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

by Brian Kevin

  Ricardo took us into a room lined with CD racks, sat us down in front of a foam-headed microphone, and introduced us to the DJ, a portly and mustachioed man named Tony. As another vallenato song faded into silence, he donned a pair of headphones and sat down at a mixer. When a light went on above our microphone, Ricardo gave Tony a thumbs-up, and Tony launched into a string of rapid-fire Spanish that I understood only enough of to know when it was my turn to recite a well-rehearsed explanation of who Hunter Thompson was and why he’d traveled through Colombia. From there, Sky did most of the heavy lifting, and I chimed in periodically with my grade-school Spanish about what we’d experienced so far along the river:

  “This region has a rich and significant history.”

  “The people of the towns are very kind.”

  “We are seeing many, many animals.”

  Tony nodded and smiled at me like I was a third-grader, but I closed strong with a three-sentence soliloquy that I’d written down in my notebook, about how more foreign tourists should visit this beautiful area. When we were all through, Ricardo smiled and slapped our backs, and we agreed to meet up for a beer later on.

  With the interview wrapped up, Sky and I found a room nearby at the Hotel Turivan, a colonial-style pension with a nice courtyard in the shadow of the old brewery. The name is a portmanteau of “turismo” and “Ivan,” and we were welcomed inside by Ivan Romero Herrera himself, the hotel’s good-humored, thirtysomething innkeeper. Ivan had heard us on the radio, he said excitedly, and boy, had we come to the right place. With a butler’s formality, he presented us a glossy Turivan flyer, which announced in bright blue letters that “Honda and the Magdalena River Are My Life” and included a long list of touristic services that Ivan could provide: boat rides, bike trips, ecotourism jeep tours, historic walks around the city, shuttles to nearby towns. Ivan wanted to be a one-man concierge for Honda’s expanding tourism economy, he explained earnestly. Then he showed us to our room, at the back of a hotel that was altogether empty, except for his pet duck, Lucas.

  We were just unpacking a few minutes later, contemplating showers, when Ivan reappeared in the doorway.

  “Sorry to bother you,” he said politely, as if he hadn’t just left us, “but I think there is someone waiting for you outside.”

  Lucas the duck followed us back through the courtyard, quacking happily at our heels. The hotel’s front door was open, and Tony the DJ was standing outside, rubbing his hands together anxiously, like he was late for something.

  “Ah, my friends, please come,” he said as we stepped outside. “It is time for you to meet the mayor.”

  Thus began five long days as the honored gringo guests of the Hondans. Tony marched us downtown and into the mayor’s office, where a small, neat man in a sport coat shook our hands and posed with us for pictures in front of a marble statue of Bolívar. We got a tour of City Hall, and Tony introduced us to a handful of local functionaries, all middle-aged men with salt-and-pepper hair and broad stomachs, each one only more pleased to meet us than the last. A walking tour of the city had somehow been arranged, and before we could protest, we found ourselves tromping through the streets with a local historian who pantomimed colonial bayonet duels and insisted on taking our pictures in front of every church, mural, and statue in Honda.

  When we finally returned to the mayor’s office, the head of the chamber of commerce was waiting there to tell us that our boat ride to Girardot had already been arranged. We would pay only for gas, he said, and the boat would leave in three days’ time. Until then, would we please stay and enjoy his beautiful city? Sky and I exchanged looks of weary astonishment.

  “Are they going to give us thirty virgins?” he asked.

  So we set out to enjoy the beautiful city. Both that night and the next we met up with Ricardo at a bar called Cirrosis—as in “of the liver”—where he introduced us to his nightlife posse. I drank a few beers with the young crowd and excused myself early, heading back to Ivan’s to read and sleep, but Sky stayed out and made friends, dancing with the local girls to bone-rattling reggaeton. On the second day, I followed a trail along the river, crisscrossing the bridges and watching the fishermen cast their nets, occasionally returning greetings from strangers who waved to me and cried, “Hola, periodista!” The following afternoon, a local news anchor and his wife showed up at Ivan’s and practically begged us to join them for lunch. They had once lived in Baltimore, loved all things American, and were eager to spend an afternoon speaking English.

  Ivan, meanwhile, was the consummate host. One morning, he drove us in his jeep to some nearby ruins at a place called Armero, where a volcanic eruption had wiped out an entire town in 1985, killing an astonishing 23,000 people. He was thrilled when we mentioned that we’d ridden on the Florentino Ariza, the captain of which, he told us proudly, he had once advised on how to negotiate the rapids around Honda. Ivan genuinely seemed to relish the role of guide. When I came home early from Cirossis one night, he sat up with me in the courtyard, declining a beer and tenderly recalling his memories of the river as a child. From the time he was about six, Ivan said, he used to ride upstream to visit his grandfather’s farm. He remembered the excitement of piling onto a small boat with his auntie, squeezing in among the people, pigs, chickens, and bundles of crops. As a boy, he had always wanted to peer over the edge at the river, and to keep him from leaning out, his aunt had to clasp her legs around him like a vise.

  “Sometimes,” he said with a chuckle, “we’d show up at my grandfather’s and my arms would be purple.”

  As a young man, Ivan ran a small footwear company for a few years, successful enough that he could afford to buy the hotel. At first he had just wanted to open a bar, he said, but as the region bounced back from the dark days of paramilitaries and narcotraffickers, he started to see Honda’s tourism potential, and he realized that he didn’t much want to sell shoes or tend bar. What he really wanted was to lead tours to the volcano above Armero, to show people the endangered river turtles and the rock upstream with the strata in the shape of the Virgin. It’s a great job, Ivan told me, and he’s never looked back.

  Meanwhile, other Hondans’ approaches to tourism are still evolving. Back at City Hall, I had flattered the mayor by admiring how pretty the hills were around town, and I’d pointed to a conspicuous cross on top of the largest one, mentioning casually that it must be a lovely hike up, that maybe I would go there to stretch my legs and get an aerial view of the city. I did not expect that on our third morning in Honda I would wake up to find two armed soldiers standing solemnly outside of Ivan’s hotel—a courtesy escort for my hike, sent by the mayor. The surrounding hillsides, Ivan insisted, were perfectly safe. The guerrillas and paramilitaries had been gone for years. But while Hondans are proud of their natural resources and eager to attract travelers, even Ivan admitted they were still working to shake off a half century of civil-war mentality. So I spent that morning hiking in the hills alongside the stoic young soldiers. They were quiet and surprisingly out of shape, sweating up the switchbacks in their head-to-toe fatigues and heavy weaponry. At the top, they shared my water bottle silently, and when we’d come back down, they asked to take a picture before striding off into the streets.

  When I talked about it later with Ivan, it occurred to me that this kind of cultural pragmatism is pretty understandable, and that maybe it helped to explain the no-nonsense mind-set of Julio and the men at the bridge. In a country where cartel kidnappings and paramilitary violence are relatively recent memories, “adventure” as a concept simply doesn’t have much cachet. If Colombians choose to value prudence and seguridad over the romance of the trail or the open water, then I suppose, who can really blame them?

  On our third and supposedly final evening in Honda, we were drinking shots of aguardiente, Colombia’s anise-flavored national liqueur, with some of the town fathers we had met at City Hall. We’d run into them at a downtown tavern, where they offered to teach us how to play tejo, a uniquely Colombian bar spo
rt that involves throwing rocks at paper packets filled with gunpowder. The head of the chamber of commerce was there, and after several shots, he casually mentioned that our boat was going to be a little delayed. It would be two more days before we could leave for Girardot. Three at the most. Possibly four. But he was working on it, he assured us, and he would stop by Ivan’s as soon as he had an update.

  I wasn’t thrilled about the delay, but up until then, we’d been hiring our boats in accordance with Thompson’s Law of Travel Economics, paying steep fees to boatmen who had no reason to travel upstream except for two gringos who were inexplicably opposed to bus travel. It was all starting to take its toll on my finances, and the prospect of paying only for gas was too good to pass up. If it meant a few more days loitering in laid-back Honda, I decided, I would just have to grin and bear it.

  Sky, meanwhile, had no qualms about sticking around. That evening, one of Ricardo’s friends was opening a new nightclub, and we had been invited to the inaugural debauch. I was hesitant, but after all the hospitality we’d been shown, Sky had convinced me that it would be rude not to go. So the plan had been to make a brief appearance, then head back to Ivan’s, ready to hit the river bright and early the next morning. Now, with the chamber head’s revelation, the night was comparatively young. What’s more, Sky had taken a shine to a lady friend of Ricardo’s—an absolute bombshell who had flirted with him mercilessly at Cirrosis and looked like a cross between Natalie Wood and Salma Hayek. Needless to say, she would be in attendance at the club’s opening night. So off we went.

  The nightclub Las Tecas—which translates roughly and grandiosely to “The Archives”—looked like a discarded set piece from Miami Vice, bedecked with fake palms and so much neon that the room hummed audibly during the brief gaps between earsplitting reggaeton anthems. A sign above the backlit bar proclaimed that tonight’s party would feature BIUTIFUL STREEPERS. We settled into a nook with Ricardo’s crew, surrounding a table on which the proud new club owner had set an unopened bottle of aguardiente and a tray full of shot glasses. When that bottle was empty, he produced another one, and another after that. And that’s pretty much how things went for the couple of hours I managed to stick out the party, mostly chatting with Ricardo about American pop music in a pidgin of his bad English and my bad Spanish.

  I left the party around the same time that a topless blond woman came walking across the bar, spraying a mystery liquor into people’s mouths with a squirt gun that looked like an AK-47. I thanked Ricardo and the club owner, shared a round of cheek kisses with the women at our table, and told Sky that I’d see him the next day at Ivan’s.

  Except when I woke up late the next morning, Sky wasn’t at Ivan’s.

  Look at you, Don Juan, I thought admiringly, and I left him a note before heading out to find coffee and an arepa.

  I spent much of that day sitting at a sidewalk café, drinking bad instant coffee and working my way through a long magazine article in Spanish about the international flak that Colombia was taking over its military-base agreement with the United States. There was still no sign of Sky when I walked back to the hotel in the midafternoon. His cell number went straight to voice mail, and Ivan said that he hadn’t come around. I laughed it off, but after a couple more hours and a few more unanswered calls, my amusement started to drift into concern. I didn’t have Ricardo’s number, I realized, but somehow I had ended up with the club owner’s from the night before.

  He answered after a few rings. Our conversation was stilted, but he told me that he’d last seen Sky and Ricardo getting into a cab together sometime after dawn. Was I sure he hadn’t come back to the hotel? Positive, I said.

  “Then I’ll come get you,” the club owner told me. “We can go look for him.”

  A half hour later, he pulled up to Ivan’s in a silver Camry with a prominent spoiler, which I’d seen parked outside the night before. In the passenger seat was a girl who’d sat at our table. Both of them looked worried. I hopped in, and they tried to reconstruct for me what they remembered of the wee hours. They spoke quickly and talked over each other, and it was hard for me to keep track of their pronouns. Sky had danced with a girl who they both agreed was crazy. Or maybe her boyfriend was crazy, I wasn’t quite sure. At some point, somebody had been slapped—possibly Sky, possibly the girl sitting in the front seat. Everyone was drunk, they said, and things got a little tense. That much I understood.

  “Dios mio,” the girl up front kept muttering, which made me more nervous than I had been. You don’t understand, she said, fingering the beads on her necklace—some people here will take advantage of a drunken gringo. Kidnappings still happened from time to time, and it occurred to me that everyone in town knew who we were, the famed traveling American journalists. “Dios mio,” the girl repeated. “Dios mio.”

  The club owner drove in what seemed like arbitrary circles, stopping occasionally to ask acquaintances if they’d seen a tall gringo matching Sky’s description. No one had. The two of them made a half dozen phone calls on my cell (the only one with minutes), asking revelers from the night before whether they’d been with Sky or Ricardo after the club emptied out. No dice there. After an hour of this, we headed back to Ivan’s and simply stood outside, deliberating. By now it was after seven p.m. We decided that I would wait through the night, and if we still hadn’t heard from Sky by morning, we would go to the police. No one had any better plan.

  The potential seriousness of the situation began sinking in with me, and two thoughts passed through my head in short succession: I may not be leaving Honda anytime soon. Followed closely by: And when I do, it might be without Sky.

  And that, of course, was the moment that he and Ricardo chose to come wheeling around the corner.

  “Heeey!” the two of them cried, clearly still in the waning throes of the previous night’s party. Both were disheveled, with dark bags under their eyes and overdue for a shower, but otherwise no worse for wear.

  “Dios mio!” cried the girl from the club.

  “Dude, where have you been?” I asked.

  “Hanging out with Ricardo, man.” Sky shrugged. He sat down on the hotel stoop with an exhausted grunt and ran his hand through his hair. “We ate some food, took a nap for a while, hung out at his place. Then we went and played pool. What have you been doing?”

  I shook my head apologetically at the club owner, who was going through some version of the same thing with Ricardo in Spanish. Sky exhaled shakily, and undid a button on his dress shirt, which was already half-unbuttoned and stained with twenty-four hours of sweat.

  “Bro, I need some sleep,” he said with a laugh, leaning back on his palms. “Oh, and also, I think I lost my cell phone.”

  Ricardo must have sensed my exasperation, or he’d maybe just been told that we were several hours away from calling the police. He walked over and gripped my shoulders in a way that was meant to be reassuring, looking me squarely in the eyes.

  “I am with him all of the day,” he said in English, his tone somber. He shook his head slowly. “I am never stop watching him.”

  Then he and the others climbed into the metallic Camry, and with a farewell honk they sped off, leaving the illustrious gringo journalists slumped outside of the Hotel Turivan.

  IV

  “Mr. Brian?”

  Ivan’s voice woke me from a sound sleep the next morning. He was standing again in the doorway to our room.

  “Sorry to bother you, but I think there is someone waiting for you outside.”

  I opened my eyes groggily. Oh, sweet Jesus, I thought, not again. It was Groundhog Day, and I was Bill Murray, and I was never, ever leaving Honda.

  Lucas waddled behind me as I shuffled to the front door, where the head of the chamber of commerce was standing with his hat in his hands, the morning sun reflecting off his bald head. He wore round glasses and had a white mustache that drooped a little at the corners, like a Latino Wilford Brimley.

  The chamber head wished me good morning and ask
ed if Sky was also available. Still sleeping, I told him, without adding that Sky would probably be sleeping all day. So the chamber head spoke slowly, knowing that my Spanish was far inferior to Sky’s. He had made a mistake, he said, and he was very sorry. The boat to Girardot was actually going to cost roughly three times the amount he had quoted us. He sincerely regretted his error. It was a very nice boat, however, and it could leave in two days’ time. Possibly three.

  The sun was a huge exposed bulb that protruded from the grain silo of the shuttered old brewery. I squinted and shaded my eyes as I thanked the man, took his cell phone number, and said I would discuss it with Sky. The minute that I shut the heavy wooden door, Thompson’s words from the beer barge rang in my ears: “You get what you pay for … and I ain’t paid.” Both he and Márquez made their journeys up the Magdalena inside of eight days. Sky and I had been following the river for two weeks now, and there was no telling when we would get back on the water. A bus ticket to Girardot, meanwhile, cost less than another night’s stay at Ivan’s hotel, and it could get us there by lunchtime. I sat down in the cool of the courtyard and asked Lucas what to do. He tucked his beak into his mottled brown feathers and sighed.

  “Mr. Brian?” Ivan came around the corner from the front room, where he’d overheard my conversation with Wilford Brimley. “I can help you get to Girardot.”

  Ivan understood the quest, he said. Who wouldn’t want to float the historic passenger route of the Magdalena? He had a small wood-and-fiberglass lancha, better suited for scenic spins around Honda than a hundred-mile journey upriver and back, but it would be his pleasure to make the trip with us. He would charge us only for the gas, he said, and leave his housekeeper behind to staff the hotel and feed Lucas. We could leave the very next morning.

  It was an act of pure generosity, and I was touched. When I shook Ivan’s hand, a broad grin spread across his face, like he’d been nervous I was going to say no. Thank you, I told him. We couldn’t ask for a better guide. He was happy to do it, Ivan said. It would be an adventure.