The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (3 page)

But instead of traipsing around South America, I had spent my twenties settled into a classroom, a desk job, and a premature marriage. I looked with a kind of wistful admiration to the younger and hungrier Thompson whom no one seemed to know—much, I suppose, as Thompson had once looked to Hemingway, Faulkner, and his other literary heroes. Something in South America changed Hunter Thompson, and I wanted to know what it was, to figure out how the experience of a foreign culture had so altered his relationship with his own. In truth, I wanted some of that transformation for myself. At twenty-five, Thompson returned home from South America with a new understanding of journalism, injustice, and the American Dream. I, on the other hand, was staring down the barrel of my thirties with two useless degrees, no job, and a failed marriage, the ink on the divorce papers still wet. And I didn’t understand a damn thing.

My e-mail exchange with Sky paraphrased all of this, though I played down my existential angst about transformation, the American Dream, and so forth. My plan, I told him, was to retrace Thompson’s route across the continent, and this is what explained my offbeat itinerary. Barranquilla—hot, bland, or otherwise—was my starting point.

Sky was intrigued. “I am totally game to join you for a leg or two of your journey,” he offered. Would I have any interest in a partner for the first few weeks of the trip? Someone who knew his way around Colombia and spoke far better Spanish than my rudimentary child-speak?

Sí
, I told him,
absolutamente
.

So there we were a few months later, in Barranquilla, getting to know each other at the Colombian equivalent of a TGI Fridays.

“Yep,” Sky said again, setting down his beer. “This is easily one of the ugliest cities I have ever seen.”

I couldn’t disagree. My taxi ride from the airport had given me my first real glimpse of Latin American urban poverty, a suffocation of sheet-metal shanties that seemed to characterize much of the city’s outskirts. Traffic in Barranquilla was a lawless, laneless contest of cabs, donkeys, and moto-taxis, all competing against the gaudily painted, repurposed school buses that served as mass transit. The shopping district surrounding our hotel seemed inoffensive enough—densely packed avenues of concrete, neon, and litter—but I’d come through several seedier sectors on my way into town, passing whole blocks of morning-time drinkers and what looked to be an impressive number of whorehouses.

“So all of this out here,” I asked, gesturing at the tired
palm trees and mausoleum-like office buildings, “this is not typical of a Colombian metro?”

“Man, not at all.” Sky shook his head. “Much more drab than Medellín or Cartagena. Colombians are actually super-passionate about their architecture. Art Deco is big. There’s a ton of colonial preservation. But this place?” He shrugged. “I don’t know, dude.”

Sky gave a quick side-nod toward an adjacent table, and I looked over to where a trio of cute uniformed nurses sat, chatting over their cocktails in clipped Caribbean Spanish. He leaned over his place mat conspiratorially.

“On the other hand,” he said, “there are things that don’t change no matter where you go in Colombia.” He sat back in his chair and grinned slightly, raising his bottle in a mock toast. “At least the women of Barranquilla are still beautiful.” Then he took a long swig and exhaled in satisfaction. “Hey, did you know this is Shakira’s hometown?”

Sky was a tall, tanned thirty-year-old with a goatee and the kind of nondescript, close-cropped haircut that’s justifiably popular in equatorial climates. More often than not, he wore a camera around his neck and a leather satchel over one shoulder, heavy with lenses and other tools of his trade. Over beers that afternoon, he regaled me with stories of his time on the continent, waxing romantic about his fondness for Colombia, which in large part seemed to stem from his fondness for Colombian women. Sky was clearly a bit of a playboy, a good-natured soldier-of-fortune type who could segue onto the subject of women from seemingly any unrelated topic. He also kept up with my beer consumption, which I admired, and he seemed just as passionate about South American politics and social movements as he was about the Shakira look-alikes coming in and out of the bar. I liked him instantly.

“So our first stop is Guajira, then?” Sky asked as the bartender brought another round.

“La Guajira,” I confirmed. “The land of the Wayuu, where Thompson first touched down in May of ’62.”

I had mailed Sky photocopies of Thompson’s
Observer
stories, including his first article from the continent, entitled “A Footloose American in a Smugglers’ Den.” The piece opens on Thompson as he disembarks from the bootlegger’s boat in a tiny village at the tip of the peninsula. He had managed to hitch the ride there from the Dutch island of Aruba, about ninety miles out to sea, where he’d stopped en route to the continent after visiting friends in Puerto Rico. From the
Observer
story, Sky and I had gleaned what little we knew about Guajira: (a) that it was a desert, and (b) that it consisted largely of reservation land for Colombia’s indigenous Wayuu tribe. Some cursory Internet searching hadn’t revealed much more. Like many Latin American countries, the Colombia of the Internet reflects mostly those areas of interest to visiting tourists, and Guajira isn’t a region that sees a lot of gringo traffic—or any kind of traffic, really, since the whole peninsula is largely without roads.

“The problem is,” Sky said, “I don’t know any smugglers with boats. So how are you supposing we get out there?”

I unfolded a map that, thankfully, I’d been using as a bookmark. “We can take a bus as far as Riohacha,” I said, pointing to a town some 125 miles east of Barranquilla. Riohacha is the capital of the La Guajira department (the Colombian equivalent of a state) and effectively the gateway to the peninsula. Near it on the map was a small blue icon of a beach umbrella, indicating
la playa
. Where there was
la playa
, I figured, there would be some kind of tourism infrastructure. From Riohacha, then, I hoped we could rent a truck or some other sort of off-road conveyance.

Sky laughed. “That simple, huh? Then we just tear off into the desert, full speed ahead?”

I nodded.

“And what are we looking for exactly?”

I shrugged. “Stories, I guess. Adventure. Ghosts.”

We both laughed at how little we’d planned anything beyond that moment. At least in this, I thought, we had something in common with Thompson. When the nurses at the neighboring table got up to leave, Sky’s eyes followed them to the door.

“You know what they call speeding in Colombia?” he asked, turning back to me. “
Ir a toda mierda
, which basically means ‘going full shit.’ ”

I laughed again and finished my beer. The two of us stayed at the pub for a couple more hours that night, poring over the map and sketching back-of-the-napkin itineraries beneath posters of scantily clad Aguila beer models. By the time we teetered back to our hotel, feeling chummy and intrepid, my backpack was waiting for me in the room. On one of the plastic clasps, the airline had tied a short note.
Buen viaje y buena suerte
, it read. So long and good luck.

“It’s good that you should see a Colombian mall,” Sky said the next morning as we nursed our hangovers with fried eggs and guava juice. “They’re no different than American malls, really, but Colombians love them because they combine two of their favorite things: shopping and air-conditioning.”

The Muzak and fake foliage of the Portal del Prado shopping center wasn’t the rugged, romantic setting I’d pictured
for my first full day in South America, but simply “going full shit” into the wilds proved more difficult than I’d envisioned. There were errands to run and bus tickets to buy, and in Colombia, these kinds of seemingly straightforward tasks can sometimes occupy one’s entire day. Simply put, America’s quintessentially Protestant emphasis on efficiency has never gained much of a foothold in Latin America, where any number of commonplace tasks and routines can seem needlessly swaddled in layers of tail-chasing and bizarre, paradoxical frustrations.

Consider the phenomenon of Colombian cell phones. Before setting out for Guajira, Sky and I needed to gather a few things: some nonperishable food, cash, batteries, a couple of bags of “goodwill” candy for any kids we met along the way. But most important and time-consuming was the task of acquiring a couple of cell phones. It had never occurred to me that I might carry a cell in South America. For starters, I was accustomed to a messy system of contracts, carriers, and expensive plans back home. Moreover, I hadn’t expected to find much service outside of the major cities. So the ubiquity of cell phones and cellular coverage in South America was the first of many misconceptions about the developing world that would evaporate for me in the coming months.

This is not to say that Colombian cell phone usage makes any sense. Dirt-cheap and available on every street corner, most Colombian cells operate on a counterintuitive arrangement in which minutes are prepaid and incoming calls are free. The result of this, Sky explained on our way to the mall, is a Kafka-esque scenario in which everyone owns a cell phone but no one ever has any minutes. So rather than waste their own, most callers will simply dial their intended target, then wait for a single ring before hanging up, hoping that the recipient will call back on his or her own dime.
Which, for lack of minutes, no one ever does. Consequently, the streets of most Colombian towns are crowded with vendors charging customers to use fleets of non-depleted cell phones, which they keep tied to chains like pens at the bank. In even the smallest Colombian villages, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a sign that advertises these
minutos
, posted in corner-store bodegas, on street carts, and even in private homes.

But we didn’t want to rely on
minutos
, and we figured there’d be times when we’d need to call each other, so we squared away our phone situation at Portal del Prado, enjoying some Arctic air-conditioning in the process. Sky’s Spanish was vastly superior to mine, so he mostly handled the transaction, flirting mercilessly with the round-eyed, tube-topped attendant at the kiosk. Funny, I thought, how easy it is to recognize playful innuendo, even when you’re fighting to understand the language.

The rest of our supplies we picked up at the Colombian equivalent of a Walmart anchoring one end of the mall. Unlike American big-box stores, however, this particular retailer employed several conspicuously armed security guards, which I learned when one of them chased me down to ask gruffly that I check my backpack in a locker. From the short-barreled rifle hanging at his side, I guessed that gringos with illicit backpacks were the least of his potential problems. So there’s at least one difference between American and Colombian malls, I thought. In Colombia, the mall cops get to carry guns.

We were further delayed at the bus terminal, where a smooth-talking driver duped us into leaving Barranquilla on the local rather than the express, which meant stopping for a pickup at every no-name village along the way. It’s an easy mistake to make in Colombia, where every shifty-eyed
counter agent will assure you that
his
is the only nonstop route. We stuck out the bus ride for several hours, covering all of seventy miles before switching at another terminal to a
puerta-a-puerta
—a “door-to-door” shuttle van that carries a dozen passengers for a few pesos more than bus fare. Our particular conversion van was packed with middle-aged men and smelled faintly of diesel, and when it finally pulled away from the station, it was clear we had zero chance of reaching Riohacha before nightfall. But at least Barranquilla was in the rearview mirror, and the rest of the continent spread out in front of us like a dashboard map.

“Jesus Christ is coming back!
Jesús Cristo va a regresar!
”

I heard the bearded and wild-eyed street preacher before we’d even stepped out of the
puerta-a-puerta
. It was an uncharacteristically cool evening in the beachside village where we stopped for dinner, and a handful of locals were loitering around an open-air market, sipping
refrescas
and trying to ignore the ragtag prophet howling in the street. At our driver’s urging, we filed out with our fellow passengers, lining up at a street-corner grill for some cheese-stuffed corn pockets called arepas, the de facto national street food of Colombia.

“He is bringing you his blood!” yelled the preacher, addressing no one in particular.
“Jesús Cristo le ofrece su sangre!”

Sky looked at me and rolled his eyes. The air was heavy with the buttery scent of frying arepas. In line in front of us, a stocky middle-aged guy who’d been riding shotgun in the van turned around and pointed none-too-subtly at the preacher.

“You see that guy?” he asked in Spanish. “
That
guy is an asshole.”

I blinked and begged his pardon.

“He’s an
asshole
!” said the guy again, a little louder this time. “He used to be a hit man for the cartels, and now he stands out here screaming about salvation.”