chaddeal

Santa was having trouble with Colombian customs.

"Where's the snow, Saint Nick?" the agents asked as they gutted his big red suitcase like a dead animal. Santa smiled and gave a shrug. They found nothing and eventually stamped his North Pole passport, sending him on his way.

It was my turn next. I approached the window and yeilded my passport. The bored agent behind the counter flipped through the visa pages for a very long time. In Spanish, he told me to wait as he disappeared behind a door. When he came back he informed me that my visa had been overstayed by nearly a month. I would have to miss my flight to Panama City and produce large sums of money. I protested.

He took me to a dim back room which seemed to serve this purpose alone - bantering about overstayed visas and exchanging half-assed threats. The agent got on a computer and clicked on random icons, desiring the appearance of looking busy, somehow trying to help.

"Two hundred and fifty dollars," he said finally, as if he we reading it from the screen. He was halfway through a game of minesweeper.

"Listen, I don't have two hundred and fifty dollars, thats why I'm going home. I'm broke."

"Hmm, well. Two hundred and fifty is the minimum. I'm trying to make this easy on you."

"Right."

"What were you doing for nearly three months in Colombia, anyways?"

I was teaching English without a work visa, dancing salsa with wild girls, and eating lots of fried food - but sometimes the truth only complicates things. I had a better idea.

"Well, if you must know, I'm a writer. A professional. For a very popular travel magazine in the United States. I've been working on an article about how wonderful and welcoming your country is for tourists. After all, the only risk is wanting to stay, am I wrong? Well, I've had nothing but good experiences...so far..."

He caught my gist.

"Just give me whatever you have and get outta here. And hurry, your flight's about to leave."

I sat next to Santa and we struck up conversation. Panama would be his 80th country. He held the unofficial world record for hitchhiking, an estimated million and a half miles. He was as kind-hearted and jolly as you'd expect Santa to be.

Santa

When we arrived in Panama City Santa and Pete from New Jersey came with me to David's house, who I had gotten in touch with a few days earlier on couchsurfing.com. David lived in a elegant highrise on the waterfront. The causeway gleamed across the water and the city made city sounds. We shared stories and beers late into the night.

I woke up to Santa looming over me in his big red shirt and his Peruvian lama fur hat.

"Man," he said, "you one ugly motherfucker in the morning."

"Thanks Santa."

Pete had awoken with his eyes bloodshot and itching. I later learned that he was detained at the Panama City airport under suspicion of having swine flu. You can read the full story here:
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/20090513_A_flu_nightmare__without_the_flu.html

David and Santa

Pete and Santa

We headed off across town to Mama Llena hostel, where I was going to meet up with Katie, old Humboldt friend, and Santa was going to find a room. Santa drew a lot of attention from the locals, who HoHoHo-ed from delivery trucks and snuck pictures from across the street. He seemed accustomed to the popularity and returned the salutations joyfully.

We found Katie at a hostel in Casco Viejo and hung out for a while drinking coffee. Then off we went, Katie and I, to retrieve a car which some folks from Alabama had left with her to return to northern Pamana. The car was an old brown diesel Toyota 4-runner. At first we couldn't even get the thing started, so we wandered around barefoot in the rain for a while before finding a taxi who was willing to come over and jump the battery. The car came to life and we took off.

Katie and an anteater who says HONK!

Katie had driven a stick one time before in her life, when someone in Humboldt had taken a vial of LSD to prove a point and quickly lost the ability to operate a motor vehicle. Now she was learning all over again, on the wet roads of rush hour Panama City. The first thing we did was got lost following some bogus directions. We asked the locals and some policemen, but every single answer contradicted the others. We took life into our own hands. We read a map. In no time we were zooming through the insane traffic of the city towards the canal. By the time we breezed over the Bridge of the Americas, Katie was driving the beast like a champ and we both shared a profound sense of relief and accomplishment.

The plan, we decided, was to drive until it got boring and figure out what to do and where to stay as we went. Of course.

When evening hit we were both ready for a beer. We pulled off the road and went into a bar which shared an architectual heritage with the public restrooms you find on So Cal beaches. Shitty porn played from a TV.

Katie spotted him first.

"That one, with the baseball cap. He's the one that's going to give us a place to stay tonight."

"You're right," I said. "Let's go talk to him."

He turned out to be friendly enough. We all talked about mundane things for a while. Katie and I decided somehow to masquerade as German tourists for the hell of it, so we occasionally broke into side conversations of exasperated faux-German before resuming small talk with our unknowing benefactor.

He did indeed have a place for us, as it turned out. Just across the street. He introduced me to his friend, who looked like a toad from an old Chinese story. The toad appeared to be retarded. Or very, very drunk.

"Forty dollars," said the toad.

"Five," I countered.

"Twenty," he challenged.

"Look," I continued, "The lady and I are simple people. In fact, we're German. We don't require much. We're probably better off sleeping on the beach."

"Ten," the Toad belched irritably.

"Agreed."

The place was a three bedroom guesthouse behind a large, semi-luxurious estate which was clearly inhabited by old folks. It was unclear why the Toad had the keys to the house, but it seemed to involve a boss who was on vacation elsewhere. We rigged up the stereo and laid down our things and proceeded to drink late into the night with our two Panamanian entrepeneurs.

The next morning we woke around noon to find the Toad on the porch sucking on a bottle of vodka, still with that challenged look in his eye. We took our time leaving - went swimming, ate some mangoes, showered.

Katie and the Toad

We weren't on the road more than a few hours before pulling over at a roadside beerhut to get leisurely. Some locals waved as we sat down. They appeared to be in the depths of a methamphetamine binge. Their faces were skinny and too wrinkled for their age, their eyes hollow and frantic. They signaled the waitress to give us some beer. So we drank them. But before we were even halfway through, two more showed up. We waved a "gracias" and the dudes smiled proudly. Suckers for gringa girls, all of them.

In no time we were halfway to drunk and again somehow mysteriously German as we talked away with some people sitting next to us. They were from Santiago, nearby. The older man told me that the other was his son in law.

"A ha, and she must be your lovely daugter," I said, indicating the woman sitting near to the other man.

"No," he responded. "My daughter is at home with the kids. This is the mistress of my son in law."

"Oh, hmm. This sort of thing is not so common in Germany. You don't mind it here though?"

"Why should I?" The man asked, smiling. "Everyone has a mistress in Panama."

Katie and I exchanged some German remarks.

More beers appeared.

"Those guys," said the father in law, pointing to the meth fiends. "Gays."

"Gays?"

"Yes," he said gravely. "Gays. And robbers."

"Holy shit. What should I do?"

"Avoid the urinal. They want to steal your penis."

"Good lord!"

We realized that we would have to cut off the drinks pretty soon if we intended to drive any further, so we left the bar and clambered around on a half-built watertower, sang strange songs, and painted each others faces with the ash from a burnt tree.

The sun had long since set when we rolled into Santiago. We found a cheap hotel room and bought a bottle of rum. Election day was the day after tomorrow and all booze sales would be halted the next day at noon so as to prevent drunk voting. We wandered around town, then, seeking a taste of Friday night Santiago. We ended up at a bus station where somehow we had decided to distribute rum to everybody.

"Would you like a shot of rum?" One of us would ask a bored looking stranger.

"A shot of rum?"

"Yes, a shot of rum."

"How much does it cost?"

"Nothing."

The idea alone of free rum was enough to frighten away a few, but the tenacious understood and eagerly accepted. I produced the bottle from beneath my Colombian poncho and filled up a tall shot in my wooden shot glass necklace from carnaval. The takers were pleased and grateful. Its a long ride to David by bus, but this night the ride was certain to be a shade merrier.

What an odd notion, we realized. How simple it is to get the vast majority of an entire bus grinning stupidly for no good reason at all. We felt like sorcorers.

The bus took off but we wanted more, so we waved down a taxi.

"Listen, we're on a promocional campaign for Abuelo rum and we absolutely must distribute this entire bottle to thirsty locals before the night is through. What we need is for you to drive us down every street in town while we hand out shots. We can't pay you, but we can get you drunk. What do you say?"

The first cabbie said he didn't drink and therefore couldn't help us. A Panamanian man who doesn't drink? Lies!

But the next driver was intrigued. At first he laughed, but when I showed him the bottle the tone became conspiritorial. He had to make a run, he said, but he'd be back.

So Katie and I clambered up a watertower to get a more complete yen of late night Santiago. For me, Katie has been one of those friends that just flow into your life naturally and seem to be there for a reason. Our conversations quickly turn esoteric and seem to carry an air of secrecy. Like we're on the same vibe. We both generally suspect that there is a lot of unseen and unknown going on behind this thin film of consensual reality, and that seemingly ordinary people are in fact divine superheroes - the hot dog lady on the street corner, a flight attendant, hazy eyed old men smoking pipes in a cow field, all of us - mysterious and magickal somethings that for some large and blocky purpose have been imprisoned in life as we know - passing time, learning lessons, hammering out the edges just waiting to fly again.

So it was these sorts of things which we discussed loudly like giddy children atop the watertower as we waited for and then forgot about our taxi accomplice, who never did come.

The next day we hit the road late again and plowed through the rain for hours before reaching Bambu hostel in David around sunset. We passed several days there - swimming, hammocking, singing bizzare songs to the dogs on the porch, Katie working on her mural on the wall, me taking my old bicycle out for long rides, sometimes lurking around the city at night.

Finally Katie said she couldn't stand it anymore, David is hell. I didn't know just what she meant until we made it up to Lost and Found eco hostel in the rainforest about an hour inland. She had spent the past two months there doing a work exchange, giving the place some flair with her wild art, and generally causing trouble.

Katie's mural at Bambu

She took me on a hike through the appropriately titled "death trail", where the path crumbles beneath your feet and disappears down a cliffside like something out of Indiana Jones. I was positive I would step on an exotic serpent and die peacefully right there in the jungle like a shaman. Instead we swam in the river and jumped around on some rocks.

A few days later I got on a bus and found myself at the end of a long and hazy day in San Jose, Costa Rica. I met up with my old roommate Michelle from the TEFL school in Samara and we went out on the town. Scenic San Jose. We ended up at a bar that played eighties music all night and danced like fools while everyone else stood around looking cool.

The next day we met up with Layne, another classmate from the TEFL school, who was celebrating her birthday with her cousin in a hotel room by the airport in Alajuela. Both her cousin and I had flights at 6 the next morning, so we stayed up most the night talking and hanging around.

Well, then, before I knew it, here is was. Back in mama America. Everything looking so clean. So orderly.

People stop at red lights and follow the lines on the road.

And maybe you know how it is - for all the homesickness along the way, for all the times I found comfort in the memories of right here, well, suddenly that feeling was very far away, and the bittersweet of people and places never to be seen again surged my heart with the impossibility of it all, the beauty and the strange miracle of existence in the first place,

and I was made full
with gratitude.

written by

chaddeal on May 14, 2009 from San Jose, Costa Rica

from the travel blog: The Great Pan-American Synchronistic Cycle Extravaganza Unlimited

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Had I been feeling superstitious, I never would have gone in the first place.

There was the dead guy, for starters. Dying, anyways, slumped against the meat display at the carneceria across the street from my apartment, hands clutching the hole in his gut which appeared minutes earlier from a gun which nobody had heard. That could have been a bad sign. But then, at the metro stop in Poblado where I would meet Steve, a bus overturned on the rainy night highway below and one-by-one passangers escaped kicking out emergency windows. Not the best omen for someone about to hop on a bus for eight hours.

Fortunately, I was feeling bold and non-chalant. Life is transient. I had no time to contemplate the broader significance of daily mundane misfortunes.

We materialized in Cali sometime the next morning, groggy from the anti-nausea pills and poor sleep. We drank some coffee. Another hour south by bus brought us to Jamundi, where Steve´s mother welcomed us joyfully. She was the embodiment of all admirable maternal qualities, always making sure we had enough to eat and that Steve´s sweater was pulled down tight and kissing us both on the cheek everytime we left the house.

Jamundi was hot and dry, so we biked to the river and jumped off some rocks, drank a slow beer and chatted with the locals. Then back to town, where Steve introduced me to the heart and soul of Jamundi. One thing that I liked about Steve´s style of cultural introduction from Day One is that, rather than beating around the bush of tourist bullshittery, he takes you straight to the source of what matters most - the food. In accordance with this philosophy, we proceeded to slurp down a couple world famous Jamundi cholados - cups of shaved ice decorated with cuts of fresh fruit and sauced in sweet condensed milk - smiling beneath a harsh midday sun.

Around town, then, to meet the locals. Steve has friends in all circles, representing all aspects of Jamundi personhood, but I quickly saw that each of them have one thing in common: they all like to jam. So we turned up the volume in various jam rooms across town and rocked, funked, and bluesed the day away.

The night we met up with a friend of Steve´s, Catarina, a beautiful young girl who´s recent pregnancy was visible through a tight red dress. We hopped in a taxi and disappeared through the cow fields. Some time later, a vast glowing palace churned over the horizon and came to a halt aside the cab window. We got out. The palace turned out the be the local shopping mall, conveniently located at least twenty minutes from anything.

We sat down at an outdoor bar kiosk called ¨Rock and Pop¨, which would make a great title for a future cult classic about an Elmore Leonard style dope smoking strangler from the midwest with a knack for cherry Tab. The radio played Air Supply and Extreme, not the best dancing music, but it didn´t matter. Catarina, the one girl present, was prohibited to dance lest the baby slip out in the midst of a heated salsa and get lost half-developed amongst high heels and the urgent shuffling of feet.

A couple beers later, the mall began to take effect. Commercial centers have a way of bringing out the shadow side in me, the inner Sundance Kid. A rare hostility beheld me. I felt like Han Solo, an outlaw, liable to cut to the core of you with one well placed remark and slap a hooker with a satin glove on the way out.

I got the creeping urge to destroy everything in sight - demolish the department stores, dismantle the disco, peel the paint from the panaderia, blow up the butchery, disect the drogeria, implode the info booth, trash the television, obliterate the offices, heap the habedaschery - if only to see what remains when the surface is gone, making the whole hoax tick.

The notion was soon forgotten as we breezed back through the bovine barrios to a late night Jamundi. Inside a friend´s house, people sang reggae and country karaoke through a keyboard, liters of volatile aguardiente circulating constantly. The music hit a high note and so did I, so I grabbed the mother of the house and we spun around the living room breaking loose with dance moves that would have launched Catarina´s wee embryo halfway to Aruba.

Then she read my aura. It was straight out of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez tale. Her eyes rolled back in her head as she told me of spells and manipulations, confirmed secret suspicions of malevolence, then gave me a purple crystal for protection and told me to be wary of women, keep an eye on that money!

The next day, at the suggestion of Steve´s father, we hit the highway. He said my be-gringo-ed disposition would put us at an advantage amongst the bustling holiday traffic. He was a man of serious appearance, but, as I would find out over the next week, full of a certain brand of humor. But it must have been no joke, this time, as the third car to pass swooped us up and off we went to Popayan. A half hour later we were milling around the side of the highway, as oblivious as our benefactors as to the mechanical problems which prevented the vehicle from going an inch further. But in no time off we went again, this time in the back of a Jeep which deposited us in Santander, where a bus would take us the hour or so more to Popayan.

The core of Popayan is a colonial downtown dating back over 500 years, everything painted white and not a single traffic signal. A church is visible from any given point and the streets are bustling with indigenous Guambiano vendors, who still wear traditional low-cut witches boots, black and purple shawls, and comical little Charlie Chaplin bowler caps. The town reaches capacity during Semana Santa, aka Holy Week, the latino version of Easter which draws crowds for the Catholic processions, said to be second best in the world after Spain.

Guambiana

Christian, Angela, and me in Popayan

We stayed at Steve´s grandparents house, where over the course of the week more family members showed up to take part in the festivities. A maid prepared a lunch each afternoon based on Steve´s grandmother´s recipies - soups of tripe, seasoned meats, patacones with heavenly sauces, and of course, rice and beans.

We also sampled the local specialties around town, the best of which were empanaditas pipian - minitaure empanadas filled with potatoes and mashed peanuts, dipped in a sauce of peanut and aji peppers. These are accompanied by a champu, which looks like a glass full of vomit but takes like sweet, succulent American pie gone liquid and chunky. Finally, there is the chontaduro, an orangish fruit thing with a large black pit which comes from a type of palm. The chontaduro is coverd in honey and salt and tastes somewhat like a fibrous yam. Yum.

Champus look like vomit

Steve looks like latino David Byrne

Back at the house, Steve´s cousin Paulo filled me in on the history of Semana Santa in Popayan. The tradition dates back 450 years and involves a two or three hour procession of large, heavy ¨pasos¨ carrying lifesize figurines depicting biblical scenes. The pasos are carried by eight ¨cargueros¨, four in the front and four in the back. Paulo´s grandfather had started the tradition in his family line 70 years ago and had carried for 55 years. This would be Paulo´s eighteenth year as a carguero, a role which he took proudly, humbly, and reverently.

¨In reality the pasos are very heavy,¨ Paulo told me, ¨but when you are carrying you don´t feel any pain. You carry with the strength of your heart. You carry with your soul.¨

A few days later I had a chance to carry one of the heavier pasos depicting two women at the feet of Jesus as he carried the cross. I carried for about half a block (next to a man who must have been over fifty and carried for about eight blocks) and felt it in my shoulder for three days. The cargueros, who carry over thirty blocks and several hours, are left with welts which resemble a softball surgically implanted on the collarbone.

Catholic for about three minutes

The processions began on Tuesday, with the crowd growing larger every night until Friday, which is considered the most important procession. Back at Steve´s grandparents house, everyone was chatting anxiously as Paulo, Steve´s younger brother Christian, and several other family members were dressed in the living room in blue robes and caps. Girlfriends, sisters, and aunts pinned minture wreaths to the white sashes which draped over the robes.

Later, on the streetside, the military band blocks away echoed down the whitewashed corridors. Young boy/girl scouts in blue class A uniforms and arms linked cleared the road followed by street sweepers in dust masks and yellow jumpsuits. Then came the junior police, eight-year olds looking stern in stiff uniforms. Behind them more children in red frilly robes ringing bells, looking like high priests from the inquisition. The band arrived - glockenspielers, booming bass drums, women in heels with hand cymbals, the percussion artillery, then the brass. The music was mournful, militant, and Christmasy - the type of songs you might hear at the funeral of a high-ranking elf who fell valiantly in a hopeless and bloody quagmire with the nefarious grinchlings of the south pole.

Paulo and Kike luggin the big one

The first paso arrived, adorned with candles which Steve´s grandfather makes by hand and depicting one of the Catholic saints surrounded by fresh flowers. The cargueros paused with a faraway look in their eyes and propped the paso up on four poles made from the same palm which produces the starchy chontaduro fruit. More pasos, then, followed by bands playing music which makes you think of the moment Bambi died, politicials, a beaming Miss Colombia (straight from Popayan) waving to the flashing cameras, more pasos depicting Jesus, Mary, the whole cast, a mobile symphony playing a song which evokes images of the last dinosaur collapsing in the middle of a vast desert and, oddly, a Simon and Garfunkle song which Steve later told me has been converted into a tradtional hymnal. The tail of the carnival was brought up by soldiers carrying candles and rifles, and finally, a single street vendor shouting ¨Mani! Mani! Mani!¨

Which means peanuts.

The next day we woke up early-ish and piled into a bus advertising Medellin Rum. Instead of seats there were bar stools lining the open-air sides making plenty of room to dance behind the caged-in divers pit. Somone yanked the generator and the music spewed forth as we wheeled around town, collecting various people who all turned out to be more or less related before zooming off at top volume into the countryside. Like something out of a commercial, someone produced a bottle of rum and we all smiled approvingly as the accordians blared from the speakers. The gang was fairly grinning by the time we pulled up at the hilltop country house.

Steve´s folks are awesome

The women began cooking rice and boiling up a traditional concotion of ¨sancocho¨, a large stew of meats, vegetables, herbs, and really anything you want. The men kept drinking. I fell asleep in a hammock. When I awoke, the grandfathers and uncles were drunk and intrigued by the pale visitor. What was I doing here? How did I like the women? Did I need another rum? Nada mucho, me encantan, y claro que si, Señor!

We passed the day like this - talking, eating, sipping rum - until finally we all heaped back into the party bus and rambled off down the rutty mountain dirt road. We were feeling inspired, it seemed, especially the grandfathers and uncles, who all took to the dance floor, flailing around in an inebriated, stumbling salsa. One of the girls grabbed my hand and someone slapped a straw hat on my head and off we went, twirling recklessly to the beat. At Steve´s urging, I cut loose with The Dance of The Gringo, one of the only true remaining esoteric arts, and wowed the locals with my deft, straight-from-two-decades-ago gyrations.

The disco bus, gringo style

The next night we took the 11pm bus from Cali. We arrived at the terminal in Medellin early in the morning. The sun had not yet topped the eastern mountains. Coffee vendors roamed the streets. The air was warm and welcoming.

At once I longed for and felt at home.

written by

chaddeal on April 14, 2009 from Popayan, Colombia

from the travel blog: The Great Pan-American Synchronistic Cycle Extravaganza Unlimited

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