The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (24 page)

If you want to go off the beaten path in Colombia, it's best to be with people you trust who have fresh information. It's a bonus if they have good brakes. Given these criteria, Acevedo is the man for the job. Armed with two iPhones at all times, he's in constant contact with friends and coworkers all over the country. Two years ago, he was hired as the incoming tourism manager for Voyage Colombia, a large operator, to bolster its eco- and adventure-travel itineraries targeting intrepid Dutch, German, Canadian, and Brazilian tourists. His new branch is one of only four or five outfits with countrywide coverage in Colombia.

“Ask any Colombian and they'll say La Macarena is dangerous,” he tells me. “That's why we're looking for
adventure
travelers. But we only go to places the government guarantees there's not going to be a problem.”

By the end of this 11-day journey via Cessna, horseback, tractor, Subaru, mountain bike, Twin Otter, and ocean outboard, Acevedo, photographer João Canziani, and I will have traveled a few thousand miles.

At the moment, we are climbing 11,000 feet over the Cordillera Central, then dropping into Armenia, the heart of Colombia's mountainous Coffee Triangle. We'll spend a night at Hotel Bambusa, a peaceful hacienda on a cacao plantation exquisitely renovated by its artist owner, Santiago Montoya. The next morning, we'll drive to Los Nevados National Park, where we'll hike in the Cocora Valley under 260-foot wax palm trees before driving to an evening tutorial in coffee making at Hacienda Venecia. The century-old coffee farm sits on 495 acres nestled in the volcanic hills below Manizales, home to some of the best mountain biking in Colombia. There's no time to ride, though: we're driving on to Medellín in pursuit of yet another incredible network of trails.

The next morning, we meet Acevedo's friend Alejandro Puerta, a 40-year-old production engineer, mountain biker, and, according to his friends, technology nerd. In the past few years, he's used Google Earth to scout an estimated 200 mountain-biking routes all over Colombia. His most epic ride topped out at 15,750 feet on the Nevado del Ruiz volcano.

“I try every week to never repeat the same path,” Puerta says.

Today, Puerta, his 38-year-old girlfriend, Mildred Uribe, and friend Carlos Carvajal, a 42-year-old mechanical engineer who just finished circumnavigating South America by bike, are taking us mountain biking on a favorite 20-mile route that follows the Cauca River, north of Medellín, and will end with a feast in Santa Fe de Antioquia, a 16th-century whitewashed colonial town with red-tile roofs and seven churches. On our right are the dry peaks of the Cordillera Central, with the Cordillera Occidental to the left. The smooth single and double track passes fruit orchards and a cluster of expensive-looking vacation homes before passing over a 400-year-old colonial bridge.

“Ten years ago I couldn't do this trip,” Puerta says. “We were completely kidnapped inside Medellín. It was terrible.” He is speaking figuratively, but his family experienced horrific violence firsthand, and he dislikes discussing the past. “I don't want people to be afraid to come to Colombia,” he says. “It's not all drugs. It's not all bad things.”

The country's extreme makeover is especially evident in Medellín. In 1991, the city, with a population of 2 million, had a murder rate of 7,081. That same year New York City, with four times the population, had roughly 2,200 murders. Today, Medellín has grown to 3.8 million people; it isn't crime-free, but homicides were reduced to 1,528 in 2011. (By comparison, New York City had 515.) Plus, as Carvajal tells me, its potential for cycling and mountain biking is enormous. On the last Wednesday of every month, he arranges, via social media, La Fiesta de la Bici, a noncompetitive ride that draws an average of 5,000 cyclists.

That evening, as Acevedo accelerates around the curves on the hourlong ride back to Medellín, the moon illuminates the twinkling lights below. As we reach the outskirts of the city, we pass a strip of drive-in lodges with names like Motel Sensaciones and the famous Metrocable, one of two gondolas that provide transportation from the poorest hillside barrios to the city. This gondola, along with a 1,300-foot escalator up another mountain, is connected to a high-speed light-rail system, which allows people in the barrios a way to get to work, reducing crime by more than 50 percent.

Later in the week, we ride the Metrocable at 8
P.M.
on a Friday. The city smells like roses and
mani,
sweet roasted peanuts sold by street vendors. It's the eve of the famous Fiesta de las Flores, an annual weeklong party where growers transform Medellín into a garden, erecting brilliant flowery sculptures in every public space available. I watch the Virgin Mary miraculously materialize out of carnations, her image seeming to soothe the country's slowly diminishing posttraumatic stress disorder.

 

After more than a week of nonstop travel, we're all ready for the
tranquilo
vibe of a beach. We're heading to the central Pacific coast, known to have the best surf in Colombia and also an excellent place to see migrating humpback whales.

“The conditions are so good for nature here that it grows everywhere,” says Guillermo Gómez, co-owner of El Cantil Ecolodge, an Eden on the edge of Chocó, Colombia's poorest region.

A former businessman from Medellín, 45-year-old Gómez is wearing flip-flops, board shorts, and a Billabong baseball hat and has the ripped physique of a surfer. As the crow flies, his eco-lodge is 120 miles from Medellín. But because it's accessible only by boat and backs up to one of the thickest jungles in the world, El Cantil might as well be a million miles away. To arrive there we flew into Nuquí, a relaxed village with no roads to the outer world, founded by escaped slaves nearly 200 years ago. Then we motored an hour south down the Pacific coast in an outboard panga.

“The reason the slaves came here,” Gómez says, “is that nobody was going to find them.”

Drug cartels infiltrate the area for the same reason. Last July, Colombian police seized 388 pounds of cocaine at a covert lab near a beach in Ensenada de Utría National Park, less than 20 miles from El Cantil.

“The cartels aren't interested in making problems for tourists,” Gómez reassures me. In the 20 years Gómez and his family have owned their property, they have had very few security problems. Gómez's lodge has such an impressive safety record that when Uribe was president, he called Gómez looking for trustworthy, on-the-ground advice.

To crack down on the cartels, Uribe sent army intelligence officers to infiltrate nearby villages and weed out locals who act as liaisons to the drug runners. These days the cartels keep to themselves, and curious travelers from all over the world are attracted to El Cantil by its stunning location, fresh Chocóan meals, and chic
palafitos
—clean, rustic, oceanside cottages lit by oil lamps and strung with hammocks. This week a high-level international-development worker from the U.S. and his 17-year-old son are here to surf; a Dutch real estate lawyer, his wife, and two teenage daughters came to watch migrating whales; a professor of Latin American history from New York City is here with her two kids to relax before school starts; and a young Australian mining executive and his Colombian girlfriend are taking a romantic break from Bogotá.

“It's actually nice to harbor the illusion that people shouldn't come here,” the U.S. aid executive told me as he and his son played cards in the open-air dining room. “Six months ago, my security team told me, ‘No, you can't go to Chocó.' I convinced them that if there's a problem, the local
commandante
knows I'm here. I'll just call the police. They know everything that's going on.”

Once again, Colombia isn't living up to its deadly reputation. What I'm seeing in front of me is paradise—the turquoise Pacific, black-sand beaches, and so much greenery that even the volcanic boulders sticking out of the ocean are covered in ferns and sprouting palm trees.

What are the odds of a catastrophic mishap for a traveler veering off the beaten path? The answer depends on who you ask and where you are. Even the State Department travel warnings tend to flip-flop: “Security in Colombia has improved significantly in recent years,” but “terrorist activity remains a threat throughout the country.” An unexpected result of the violence, however, is that most Colombians, perhaps by psychological necessity, crave peace and go out of their way to ensure that foreigners experience it while on their soil.

“Pablo was a real monster, but I chose the right path for me faster because I saw that violence,” Gómez told me at dinner one night. “What's going on with this country makes us go deeper.”

To attract more tourists, Termales, a fishing village roughly three miles south of El Cantil, has capitalized on what is literally its hottest asset: a sulfur spring. Using government funds, the people of Termales built a jungle spa with mud baths, decks overlooking a river, and beautiful concrete pools. When we arrive, a group of 10 Germans in Speedos are soaking in the springs.

Back at El Cantil, guests gather for a lunch of fresh tuna, coconut rice, fried plantains, and frosty Aguila beers. I nap in the hammock, then borrow a stand-up paddleboard from Gómez's wife, Adriana. It's late afternoon, and the water is choppy. I fall headlong into the salty waves a few times before I sync up with the ocean. Finally, I find my balance and paddle toward the sunlight.

FROM
Smithsonian

 

O
NE OF THE LITTLE-KNOWN
turning points in the history of American travel occurred in the spring of 1869, when a handsome young preacher from Boston named William H. H. Murray published one of the first guidebooks to a wilderness area. In describing the Adirondack Mountains—a 9,000-square-mile expanse of lakes, forests, and rivers in upstate New York—Murray broached the then outrageous idea that an excursion into raw nature could actually be pleasurable. Before that date, most Americans considered the country's primeval landscapes only as obstacles to be conquered. But Murray's self-help opus,
Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks,
suggested that hiking, canoeing, and fishing in unsullied nature were the ultimate health tonic for harried city dwellers whose constitutions were weakened by the demands of civilized life.

This radical notion had gained currency among Europeans since the Romantic age, but America was still building its leisured classes and the idea had not yet caught on with the general public. In 1869, after the horrors of the Civil War and amid the country's rapid industrialization, Murray's book became a surprise bestseller. Readers were enthralled by his vision of a pure, Edenic world in the Adirondacks, where hundreds of forest-swathed lakes were gleaming “like gems . . . amid the folds of emerald-colored velvet.” Murray argued that American cities were disease-ridden and filled with pressures that created “an intense, unnatural and often fatal tension” in their unhappy denizens. The wilderness, by contrast, restored both the spirit and body. “No axe has sounded along its mountainsides, or echoed across its peaceful waters,” Murray enthused, so “the spruce, hemlock, balsam and pine . . . yield upon the air, and especially at night, all their curative qualities.” What's more, Murray pointed out, a new train line that had opened the year before meant this magical world was only 36 hours' travel from New York City or Boston. The vision struck a deep chord, and his book ran into 10 editions within four months.

That first summer of '69, the Adirondacks were inundated with would-be adventurers, each clutching a copy of Murray's volume (including a tourist's edition in waterproof yellow binding, with fold-out train schedules and a map)—an influx that was dubbed “Murray's Rush” by the press. It was a “human stampede,” wrote one modern historian with a florid turn of phrase that Murray would have appreciated—“like hungry trout on a mayfly-feeding frenzy.” Unfortunately, it was also one of the wettest and coldest summers in Adirondack history, ensuring that the region was not quite the Arcadian idyll Murray had depicted. Many of his followers arrived woefully unprepared, and as nervous in the wild as Woody Allen characters today. These Gilded Age city slickers got lost only a few yards from their camps, overturned their canoes, and became terrified by deer or bear tracks. A late winter meant that black flies—a biting scourge in the Adirondacks every June—persisted well into August, and clouds of mosquitoes turned many campers into raw-skinned wretches. The few rustic inns in the area, which had previously only catered to a few gentlemen hunters, were overwhelmed. One hotel became so crowded that the rapacious owner charged by the hour for guests to sleep on the pool table. Locals with no experience hired themselves out as guides to the city rubes, adding to the chaos by leading their groups astray and camping in dismal swamps.

These pioneer nature lovers were soon derided in the press as “Murray's Fools” (the book had come out around April Fools' Day), and the author was denounced by angry readers for grossly exaggerating the charm of the outdoors. Meanwhile, gentlemen hunters complained that Murray was too democratic, flooding the forests with hoi polloi, including, shockingly, women. The young preacher had even taken his own wife on extended camping trips. “Let the ladies keep out of the woods,” fumed one critic.

Murray was forced to publicly defend himself in the
New York Tribune.
In a long “Reply to His Calumniators,” he pointed out that he could hardly be held responsible for the dreary weather, including rains that were “ten fold thicker than was ever known.” Many first-time campers had failed to heed his tips, he noted, arriving in the wilderness “dressed as for a promenade along Broadway, or a day's picnic.” And he predicted that the Adirondacks would become America's “great Summer resort”: “Hotels will multiply, cottages will be built along the shores of its lakes, white tents will gleam amid the pines which cover its islands, and hundreds of weary and overworked men will penetrate the Wildness to its innermost recesses, and find amid its solitude health and repose.”