Been on the road for 2 straight days and it certainly feels like it.
I am definitely going on a faster pace than I anticipated. I thought 3 months would be enough, but I do wish I had an extra week or 2. An extra month would have been perfect.
Right now, I have no idea where I am at. I know I’m about 10 miles south of Cali, which is a maze of a city. I’m not sure if I missed some signs or not, because highways signs in Colombia have been excellent until I reached that city. I had to use the GPS to get an idea of my bearing. It saved me a lot of time again.
I am absolutely fascinated by Colombia. The countryside is all green, and it made me reaffirm why I love the color green. There are magnificent rivers that cut through the mighty mountains. Colombia, by far, is the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen. And you won’t know what I mean unless you’ve been here. It’s a genuine feeling of a unique, tranquil experience, not a simple collection of pictures. I can’t tell you Colombia is great simply because the people and the city are great, which they really are. It’s all a collection of the experience I’ve had since I arrived here a week ago.
I’m contemplating on whether I should try and get into Ecuador tomorrow or not. If I leave this place early enough, I can probably get pretty close to Quito tomorrow.
A lot of things happened yesterday. First, I had to get insurance for my car, since I’ve heard that there are several police stops where they ask you for proof of insurance. This took a long time to get, as I kept hopping around to 4 different places for a short term insurance. I managed to find one near Calle de Venezuela, and paid about $25 for the 60 days of vehicle stay as indicated by DIAN.
Then I had to mail some postcards. I got pointed to several different locations, which really sucked because by then I had walked around Cartagena in full jeans and flip flops for 2 hours. I made it to El Muello del Bosque around 10 AM, and got my car keys in my hands by 11:30 AM. The entire Customs experience, both in DIAN and Colombia, has been a long and hard experience.
This means Milestone #2 is now complete. Final Milestone, #3, is waiting for me at the end of the world.
I then drove, thinking I’ll just stop by a local motel I see along the way. I quickly noticed that some gas stations in Colombia have hotels as well as restaurants, offering a complete service. Which is good, since I can gas up, eat, and sleep all in one place on the road without having to look for all those places, especially in a country like Colombia.
I had gone a little past Sincelejo when I saw this guy with hair that resembled a Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons. At first I thought he was trying to cross the highway, but then I noticed he’s trying to hitch a ride! Well, what better place to pick up a hitchhiker than in Colombia!? I thought he looked as though he may speak some English, but alas, no. He spoke clearly and slowly for me, though, and I asked him where he’s going. Medellin, he says, he’s got family there. I say I don’t think I’ll go all the way, but hop in.
His name’s Andre, and he makes and sells bracelets for a living. He loves to travel, so that’s all he does: hitching a ride all over South America and make and sell bracelets. He’s 30 years old, and he’s been doing it for 15 years! Yes, do the math and you’ll be amazed, too! He grew up in Medellin, and since his traveling days have been to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Uraguay, and Paraguay. He doesn’t have a passport, and says that Ecuador is a tough border for him to pass. He needs to walk across the border…
Music, not math, is the universal language. You can understand each other’s math, but that’s not language is. Like language, however, you can experience the same feeling with music. We listened to my iPod the entire way. It must have been the first time he’s seen one. He didn’t know how to work it. But I understood him enough to play Bob Marley for him, and he was tapping away in no time.
I need to use the restroom, and he knows just the place. A tiny restaurant located right next to the bridge. I run out of the car, and a waitress quickly steps out. I ask her for the restroom, and she looks amazed and stunned. I must look really different to her (and everyone else around here for that matter), because she totally didn’t hear a single thing I said and she starts asking me questions about where I’m from, what nationality I am, why I’m traveling and why I’m traveling alone. I managed to ask for the restroom again, and later took her picture as well. But I’m not happy about how the picture turned out. You can rarely capture the face of pure joy in someone’s face, and hers was one that I hadn’t seen in a grown up in a long time.
I give her a hug, not really in complete understanding of the culture here. She’s short enough that she ends up pecking me on my neck. This was one of the rare moments during this trip where I truly regretted not having command with Spanish. She expresses regret that I don’t understand nor speak Spanish very well. She wasn’t concerned about money or time. She was just happy to have met someone. I leave the empty restaurant as quickly as I found it, wondering what could have been.
But as soon as I drive out of the restaurant, I realize that she had asked me for my name but I never asked for hers. So I make a U-Turn in the middle of a 2 lane highway. She comes running outside, thinking something went wrong. Andre explains to her I just wanted to ask her for her name. Her face lights up again and she goes back inside, and writes me her name and phone number. I write mine down as well as my email address, but Lina doesn’t know how to use the internet and I don’t have a Colombian cell phone.
I’m Californian, so I’m not used to the hot and humid weather down here. I turn on the air conditioner, but it becomes utterly clear that Andre is not liking it. He puts on a sweater and starts shivering. He left Cartagena on Monday (the day before Tuesday when this happened), and he’s had a fever ever since. He starts coughing and I realize that I could get sick as well, which is a big risk to take. So I turn on the heater, and for the last 3 hours of the trip, have the heater on full power while Andre is coughing away every 5 minutes or so, and my window down. All of which is a bad combination. I had been driving for a long time, and the heater combined with the calm nightly breeze of Colombian moutains alerts me to my level of fatigue.
It’s getting dark and I tell Andre that I’m might stop in a local motel soon because it is probably more dangerous at night. I meant both as a driving condition as well as the safety issue that is prominent in Colombia. He says no, it’s only really dangerous after 11-12 PM. I ask him, are you sure? And I change my plans, again. I disobey the Golden Rule #1 of International Driving, again: DO NOT DRIVE AT NIGHT.
But what could go wrong? I had a Colombian hitchhiker as a passenger, and I was heading into the moutains going from 1000 feet to 9000 feet in less than 4 hours. Besides the darkness, the lack of street lights or lane reflectors, the reluctance of Latin Americans to turn off their high beam when passing, the crushing rain, ominous lightining, invisible potholes, lanes that collapsed down the mountains, trucks that are either going 15 miles an hour or being fixed literally in the middle of the road, fatigue from what would become a full 18 hour day with 12 hours of driving, the degree of elevation at 8000 feet that would make San Francisco proud, and the illusive fog limiting visibility to less than 20 meters at times, I had nothing to worry about.
But I made it. It was one of the top 3 hardest drives I’ve ever done, but thanks to the hitchhiker’s knowledge of the roads, I made it without having to look at the map. I had cut a full day’s worth of traveling thanks to him. I bought him some water and dinner.
As a hitchhikeer, though, he doesn’t have a lot of money. So he asks me if I can’t help him find a place for the night, something about his mother not knowing he’s coming or something. So I say ok. I’m reluctant, but hell, how many people do you know that’s picked up a hitchhiker AND slept in the same room as him? So after looking around for a place to sleep in Medellin (which nearly took an hour due to all of them being booked up by 11PM), we find a hotel.
I start regretting this move almost immediately. Hell, he could simply take my keys in the middle of the night or while I’m taking a shower and just leave with everything I’ve got. So I don’t take a shower, promising to take one in the morning and immediately fall asleep. I wake up twice in the middle of the night, pulses rapidly increasing and I’m in full alert. I check my bag under the bed and the key on the countertop. I suppose I should have slept with the keys in my hands. I hear him ruffling in his sheets, thinking he might be waiting for his moment. But the morning calms all my fears.
Andre’s 31st birthday is next week, and he was planning on spending it with his family in Medellin, where I drove last night. But this morning he says to me that he wants to keep going with me. He has the chance to go to Pasto, Colombia where I’ll be by tomorrow and head over to Ecuador as he was planning on going to visit his sister and keep up his hitchhiking journey. But he’s obviously sick and I’ve already paid for a bigger room because of him and had already gotten him some water and food as well. Plus, what would I tell the cops at the checkpoints? A Korean dude with an American passport traveling with a Colombian hitchhiker didn’t make a lot of sense. I tell him I can’t because I like to drive alone, and he completely understands. He comes with me, though, for breakfast and helps me find the nearest ATM and gas station. He even gets me to the entrance of the highway. He quickly says it was great meeting me, thanks for being so kind, and that he has horrible memory and won’t remember my name, and jumps out of the car. I can’t blame him. Who would, after 15 years of hitchhiking?
Andre’s an experienced hitchhiker, and you can tell. I don’t have to ask him to get out of the car when I stop to use the restroom or to get gas. He doesn’t slam the door shut (even though he should because it doesn’t shut very easily) and is thoroughly knowledgeable of the country. What was weird, though, was that even though he doesn’t speak a single word in English, I felt like he was my translator. He quickly understood what I meant with a mere word or two and helped me get things in quick fashion. I would automatically translate all the conversations we had had into English and somehow, I got to thinking that he spoke English. So I would look to him when people said things to me in Spanish that I wouldn’t understand. Which was really useless since he would simply say the same things to me in Spanish anyway. But at least he knew my story about driving down and all by then, and quickly understood what my immediate needs were and spoke with the locals as a facilitator.
Colombians are absolutely remarkable. They’re the friendliest people I’ve met since I’ve travelled through Mexico. On top of that, Colombian women are absolutely gorgeous. During the drive, I thought about all the crazy people on Jihad and all going on suicide missions, all for a promise of going to heaven with their 69 virgins or whatever. To me, they’re even more foolish now. I’d rather just say ‘screw you, I’ll just go to Colombia.’ On top of that, they’re for the most part very, very friendly. Beauty and amicable personality? Definitely a virtue hard to dig up in America.
So I drove and drove and drove. I drove about 800 miles in the Colombian highway between yesterday and today. That in the states is a long drive for one day. But the roads here aren’t in that great of a shape, and coupled with high rising mountains, heavy city traffic that you HAVE to pass through, and toll booths and random speed bumps, it’s a long, long drive. It’s starting to take its toll, and there are sparks during the drive when I go, where the hell am I and why am I here?