Quick, look lost !

We arrived in Medellin on the night bus.  We staggered into the terminal, tired and without much of a plan for the day.  Less than three minutes later, a woman approached us, "Are you lost ?  Do you need help ?"  We told her we were thinking of maybe, perhaps, going to the Botanical Garden.  "Oh," she looked us up and down, "if you go in there with your backpacks, you won't be leaving with them."  Then she offered to bring us home with her...and feed us...and let take showers...and let us sleep in a bed.  It was an offer we couldn't refuse.  We were certainly interested in keeping our backpacks.  So we spent the day with Andrea and her sister and mother and had a great time.

This is an extreme example, but this happens over and over in Colombia and Venezuela.  Anytime we spend more than two minutes at a street corner contemplating which direction to take, there's always a local who notices and offers help and advice.

In fact if you want to find the nicest people in a 50-meter radius, anywhere in upper South America, here's what you do : stop moving, pull out a map or guidebook, look at it upside down, and scratch your head.  Get ready, someone's coming to help.

Brown Paper, Narrow Pipes

In the beginning, there was a hole.  And someone took a dump there.  And wiped his own hole with his hand…or perhaps with some leaves.  Thus the first toilet was born.  Can you hear the opening music to the film 2001 ?  Of course, that bathroom ritual still exists in many parts of the world today.  But in Europe and North America, among other places, we’ve reached the pinnacle of bathroom technology and hygiene; we’ve got flushable toilets and oh-so-soft triple-ply paper. 

Upon first glance at any bathroom in Colombia and Venezuela, you probably wouldn’t be able to detect any differences.  Sink and faucet : check.  Flushable toilet : check.  Toilet paper : check.  Little trash bin : check.  But there is a difference.  It’s in the pipes.  In this part of the world, the pipes aren’t exactly the same caliber as back home.  Oh, they can handle just fine the peepee and the caca…but not the paperpaper.  That little brown-streaked paper goes in the little trash bin next to the toilet. 

And you might expect that this little bathroom would be the foulest smelling room in the world.  You might expect it to be crawling and overflowing with flies and maggots.  You might expect to get wicked constipation from tightening your anus and avoiding all the bathrooms of Latin America.  Those would be reasonable expectations.  But you’d be wrong.  In fact, it’s usually odorless, and certainly smells no worse than any other room in the house.  And I can’t even begin to explain it.  I've seen those bins overflowing with brown paper, but not overflowing with stink.  I don’t get it; my olfaction doesn't get it.  I guess it’s just one of life’s pleasant mysteries.

Like A Bridge Over Brown Water

 

The Golden Gate Bridge.  The London Millennium Footbridge.  The Millau Viaduct.  The Pont du Gard.  Bridges are beautiful.  They span space and time.  They're spanners.  But not "in the works" of course.  They defy the instinctual logic of my brain.  How can they hold up their own weight, let alone all the cars, trucks, and fat tourists ?  Why don't they crash into the abyss below ?  But if I accept the fact that bridges are not magic - and physics does make such a claim - that makes it all the more paradoxical and ironic that they can be felled by marching armies or tourists, or wind, or supposedly even a cat.  They're beautiful, too, as metaphors, but I won't get into all that cross-cultural bullshit.

Anyway, back to Colombia.  Barranquilla and Santa Marta are large Colombian cities along the Caribbean shores.  The Magdalena River and the Manzaranes River pass, respectively, through these two towns.  And several bridges span these rivers, the majority unremarkable.  But on our second day in Barranquilla, we did discover some rather interesting bridges built with unconventional architectural techniques.

You see, these cities have no gutters and no sewers.  So when it rains, at least once every three days during the rainy season, you get inner city flash floods.  The roads collect all the precipitation, forming hundreds of new and temporary canals after about 30 minutes.  Looks something like a dirty and shallow Venice.  But not a gondola in sight.

Most people stay put when the streets flood, and many cab drivers will even refuse to drive.  They don't drive Hummers here, after all.  Maybe they could use some gondolas after all, steered by singing Italians...  But honestly, it's very dangerous.  We heard of one motorcyclist who had been swept away the river of sediment and garbage.  His body was never recovered.  We saw a giant drowned rat that had been swept away, too.  Its body rolled in front of my feet.

So what's the solution ?  Are the cities building gutters and sewers and retention ponds ?  Ha !  Of course not !  But some enterprising citizens brave the river-slash-roads and build bridges out of pallets and crates and 2x2's and other scraps of wood, and they charge the passers-by 25 cents to get to the other side.  And not even armies of soaked Barranquilleros and Samarios marching across can't collapse it.  It's no Golden Gate, that's for sure, but these Bridges of Barranquilla and Santa Marta have their utility and, in a way, their beauty.

Trash

Trash.  Rubbish.  Garbage.  Litter.  Waste.  Latin America has it all.  In abundance.  Anyone who's visited this part of the world knows what I'm talking about.  One of my first cultural shocks I received on my first trip to Latin America was on my first bus ride out of Managua.  Several passengers had bought sodas in a bag (literally, soda poured into a plastic bag) for the trip.  And when the bag was empty, the passengers leisurely tossed them out the window to let them mingle with other discarded bags.  Cringe !

But my most recent shock was in Barranquilla, on the Colombian Caribbean coast.  Driving through the city, we passed a canal, called the Pumpkin Canal, which was linked through a series of canals to the Magdalena River.  But this canal was an interesting composition of one part water and three parts trash.  The layer of plastic, paper, glass, and rotting food bobbed up and down with the wind.  Like a Colombian Cuyahoga.  If you're not American or if younger than 40 years old, you may be unfamiliar with the Cuyahoga River.  It's a river in Ohio that is infamous for catching on fire in the 1960's...several times.

The US, the country where rivers burn, produces more trash than any other nation.  But it usually does a damn fine job of hiding it all.  It's no Switzerland, but the plastic bags on the side of the road are few and far between.  Latin America produces less trash, but lets it all hang out.  If there's a hand-painted "No Littering Here" sign on a wall, below it you'll find, without exception, 14 bags of trash, half of them torn open and dispersed by the roving dogs.  Some kind of reverse psychology going on here...  I'm thinking of painting the sign "Whatever you do, don't place your gold and diamonds here" on a wall and then waiting around the corner.

And if this were Nebraska or the Murmansk Oblast, nobody'd be complaining.  But there's far too much beauty here between all the mountains and the beaches and the plains and the rainforest to let it be marred by styrofoam and plastic.  I can only hope that, like the fires on the Cuyahoga River, Barranquilla's dump canal will spur the people's inner environmentalists into action.