Editor’s note: The following essay was written in 2009 in The Bloomington Alternative as part of a series called “Forty Years in Bloomington: A Memoir.”
My first trip to Colombia on my way to the Amazon River was actually pretty ridiculous. Travel was never a priority in my family, and by 1974 I had only been out of the country twice — camping in Canada and breaking for spring in Negril, Jamaica, my senior year at Indiana University. The only Spanish my adventurous buddy John and I knew were leftover snippets from introductory Español in high school and college.
What little I had learned about Colombia didn’t recommend it as a travel destination, either. I knew it was desperately poor and hopelessly corrupt. Tim my dope dealer friend had told me that one of his associates went there on vacation — “He wasn’t doing any deals.” — and was thrown in prison and shaken down for $30,000. I assumed that an importing business from Colombia would at least raise some authorities’ brows, given the country’s status as an emerging drug capital in 1974.
The only draw the place held was hand woven, cotton wall hangings that, John said, were marketable to home decorator-type Americans. A bonus was that Colombia truly was an exotic culture, something I had wanted to experience since I read my first National Geographic in the John Marshall High School library in Indianapolis. And it was a photographer’s paradise, what with a Caribbean Coast, the Andes Mountains, and a port on the Amazon River.
When John told me just days before we were to depart that he was short on cash, we adjusted our plans accordingly.
Given this economic complication, my plan for a two-week-minimum reconnaissance trip devolved into an exercise in efficiency. I had to navigate through a country I knew nothing about and whose language I couldn’t speak, find a specific type of handicraft, and get out, fast. On May 7, 1974, we boarded a Delta Airlines jet in Indianapolis and flew to Miami, catching an Aerocondor Airline jet to the cheapest Colombian airport in the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquilla.
I don’t recall what our ground plan was. But whatever we had in mind was rendered moot when a well-dressed, fedora-wearing Colombian approached us after we cleared customs in Barranquilla and introduced himself as Victor – in intelligible English. He was a guide, he explained, and could get us anything we wanted. When we told him we wanted wall hangings, he said we should go to Cartagena.
Getting in a cab with Victor for a three-hour drive down the coast was among the most adventurous moves I had made in my 23 years on the planet. Definitely up there with hitchhiking to California and following a Jamaican at midnight up an unlit dirt road in Negril, where he promised we’d find pleasant lodging. I had confidence in my Karma and vetoed John’ legitimate concerns that Victor seemed shady. He did. But I didn’t have time to be cautious.
I remember thinking of Cartagena as Colombia’s Miami. The seaport city is the country’s fifth largest, with roughly 1.2 million residents today. Barranquilla is fourth, with about 1.4 million. Bogota, the 8,660-foot Andean capital, is the largest, with 8 million.
In a May 2008 article titled “Thirty-six hours in Cartagena,” the New York Times waxed that the city had emerged from its cocaine past as the “belle of the ball. This tropical city on the Caribbean is pulsating like a salsa party, drawing well-heeled Latin Americans and European socialites to its restored colonial mansions, fancy fusion restaurants and Old World-style plazas.”
We couldn’t afford socializing with the jet set during our 48 hours in Cartagena, but true to his word, Victor helped us find everything we needed, starting with a clean, affordable hotel room, where my Colombian adventures began under a shroud of panic.
After Victor assured us it was okay to smoke pot in the hotel — which we did — I flashed back to Jamaica a year before.
Following a stranger called Stone into the Negril night delivered two friends and I to Hines and Lupe’s “Pravedence Cottage — Cool Spot, Rooms to Rent,” which produced as idyllic a lodging experience as I could possibly imagine. But after two friends arrived the next day and followed another stranger down another dark road, machete-wielding bandits burst through their windows in the middle of the night and robbed them of everything they had. I had to give David a shirt so he wouldn’t have to fly home bare-chested.
Shady Victor could have set us up. We were Americans. And I did have a camera bag with me.
Exhausted, stoned, and frightened, I spent my first night in Colombia with a six-inch, fixed-blade sport knife under my pillow. The night passed without incident, and, proving himself again in the morning, Victor took us to a swanky gallery/gift shop, where we found the objects of our desire — a collection of Colombian wall hangings, alongside leather bags, wood carvings, baskets, carved gourds, and other hand-crafted items.
Talk about efficient — goal achieved within 24 hours of landing in the country.
With our anemic cash stash, the rest of the trip was brief and touristy. We toured the “old city” – historic walled district, brick streets, 300-year-old Spanish colonial buildings, seaside vistas – which would be declared a Unesco World Heritage Site a decade later. We paid a guy with a sloth to let John hold it in his arms like a baby. We dined at a restaurant with an outdoor patio/dance club filled with beautiful Colombian women, who turned out to be prostitutes.
Before leaving Cartagena, we returned to the gift shop, and I bought 25 cotton wall hangings, two leather bags, and a variety of hand-made goodies to show friends and investors upon my return home. Victor vowed to find a wall hanging source. We traded addresses.
So quick was my first trip to Colombia that my old fraternity pal Eagle Scout Tim smirked when I walked into the place he rented on Woodyard Road soon after my return. Oblivious to the Colombian leather bag and rolled-up wall hanging in my hand, he asked what had delayed the trip this time. Before I left that night, Tim was a partner in my fledgling importing business.
The Amazon wasn’t on my mind, but two months later, Victor greeted me at the Barranquilla airport, as I disembarked on my first of five solo trips to Colombia.
