sky.

  “Sí,” I agreed, “es muy bonita.”

  The boy smiled at me. Then I watched as he and his father threw their empty bottles into the river and walked away down the deck, hand in hand.

  III

  Over the next several days, we hired a series of private boatmen, each happy to take our pesos, but to varying degrees confused and amused by our motivations. More than once we simply received directions to the bus station. Again and again, I thought of Julio and his serious coworkers beneath the bridge—and of Thompson’s unflagging cynicism as he made his way upriver. “Jesus, eight days of this,” he moaned in one letter. “You get what you pay for, I guess, and I ain’t paid.” With each new negotiation, I fought off the gnawing sense that it was callow of us to turn this into a pleasure trip, to approach the Magdalena with a sense of adventure and nostalgia, as Márquez had done. But surely Thompson, for all of his bitching, held a romantic view of travel deep down? Why else does a person descend on Colombia with no Spanish, virtually no itinerary, and $10 to his name?

  At least our aqua-hitchhiking was paying off, and we were putting a lot of river behind us. As we ventured farther upstream, the banks gradually took on a Jurassic feel, with broad ferns spreading out beneath a rain-forest canopy. Here and there, the scenery was interrupted by palm plantations, the proliferation of which is responsible for thousands of deforested acres along the Magdalena each year. But there were very few villages, and river traffic was limited to the occasional fisherman in his dugout canoe, his face fixed in a thousand-yard stare. It was tranquil atmosphere, although scenes from Apocalypse Now came inexorably to mind. At one point, we passed an olivine military patrol boat no bigger than a fishing skiff, with five uniformed soldiers pressed inside and a machine gun mounted in the bow, unmanned and tilting lazily toward the sky. We spent a night in a military town near one of the largest bases that the Colombians had recently opened to the US military. In another riverside hamlet, our relatively recent guidebook was st
ill suggesting a hotel that had actually been converted to a military installation back in the 1980s—a pretty good indication of the region’s popularity with travelers.

  Then, in a fishing town called Honda, about a hundred river miles short of our goal at Girardot, we accidentally became local celebrities, and everything started to fall apart.

  It unfolded like this: When we’d last had Internet access in Barranca, Sky had reached out on the social networks to a twentysomething stranger in Honda, hoping to find us a friend in town and maybe a free place to stay. The guy’s name was Ricardo, and while he didn’t have any crash space, he wrote back that he was a technician at the local radio station, where a visiting gringo writer and photographer were apparently enough of a news story to justify some coverage. Would we be willing to do a short interview once we’d arrived in town? Sky wrote back that we were happy to oblige.

  We landed in Honda on the same day that Sky and Ricardo had arranged the interview, so the radio station was our very first stop. Honda is a bucolic little town just eighty miles from Bogotá, close enough to attract the occasional weekenders, who come for its scenic bridges and forested foothills. Looming above the city is the post-industrial specter of the abandoned Bavaria brewery, which once employed much of the town before the company consolidated its production and left Honda in the 1990s. When we met Ricardo at the station, he explained to us that the town has been trying to attract tourists ever since, with mixed results—hence the excitement surrounding a pair of nominal gringo journalists.