I Have A Daydream

I have a daydream.  I’ve had the same one for over five years.  My mother is not fond of my daydream.  She’s pretty sure I’d be killed.  By sharks or drug-runners or big waves.  I’m more afraid of getting dragged by currents and ending up in Iceland.

Last night, I had a real dream.  In my night dream last night, I built a closet, no bigger than a telephone booth.  And I’ve planned to sail it, or rather, float it across an ocean.  Only that in my dream, it takes only a few minutes to cross, so it was probably a canal or small lake.  This water closet was only big enough for me, but for some reason there two other people hanging on the outside.  This dream was certainly inspired by my original daydream.  I’m not sure what inspired my daydream.  Perhaps it was Alfons Aberg, the little Swedish boy with a grand imagination.

My daydream is to build a lightweight and inexpensive boat and paddle and sail it around the Caribbean, starting in Florida and finishing in Trinidad or Venezuela, passing the Bahamas, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and all of the lesser Antilles en route.  I imagine a trip such as this would easily take half a year or more.  Preferably with some friends and a brother or two in the boat, too.

I wouldn’t say I’ve got the sea in my blood.  I wouldn’t even say that I’m a boat person.  I’ve been on a sailboat only once in my life and it was docked in a marina.  Out on the open water, I’ve never been in anything smaller than a ferry or a cruise ship.  I’m most familiar with canoes, paddling around the rivers of central Florida…but, I’d never try to cross the Gulf Stream in a tippy canoe.  I’m not a boat person, but I’d like to try to become one.

Buying has never been an option.  I do it homemade, with garbage and other cheap materials.  For my first attempt, I invited some friends to my home, and I told them to bring any float-worthy garbage.  We had a group of six sailors in addition to a hollow door, a wooden gate, a tile-encrusted wooden table, lots of plastic bottles, two 55-gallon barrels, and several oak branches that had fallen during a storm.  We divided ourselves into two teams and had three hours to build two lake-worthy rafts.  The result : the first boat was a submarine, gliding along two inches below lake level, wetting the pants of all crewmembers, including me.  The second boat fared far worse.  Taller than long, it flipped every time its crew attempted to climb back on.  Very funny.  Funny enough that we were encouraged to try again.


Six months later, we started again, with grand aspirations.  We were going to descend the Mississippi River iver iver er…or perhaps cross the Gulf of Mexico exico exico ico co o.  Like the echo ?  Anyway, the raft would be much bigger, more buoyant, more liveable.  Then we heard and read about all the sharks and the currents in the Gulf…  Back to the lake !  So we built it and lived on it for five days in the middle of the lake.  We never moved faster than one mile an hour, and that was with the wind.  We were thrashed about every afternoon by the daily thunderstorms, and we loved it !  But in the end, someone driving on the nearby bridge had called the police to report a sinking boat…and the police came, put their feet on our boat, threatened to deport our Aruban crewmember, and forced us off the lake.




Tries three and four were on the other side of the ocean, in Montpellier, France.  The last boat was too slow, too heavy.  It took four people to lift half of it.  So this time, we’d be going ultra-light : cardboard !  And so I convinced five teams (the first occasion) and eight teams (the second) to build flimsy cardboard boats, held together by paint and tape.  The first time, my boat sank after five minutes and my team swam across the lake carrying the submerged boat.  I swam back carrying a submerged paddle.  Did you know that a 25 kg cardboard raft weighs more than 3,000 kg when saturated with lake water ?  The second try, we fared a little better.  Our boat sank like before, but not before winning the race across the lake.  Progress !








It’s been six months now.  I’ve been boat-less for more than six months now.  I’m loving the mountains of Colombia, but my lake-legs miss the Huckleberry Finn life.  Every time I look at the world map, or at least the Caribbean part, I start daydreaming about crossing it, from Antille to Antille (is that the singular of Antilles ?).  But I know I have a lot of work to do before that, lots of materials to test, lots to learn about sailing and currents and man-eating sharks before embarcation.


Afficher Caribbean Trip sur une carte plus grande

So that’s why my next trip will be from the Ecuadorian coast to the Galapagos archipelago, in a raft made of tightly-bound reeds.  It’ll be a way to kill two birds with one stone.  The Galapagos islands are far too expensive for us to visit in the usual style, you know, with planes and cruises.  Keep checking for updates as my daydream approaches reality!




Just kidding, mom !  I’m not gonna cross hundreds of miles of the Pacific.


Yet.

Massacre Department

From Cartagena to Medellin on bus, you have to pass through the department of Cordoba.  The trip takes 14 hours, so we considered cutting the trip in two by stopping in Monteria, the capital of Cordoba.  And a friend living in Medellin had told me about a beautiful and un-touristy island a bit north of Monteria.  Sounded perfect !

We told our host in Barranquilla about our tentative plan.  He recoiled in horror.  “Oh, no, please don’t go there.”  We were a bit skeptical.  This is just one guy talking, who doesn’t even live in the region.  We were not yet convinced.

Then he told us about the reality of the life in the campo.  Around the country (all well beyond the beaten tourist trail), you have several armed and competing groups who demand a fee from the local farmers…or else.  Very mafia-style.  They call this fee a vacuna.  A vaccine.  For protection against a virus called…armed bandits.  There are least five such groups extracting money from the farmers.  The most famous is of course the FARC, but there are plenty of paramilitary, guerrilla, and other criminal groups to go around.  Some sad regions have all of these groups competing, meaning the locals need to pay five or six vacunas.  Cordoba is such a region.

Later on, we spoke to two other Cordobans, independently.  They concurred.  They had both left the area because of the violence and assured us that our white-ish skin and large-ish backpacks would attract the attention of one or more of the armed groups providing vaccinations.

We started to get the point, but I was going to do a bit of research to make sure.  One of the first articles that Google presented me was regarding two students from Bogota who were shot to death in January because they took photos on the beach.  They were mistaken for journalists.  I love beach photos, but I don’t want to be mistaken for a journalist.  The next article spoke of the 500 unsolved murders last year.  In one single department, with a small capital city with small towns and villages and farms around it.  Something like Iowa.

Each region, each department of the country is known for its special characteristics.  Bogota is the cultural center of the country , Paisas in Medellin are known for their business savy, the Costenos for fast-talkin' and slow-movin', and Cali is world famous for Salsa dancing.  And Cordoba is known for its massacres.  And I haven’t yet been vaccinated against massacres.  Is that part of the MMR vaccine : Measles Massacres and Rubella ?

Tayrona

After leaving the lonely and lovely Guajira, our next stop was Taganga, a small fishing village that has been overrun by tourists looking for parties and drugs and beaches.  It’s also used as a base for visiting the nearby national parks of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and Tayrona. 

The Sierra Nevada is a small mountain range in area but reaches 5,700m in altitude.  In fact, it’s the highest coastal range in the world.  The southern slopes of the park is home to la Ciudad Perdida.  This Lost City was the capital of the Tayrona civilization, a pre-Hispanic indigenous group and is now in ruins like its more famous Incan and Mayan counterparts in Peru and Mexico, albeit less impressive.   The real draw is the three-day hike (one-way) through the jungle to get there.  Unfortunately, the upper reaches are off-limits; the drug-growing indigenous are likely to kill trespassers.

Tayrona is perhaps the most-visited natural national park in the country.  It’s a Colombian juxtaposition of mountains, rainforest, and Caribbean beaches.  And it has monkeys.  And giant ants.  So you can see, it’s something like paradise.  Many travelers come to Colombia and spend the majority of their time bouncing between these three sites. 

Within seconds of stepping out of the taxi in Taganga, we were accosted from all sides by the hawkers hawking hotels, hostels, posadas, guided tours, boat excursions, restaurants…  I thought we’d suffocate under their weight.  Right after we passed the hawker gauntlet, we met another.  An army of dreadlocked hippies selling the same woven bracelets and necklaces.  The two groups were like a dozen piglets clamoring over half a dozen teats.

In the hyper-touristic sites and cities, the locals in the tourist industry equate white-skinned Europeans and North Americans with money.  Like walking wallets.  And in most of the cases, I think they’re right.  Most of the travelers we meet find no qualm paying overpriced hotels and taxis and guided tours.  We are not like most travelers.  To be able to travel for a year, a year and a half, we try to think and spend more like the regular locals.    

Thus we arrived at a camping ground while pondering which activities we would like to partake in.  At the camping ground, we met Rafael, a Colombian with a drooping Snidely Whiplash moustache and the front half of his skull shaved.  He tried to convince us to visit Tayrona.  “Hay que !,” he said.  You have to go !  Normally, the entrance fee is roughly $35 per person + $8 camping fee per night, which is not a price we spend lightly.  “Honestly,” continues Rafael, “it’s really worth the price.”  “You paid ?” I asked foolishly.  “Well, no, but you should definitely pay.”

Then he told us about one particular entrance to the park.  It was possible to avoid the park guards by walking in a creek around the park office and reach the beach without paying.  So now, we were heavily leaning toward going, by the super secret camino.  But he then added that it takes six hours of hiking to get to the beach.  With nowhere to leave our packs, we would have carry the weight over steep mountains with the heat and humidity of the rainforest air.  Hmmm, maybe not.  And to make matters worse, the guards give you a bracelet when you pay…and often check to see if the tourists are wearing them.  So, perhaps not.  Seemed like a hassle either way.

So, what’s plan B ?  Some locals at Taganga told us about a waterfall and several swimming holes along a creek in the mountains.  Cost : $1.50.  That’s more like it.  So we went there, spent the day there, and saw plenty of locals and not a single tourist.  And we loved it.  The water was perfectly refreshing on a hot day.  And it’s always hot along the coast. 

So we missed two of the biggest sites in the country…big deal.  The money we didn‘t spend means we can travel for another month in Bolivia or Paraguay.  And we have a very good reason to come back and see the rest of Colombia, some day, when we have more money.

The Castle

I love the beach.  But only up to a point.  I find it difficult to spend more than half a day at any beach, even the most beautiful Caribbean sort.  Honestly, beaches are hot, and activities are a bit limited.  Swimming, sunbathing, perhaps reading, frisbeeing and paddleballing, and sand-castle-building.  We don't have a frisbee, nor paddles and a ball.  We do have plenty of sand, though.  So we make castles.  Pauline and I have constructed castles on every beach we've encountered along the Caribbean.  Just walls and moats and towers.  By hand, with absolutely no artistic merit.  Any ol' five-year-old could do the same.

And as the tide starts to rise, we watch the waves slowly lick the castle to death.  Good fun in between dips in the ocean.  But interestingly and sadly enough, our primitive castles are always conspicuously alone.  We've never seen another person attempt the challenging feat of piling sand and digging trenches.  Not even the ol' five-year-olds do it...and there are plenty of them around !


Our latest visit to the beach was in a small town called Camarones, meaning "Shrimp".  The beach there was no Caribbean beauty, but had clean white-ish sand and small gray or hazel-ish waves that we thoroughly enjoyed.  And when the tide started to rise, we did like on all the other beaches...we made a castle.  Not any prettier or artisitic than our other creations, but this one was considerably larger.  And heads turned.  The other beach-goers, all locals, came to gaze upon our piled sand.   And to take photos.  It made me smile, and at the same time, feel a bit uncomfortable.  In a sane world, childishly-made sand castles should not be seen as exceptional or photo-worthy.  Except by the proud builders, of course.


But there was a group of four boys who stayed distant.  They watched us and the castle off and on for over an hour, but never came within 30 meters.  The boys were keeping their distance, but a storm was fast approaching.  By the time the rains began, most of the castle had been washed away to sea.  But a few parts resisted.  Beaming with architectural pride, we abandoned the surviving towers and walls to the elements and ran for cover.  As I ran, I glanced over my shoulder and saw those same four boys, their wait now over, dash to the castle and jump on and crush the remaining walls and towers.  Then they jumped for joy for their victory and ran to find shelter of their own.