Two Days of Solitude

The Lonely Planet has a habit, where Colombia's concerned, to describe anything a bit otherworldly, a bit off track, as being straight out of a Gabriel García Márquez novel. After a while it leaves you slightly infuriated; 'well yes' you think, 'the place where he lived and wrote obviously bears some resemblance to the world of his books.' It's a bit like going to Edinburgh and exclaiming (as I have)over the castle's similarity to Hogwarts.

Now I have no idea if García Márquez has ever been to San Cipriano, a minuscule, ramshackle village, deep in the pacific jungle, but the place is, undeniably, like something out of a storybook.

San Cipriano is home to roughly 300 Colombians mostly descended from African slaves brought to the area to work on the banana plantations. It's proximity to a crystal clear river peppered with idea swimming spots has made it a popular weekend retreat for Calianos but where it all gets a bit odd is the fact that in San Cipriano there are no cars.And there are no cars because there are no roads. Well there is a street, in the sense that there's an unobstructed passage land between the houses, but once the houses end so does the street leaving only a thin, muddy path that winds itself deeper in to the jungle.

'If there's no road' you're probably thinking 'how did you manage to get there?' Obviously if stepping in to Colombia where actually like stepping into One Hundred Years of Solitude we would have levitated there, or rode in on the back of a friendly Jaguar, but it isn't and we didn't. Instead we sat on a flat wooden cart attached to a motorbike (complete with a picture of a scantily clad woman on the seat) and using some physics far beyond my paltry GCSE we were propelled along a disused railway track through the jungle to the T-junction of corrugated iron that is San Cipriano.

The whole journey, which takes about an hour, is a wryly comedic one. For a start only the motorbike's back wheel rotates giving the driver the appearance of being bizarrely motionless and not too dissimilar to a child on a motorbike ride outside a supermarket. Then, because there is only a single track, you will occasionally meet a similar cart coming in the opposite direction. Protocol dictates that each driver switches of his engine, sits back and along with his passengers stares at the cart opposite. For a few minutes nobody speaks before one driver (it always seemed to be us) throws up his hands, climbs off his bike, pulls off the two dazed gringos and their enormous backpacks, before lifting the cart, bike and all, clean off the tracks. The winning driver then trundles past, smug looks from his still sedentary passengers, before bags, cart and people are all thrown back on the tracks and the journey continues.

It is the journey that makes San Cipriano such an alluring destination but the village itself is delightful enough. It is unlike anywhere else in Colombia I have, or will visit, devoid of the usual town square filled with impossibly old men, fruit sellers and a statue of Simon Bolivar. Instead it is just two 'roads', a few kids playing 'three and in' on a bedraggled football pitch and an excellent rope swing swaying above a particularly deep and secluded section of river. For two days it was bliss, before rice, beans, fish and plantain three times a day became a bit too much and jumping back on the H.M.S Bikini Babe we headed back to hot,dusty and boringly modern Cali.

A Lost City Found and a Maternal Revelation.

My Father (who thinks he's a funny man) spent my childhood following my Mother around Europe's various Greek and Roman ruins deriding their 'half-built' state and questioning why we kept taking him to 'buildng sites'. This coupled with a particularly hot traipse around The Valley of the Tombs in Cyprus when I was twelve left me with a deep seated conviction that as an adult I would not 'do' ruins.

However, since I left for Latin America, I have, in fact, become my Mother. I now own a fleece, have enjoyed a rainy hike in Boquete, Panama, and never miss an opportunity to use the loo. So it is no surprise then that last week I signed up for a five day trek to the Cuidad Perdida of Teyuna deep in the Colombia jungle.

Three days hiking to some rubble and the back again all whilst sleeping in hammocks - my Mum's idea of Heaven, my Dad's of Hell.

The hike turned out to be possibly the highlight of my trip so far. Yes it was hard but not overwhelmingly so and we had two brilliant guides, Jesus and Gabriel (so we knew we were in good hands), who were constantly on hand to slice up watermelon and oranges for the weary. Carlos, our translator, knew where all the best, and safest, parts of the river to swim in were and would suggest a dip just as you were thinking 'I'm getting a bit hot'.

The one with the two waterfalls

Over the five days I became quite a connoisseur of these spots weighing up the pros and cons of  'the one with the two waterfalls' versus 'the one with the big rock you could jump off'. My favourite place was 'the one with the really fast current'. There existed in our group a French guy, named Jean, who had a penchant for almost getting swept over rapids. At the spot in question he and a Dane named Rasmus (a common name in Denmark it would seem; his mate was also called Rasmus) finally got dragged down stream. Frantic cries from Gabriel instructed the two to swim with it and to the opposite bank. They then walked upstream and dived back in, across the current, back to cheering group. Well after that we all wanted a go and one by one we swam down the current, off to the side, walked upstream and dived back to safety. 

Lost City Found.

The ruins themselves, although not the trek's highlight, were impressive enough. Two hundred stone terraces soaring above the jungle where the Kogi Indians (who still inhabit the jungle) used to dwell until the Spanish arrived with their European diseases and the city was left to the infected. To my delight at the very top of Teyuna we found six army personal guarding the site from gold diggers, guerrillas and clumsy gringos alike. I may be turning in to my Mother but I am still a Cowley girl and naturally I had to have a picture with the soldiers, wearing one of their hats. The resulting photo definitely trumps my sisters' usual Notting Hill Carnival London Bobby efforts.

So after five days of only washing in streams and having run out of clean socks and t-shirts it was time to return to modern Colombia. In no time we had exchanged the lush idyll of the jungle for the laughably bureaucratic traffic police who impounded our jeep not because it contained twelve people instead of seven, or because the engine and petrol tank were connected by a rubber tube running through the passenger cabin, but because our diver didn't have the correct piece of paper. Civilisation Indeed.

Drink up, me 'earties, Yo Ho.

They say half the fun is getting there and whoever ´they´are they might have been referring to the border between Panama and Colombia. There exists, in the Americas, an optimistic road called the Pan American Highway. The romance being that you can drive all the way from Canada to Argentina on one, nicely paved, road.

And it would do if it weren´t for the Darién Gap.

100km of dense jungle filled to the teeth with bandits, guerrillas and other people who might want to kill or kidnap you. The Darién presents an interesting choice for the pan American traveller...

Do you      a) Fly (boring)

                 b) Do an awkward but cheap mix of flights, boats and buses

          or    c) Sail there

Despite a long family history of sea sickness (my grandfather a WW1 pilot reportedly couldn´t even fly over water without turning green) I plumped for ´c´ and signed myself up for five days onboard a 40ft yacht named ´Impetus´ sailing first through the stunning San Blas archipelago and then across the sea to Colombia´s colonial jewel, Cartagena.

The San Blas Islands number somewhere (it depends who you´re talking to) between the neat 365 to 400 + tiny islands, most sporting little more than a few palm trees, a white sandy beach and an appealing strip of coral reef. A few are home to the island´s autonomous, indigenous people the Kuna Yale. On our first day we hadn´t been on the yacht for more than thirty minutes when two Kuna men appeared in a dugout canoe with ten live lobsters milling about their feet. Bargaining between them and our First Mate ensued and five minutes later we had purchased seven lobsters (one each!) for $20. The second night the event was repeated with enormous red snapper replacing the lobster´s role. Thankfully both our Aussie First Mate and Norwegian Captain were excellent cooks and did the unbelievably fresh food justice.

Dinner!

The first three days were spent cruising between the islands and diving off the boat. Our Captain took us to an amazingly wrecked wreck just a few meters below the water line where we could snorkel amongst the tens of tropical fish and bright corals. Foolishly I indulged in a bit of free diving down to the cabins and swam away with two painful stings on my elbows.

On our first night, between mugs of rum someone noticed a spotted eagle ray gliding past the boat and only a few inches deep. We all rushed over to the side and spent the next half hour watching the graceful creature and its companion ripple around the pool of light our boat created. Having not bee lucky enough to see one when diving in Utila this definitely made up for it!

However after three days of bliss it was time to set sail and we awoke on the fourth day to see the palmed islands slipping out of sight. For a while all we could see were the jagged, forested peaks of the prepossessing Darién before they too disappeared leaving us alone at sea.

Dinner!

Then the sea sickness set in. Clearly my grandfather is alive and well in my veins as I spent most of day four lying on my back listening to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, then Down and Out in Paris and in London and finally before sleep claimed me most of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. However the next morning the seas had died down and I managed to force down a few spoonfuls of oatmeal, enough to provide a base for the mariners secret weapon; seasickness tablets.

I spent day five feeling like superwoman able to stumble about the boat, sit down, stand up and eat at whim. Amazing stuff! The elation didn´t even subside as night fell because sitting on the deck admiring the bio-phosphorescence around the boat I heard a splash. A loud splash, too loud to be the tuna who had been flinging themselves out of the water all day. Looking down I saw a phosphorescent trail loop under the boat and then out of the water arched two dolphins. The rest of the crew were summoned and we spent our last waking hours on the boat being guided towards the glow of Cartagena by the sparkling dolphins and their ghostly leaping shadows.

The next morning we had arrived in Cartagena and all that remained to be done was to find our land legs and, like the true pirates we had become, hit the rum.