The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (23 page)

It was November when we came into the village just before twilight, the sun sinking beneath the ceiling of clouds to light the land, the thin green murk of day giving way to a brilliant golden glow. We drove to the
palacio,
where we were staying, and when we parked, the children went sprinting off in the direction of the fields, eager to explore and play soccer. My wife and I unloaded the bags and then went ambling along the road down to meet them, one we'd traveled many times that first summer long ago.

There was no one around for this particular homecoming. Not a soul. And perhaps this was most fitting of all. The houses were shuttered, and not a single window was lighted from within. The air was cool and clean. The village was all ours, until we came to the track that led to the Molinos barn.

As we approached, a huge figure loomed over our youngest, talking rapid-fire in that gravelly baritone. Our boy was looking up at him, head cocked, laughing, uncertain what to make of the giant he'd just met in the twilight of a Castilian village thousands of miles from home.

Ambrosio did what he always does, then, afflicted as he is by that great Castilian generosity: he let us in again. He showed the kids his barn, let them drive the huge tractor. He ferried us up to the telling room, and then out in the fields, to his house there, for a late dinner. Driving us back to the
palacio,
at midnight, he veered to the edge of that serpentine road as it climbed to the village, and then he was out in a vineyard, waving for us to follow. He stood there under a bright moon, with his finger to his lip. “Shhhhh, listen,” he said. “If you listen, the silence has a lot to say.”

The kids were rapt as my wife and I tried to translate, but sinking together into that earth, I had a feeling I'd had at least a hundred times here. It was that feeling of being a child again, of watching the UFO, of being told the story that would never die. The kids stood clustered around Ambrosio, as he pointed up the hill to Guzmán.

“I think there's something a little bit magical about this place,” he said, then drew in a deep breath, and we let it be.

FROM
Outside

 

W
E'RE FLYING IN A CESSNA
180 over jungle so dense that it looks like broccoli. Every so often, the canopy breaks to reveal an emerald patch, which marks the remains of a coca farm. Many of them in this 33,000-square-mile region southeast of Bogotá, called Meta, were wiped out 10 years ago during Plan Colombia, a controversial U.S.-backed antinarcotic operation that included aerial eradication of thousands of acres. The fumigation killed the local campesinos' legitimate crops as well.

Out the window to our right is a flat-topped 8,000-foot mountain. A waterfall flows from top to bottom in such a voluminous cascade that we can see the rising mist from the plane. Like the peak, the waterfall has no name, although it's at the center of 2,430-square-mile Serranía de La Macarena, which became Colombia's first national reserve in 1948.

“All this used to be controlled by guerrillas,” Hernan Acevedo, our 42-year-old guide and copilot, tells us through his headset. “So this is pretty much virgin territory.”

It's also restricted airspace. Because there are still military operations against guerrillas and drug traffickers here, Acevedo had to get air force clearance. Our Cessna has a sticker on the tail that reads “National Police of Colombia Department of Antinarcotics.” It's an essential decal for any pilot to certify that he isn't trafficking drugs.

“This is the first year I've ever flown up here,” our pilot, Mauricio Becerra, a 43-year-old software entrepreneur from Bogotá, tells me. “After this trip, you are going to know more of Colombia than ninety percent of Colombians.”

Acevedo estimates that he's seen 50 percent of his country. With soulful brown eyes and a subtle sense of humor, he's the son of a doctor-pilot who flew to remote villages to provide pro bono health care. Acevedo and Becerra now fly for Colombia's Civil Air Patrol, a volunteer medical group that recently served 1,584 patients in a village north of Medellín. Acevedo is up in the air so often that his previous girlfriend demanded he choose between her and the plane. (He chose the plane.) Now, as parts of Colombia start to open up after years of paralyzing violence, Acevedo and a handful of his adventurous friends, like Becerra, are eager to explore it all.

In the past few years, international headlines have celebrated Colombia's comeback—and for good reason. With 45 million people, 75 percent of whom live in the five major cities, Colombia is almost twice the size of Texas. It contains three mountain ranges, peaks topping 16,000 feet, some of the most biodiverse habitats in the world, and whole regions of untapped Amazon rain forest. Eleven percent of its territory is protected in national parks, and it's the only country in South America that borders both the Pacific and the Caribbean, with 2,000 miles of coastline. These geographic wonders have made Colombia a grail for adventurers eager to chart the world's last remaining unexplored spaces. They also make the country nearly impossible to connect by road and even more impossible to police.

In 2011, most of Colombia's 1.6 million foreign visitors didn't veer off the Gringo Trail: the colonial Caribbean charm of Cartagena, the Edenic splendor of the Coffee Triangle, and cities like Medellín and Bogotá. But the number of annual foreign tourists is projected to reach 4 million by 2014. Is the rest of the country ready for its close-up? I'm curious to find out.

Today we're starting with a hike to Caño Cristales, known as the River That Ran Away from Paradise. The waterway has reached near-mythic status because of a plant called
Macarenia clavigera.
At certain times of the year, when the plant is in full bloom and the water flows over its tiny flowers, the river turns hallucinogenic shades of blue, red, yellow, orange, and green.

We land in the village of La Macarena, where Consuelo Ramos, a 22-year-old farm girl with a flawless French manicure, greets us. She has spent the past few years studying to be a guide for the local tourism association and walks us through her town of 3,500 inhabitants, where we pass kids playing soccer in the square, soldiers wearing combat fatigues and walking in formation, and silver-haired men sipping coffee at a sidewalk café.

Founded in the 1980s by farmers fleeing violence in Caquetá province, La Macarena exists because it's where the farmers ran out of food. To survive, they picked fruit and carved out a life in the jungle. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) quickly interrupted their peace.

Forty-nine years ago, the FARC started out as the self-proclaimed leftist voice of the poor. By most estimates, it has since become the largest drug cartel in Colombia. In 1998, to start peace negotiations with the group, then president Andrés Pastrana gave it a Switzerland-size piece of land, which included La Macarena, to create a zone that the Colombian army was prohibited from entering. The FARC settled in, recruited soldiers, and grew coca. In 2002, the military reclaimed the zone by force.

To get to the trailhead for Caño Cristales, we motor northeast for about a mile up the Guayabera River in a dugout canoe, then hop in a truck to drive a few miles over a rutted dirt road. When we arrive, I'm surprised to see a small convoy of vehicles, their drivers patiently waiting for visitors to return from the river. On the hike in, we pass a dozen Colombians on the sandy path and a swarm of yellow butterflies flitting in the direction of the Technicolor river. I count 25 vacationers splashing in the fresh pools and picnicking along the shore. Acevedo tells me that an average of 480 tourists per month, roughly 20 percent of them foreign, visit between June and November. Recently, the national airline, Satena, operated by the Colombian air force, started flying from Bogotá to La Macarena on weekends.

Given the area's troubled past, the whole scene is surreal. But La Macarena is a showcase of sorts, a zone in the Colombian outback that the government, with heavy military reinforcement, has designated as a haven of responsible tourism to prove to the world that the country is finally outgrowing its very bad reputation.

Ramos serves us a wrapped banana leaf filled with fried plantains, rice, chicken, and potatoes, and tart lemonade. Then we take a swim. From the looks of these laid-back revelers, Colombians' years of enforced solitude may finally be over.

“I'm not going to lie to you,” Acevedo later tells me. “The problems are still here. But we are finally free to go almost anywhere.”

In Colombia, however, freedom is a fickle concept.

 

In 1991, wooed by Gabriel García Márquez's
Love in the Time of Cholera
and the foolhardy antics of Jack T. Colton and Joan Wilder in
Romancing the Stone,
I signed up for a Spanish-language immersion program in Bogotá, unwittingly arriving at the apex of cocaine king Pablo Escobar's power.

By the time of my visit, Escobar had declared “total and absolute war” on the government, according to Mark Bowden in his book
Killing Pablo.
Two years earlier, Escobar had attempted to assassinate presidential hopeful César Gaviria by blowing up an Avianca airliner, killing all 110 passengers on board. (Gaviria was not on the flight.) In Escobar's hometown of Medellín, a sunny, mountainous metropolis that he turned into the most dangerous city on earth, Escobar paid local hit men $2,500 for each cop killed. He also blew up a Colombian police headquarters in Bogotá. In 1990, Escobar kidnapped Diana Turbay, a Bogotá TV news director and daughter of former president Julio César Turbay Ayala. (She was subsequently killed during a rescue operation.) Over the next two decades, abduction would become a primary political weapon and source of income and is still the most effective way for drug cartels and guerrillas to blackmail enemies.

I showed up in March of 1991. For seven weeks, I lived with a family in a gated middle-class Bogotá neighborhood, where an armed guard stood watch 24/7 at the end of the street. On weekdays I would hop a bus to class. On weekends my American and Colombian friends and I frequented mountainside discos, bused to outlying villages, and flew to the Caribbean beaches of Cartagena and Santa Marta. The violence was a bizarre abstraction; I knew it existed, but I never saw it. By the end of April, our professor, Mauricio Barreto, decided that it was too dangerous for us to remain in the country. I wasn't ready to leave. Colombia was mysterious and sensual, from its mist-covered peaks to Fernando Botero's fat sculptures to the sexy couples salsa dancing until dawn. On May 3, my last day in Bogotá, I wrote in my journal: “I know I'm coming back.”

When most people think of Colombia today, they still think cocaine, kidnappings, and guerrillas. In 2011, Colombia produced 760,000 pounds of cocaine. Farmers can sell a paste made from coca leaves, which is later processed into cocaine, for roughly $63,500 per pound. Cacao, the source of chocolate and one of the best alternative crops to grow, sells for 75 cents per pound. This is the very simple reason why, as Becerra told me, “as long as there's a demand for drugs, there will be violence in Colombia.”

Much of the violence involves armed factions—guerrillas, like the FARC and the National Liberation Army, paramilitaries, and even the Colombian military—terrorizing local farmers for their land. Since 1985, more than 3.5 million Colombians, about 10 percent of the population, have been internally displaced. That statistic surpasses Sudan.

After Escobar was finally gunned down in 1993 by the Colombian military—with help from shadowy U.S. forces—the FARC took over the drug trade. Álvaro Uribe, Colombia's president between 2002 and 2010, made it his priority to defeat the guerrillas, funneling money into the military. Between 2002 and 2006, homicides decreased by 50 percent, and they've been on the decline ever since.

In 2010, Juan Manuel Santos, President Uribe's minister of defense, took office. With $5 billion in U.S. counterinsurgency aid, he pledged to finally end the five-decade conflict, pursuing peace talks with the FARC, whose numbers have dwindled from 17,000 in the 1990s to roughly 9,000 today. As of November, the first talks were held in Oslo, Norway. Every Colombian I spoke to was skeptical about the outcome, and their caution is warranted. Despite its denials, the FARC still holds captive an estimated 400 civilians and, according to the Colombian attorney general's office, makes an estimated $2.4 billion to $5.5 billion annually from the drug trade and other illicit activities.

Still, 21 years after my first visit to Colombia, I decided that the time had come to return. There had been encouraging signs that the climate for travel had changed. In February 2012, the FARC posted a written statement online—albeit with machine-gun sounds embedded in the page—that it would no longer kidnap civilians. In April, when Cartagena hosted the Summit of the Americas, Barack Obama became the first president in U.S. history to overnight in Colombia. Paul McCartney even played a sold-out show in Bogotá.

Unfortunately, soon after I booked my flight, the FARC broke its promise and kidnapped a French journalist. I called my former professor to ask whether he thought the situation was really improving. Barreto, now a consultant for Caracol Television, which produces the hit show
Pablo Escobar, Boss of Evil,
was philosophical.

“The moment you start believing what the FARC says, you are in trouble,” Barreto told me. “The moment you start believing what the government says, you are in trouble. Always read between the lines in Colombia.” He gave a thoughtful pause, then continued, “Right now, the problem traveling here is not the guerrillas. The problem traveling in Colombia is because our roads are terrible.”

 

“There's something you have to know,” Acevedo says, gunning his Subaru wagon to pass a gas truck as we begin the 425-mile drive from Bogotá to Medellín. “Colombians are crazy drivers. I'll try to drive as civilized as possible. And that smell in the car? You don't have to worry. I just put on new brakes.”