The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (10 page)

“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.

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 still 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.

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 sport 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.