Here’s a look at a traditional dance from southern Colombia:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNC3wKmz0C8

Most city folk would laugh that this is hopelessly out of date, but some aerobics classes use the music and steps to burn fat, and the dance is still practiced in the countryside (especially near the town of Huila, after which it is named).

Bizarre story of a Perth girl invited to spend Christmas in Colombia and winds up getting kidnapped.

Could be true. The paramilitary protection racket in Santa Marta makes productive employment fairly pointless, leaving thuggery the most profitable way to get ahead.

There is a particularly annoying form of flea present in the mountains of Colombia, and, I presume, elsewhere in the Andes. It jumps onto you from the surrounding brush and burrows just under the outer layer of your skin. None of my guidebooks make any mention of it.

I take my exercise walking to the Three Crosses here in Cali, and find myself the frequent host to this annoying parasite.

You’ll first notice such a flea by a small, red sore that won’t go away. The sore will look like a pimple you’ve scratched, red and small and exposed. After a couple of weeks to a month you’re going to be wondering what it is. Probably one of these mountain fleas.

Tea tree oil is effective. If you spread a dab of tea tree oil on the spot it will kill the flea and the bite will heal in a day or two.

More effective seems to be drowning your fleas. Go swimming for ten minutes. Be sure to submerse your entire body, including your head in the water for as long as you can. This will kill the fleas.

I used this technique to kill off my fleas last week, only to discover one living in my ear — there was just enough air trapped in my ear canal to keep it alive. So I stood in the shower holding my ear open for several minutes and that seemed to do the trick.

Half an hour ago at around 21:10 local time a tremor shook, or rather gently wiggled, most of Cali for twenty seconds or so. Can’t find any news reports about it yet, but I expect it’s a continued regional aftershock of the much larger earthquake last month in Peru.

Today’s word for the day is “zancudo.”

Zancudo is the Spanish word for the stripey tiger mosquito, the one that carries dengue. The news today here in Cali is that the dengue previously confined to the fringes of the metropolitian area is now making serious inroads into the city itself. The health department has trucks spraying in the streets against zancudos and is conducting house-to-house inspections.

Will it make any difference? Some, probably. It’s another reminder, though, that Cali sits lower in the mountains than Medellín and Bogotá, which are spared at least this particular plague.

Here’s a travel trip for adventurers in Panama and Colombia. According to a British traveller I met on the street here in Cali the other day, firehouses in these two countries will happily give you a free bed and a hot meal if you’re an overland walker or biker.

Backpackers up and down the Gringo Trail in South America have invariably heard of, if not read, Rusty Young’s Marching Powder. It’s the story of his friendship with a British inmate in Bolivia’s San Pedro Prison, where inmates buy their cells, and some of the best cocaine in the country is produced.

I recently came across a yellow, crumbling paperback copy of Charles Nicholl’s The Fruit Palace. It makes Rusty’s Big Adventure seem tame by comparison. With the spirit of gonzo in his blood and copious amounts of cocaine up his nose, Mr. Nicholl goes to Colombia to write The Great Cocaine Story.

The time is the early 80s, and cocaine has wrapped its champagne tendrils around the brain stems of New York and London’s finest, and Nicholl’s publisher wants the scoop. The lengths he goes to and the risks he takes are astonishing — talking his way into a meat-packing plant in Bogota he suspects is a front for cocaine trafficking, bussing into the Chocó and then boating downriver to Buanaventura on the Pacific Ocean (a very dangerous thing to do, even now), and ultimately getting involved in smuggling a briefcase of 100% pure cocaine out of Santa Marta.

The Fruit Palace appears to be out print. No matter. It received many printings during the 80s and 90s and, though never quite a bestseller, there’s plenty of used copies floating around out there. It is essential reading for anyone interested in South America.

Today is Independence Day in Colombia. No big deal, really; no fireworks, no general jubilation, just a few military parades, and that’s about it.

Of course an Independence Day for a country that is essentially a regional puppet for the US government is never going to really fly. Independence? What independence? All the orders that matter come from the US embassy complex. Government Palace is just a proxy.

Here in Cali the celebrations will be marked by the replacement of the water mains. Yes, for 48 hours, starting last night, 80% of households in this city of several million will be without running water until Saturday night at midnight. At least it’s for a good cause — the mains have to be replaced to finish construction of the new electric trole bus system, which should go a long way toward preventing Lima-like pollution in the future.

Some things you can only see in Colombia. There I was, walking to the supermarket yesterday, when I came across a small, blocked off street with men and women practicing marching. They were four wide and six deep and a man in front carried a white flag held forward at a 45 degree angle.

Walking past I got a good side view of the four women in the bunch. Groowr. Stiff-backed, head high and chest out, oh so chest out, they were all short and skinny and fake titties out to here to keep them afloat when the Titanic goes down.

Only in Colombia.

Update: The Colombian Air Force made a big showing last Friday, demonstrating the very latest in military technology.

Where’s the Black Sheep Squadron when you really need them?

Thanks to Danny Hancock for the photo.

Lima of old was The City of Kings. Three hundred years of Viceroys ruled from here, the largest and wealthiest city in the Spanish Empire outside of Madrid.

These days you’d be hard pressed to find any remnant of those former days.

Cleaning the black crust of pollution off my sandal-clad feet each night I have to wonder where it all went wrong, or for that matter if it was ever right. Lima is a city of excesses and extremes, cleanliness and filth, poverty and wealth, but on the street they all have that haunted eye of fear, a sharpened elbow, a rude word, and a lying tongue.

How can we get ahead? How can we stab our neighbour in the back to get there? How can we shove our way to the front of the queue? It’s like living in the United States all over again.

Peruvians are beyond question the worst liars, cheats and thieves I have encountered in South America in a year and a half of travelling and living on this continent. They cheat gringos, of course, but they cheat each other too, also other South Americans (they can pick the accent), and, indeed, anyone who is not from their locale and can be fooled into believing something is worth more than it should be.

The Peruvians have clearly inherited the Roman traits that made “caveat emptor” the byword of that Latin empire.

My main focus for comparison is, of course, the delightfully drug-addled country of Colombia; although that appellation is entirely incorrect, as Peru produces almost as much cocaine as Colombia.

Colombians are in so many ways the contrary of Peruvians. Where Peruvians are cheats and liars, and seem to delight in being rude, like New Yorkers on steroids, Colombians are genuinely friendly, helpful people, who will go out of their way to do you a service, who seem to believe, whether true or no, that it’s more profitable to grow the size of the economic pie than to quarrel over a thin sliver of nothingness.

Two very different studies in capitalism.

Consider the food. Colombia boasts some of the most fertile growing land in South America. Within its borders there there can be found nearly every type of growing region on earth, from the deserts of the north to the jungles of the Amazon, and every mountainous growing region to 5000m and more.

Yet Colombian food is some of the most boring, bland, and generally forgettable food I have ever eaten in my life. In that land of hot pants and hotter women, it’s as though some bizarre puritanical strain courses through the Colombian taste buds. Imagine France and Frenchmen preferring to dine in the traditional English style: boiled potatoes, overcooked beef, and a stiff upper lip for dessert.

Where Colombian food is sterile, boring, and dependably bland, at least it is hygienically prepared. It won’t give you food poisoning. Peruvian food suffers from much greater swings in quality. At the low end is the cheap stuff that will give even the locals the shits. Hygiene is not a very high priority in Peru.

The heights of Peruvians cuisine, however, overshadow Colombia in a mountainous display of chili and ceviche and genuine empathy and understanding for food, what it can be, what it should be, and how to prepare it.

For a long time time I used to think it wasn’t really the fault of Peruvians they were such thieves. Peru, like Ecuador, is overrun by tourists, and, well, I’d probably rob tourists too if I lived here. Easy stupid marks, like shooting fish in a barrel. I mean honestly, some people who travel here walk around with a big flashing neon sign on their forehead that says “Hey! You! Stupid Gringo Tourist From New Jersey Here! You Know, Where Your Cousin Lives? Yeah, You! I Want To Be ROBBED! YES! PLEASE ROB ME! No, Forget The Football Game, I WANT TO BE ROBBED NOW!”

Gringos had corrupted Peruvians and turned them into thieves through the process of tourism. There were lots of tourists in Peru, and lots of thieves; there were hardly any tourists in Colombia, and hardly no thieves. Ergo, stupid tourists with bum bags and loud American accents taught Peruvians and Ecuadorians to be thieves.

Now I begin to wonder if there isn’t more at play. This fear here in Lima is a living, breathing being. It surrounds you and envelopes you in its tightening grip, and grasps cold at your heart. I don’t think I’ve felt like that, really been disturbed by that oppressive atmosphere since Chicago. Colombia may be in the midst of a de facto civil war but people are not generally afraid of each other, nor especially of the government. Here in Lima in the unending shadow of the garua, the permanent coastal fog, here in the shade, in the darkness, the devils are at play in men’s minds, and the fog and the darkness and the fear has entered their souls.

I’m a fan of macadamia nuts. Living in Australia, they were plentiful, if not especially cheap.

Colombia also produces a fair quantity of the Australian Nut. The unshelled variety is ridiculously cheap (COP$3,000 for half a kilo), but shelled macadamias are equally as expensive as anywhere else. So imagine my surprise when I came across macadamia oil in the supermarket yesterday, next to imported olive oil, and at half the price as in Oz.

Let me think. Locally grown and processed macadamia oil — right here in Cali — or the two year old dregs of whatever the Spanish and Italian olive groves decide to throw Latin America’s way. Hmm. I’m going with the macadamia oil from now on.

Also nifty is De Alba’s Aceite de Macadamia Con Ají, macadamia oil with a chile in it, turning the light yellow oil a deep pink. Spicey popcorn, anyone?

Check out Del Alba’s web site here.

A massive blackout plunged most of Colombia into darkness today, halting trading on the Bogota stock exchange and turning congested city traffic into gridlock.

The blackout is blamed on a fault at a hydroelectric power plant near the southern city of Pasto. It remains unclear whether the fault was accidental or caused by the FARC, who have a heavy guerrilla presence in the region.

The blackout affected all the major cities of Colombia from the Ecuadorian border to Cartagena on the Caribbean coast. The eastern border region of Colombia was not affected, as electricity there is imported from a hydro scheme in western Venezuela.

The power went out roughly around 10am local time. Although official reports claim power was restored by 12noon, power even now remains sporadic throughout the country, as power is restored city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood.

For more coverage, see the Associated Press or Reuters. For some especially bad reporting, see the BBC, who report the outage affected only southern Colombia.

It’s not fair. How come I never hear the bombs when they go off?

Yesterday the talk of the town was the bomb Sunday night that ripped the face off the main Cali police station, less than a kilometer from my house. The car bomb destroyed many surrounding businesses and killed a bunch of cops and an unlucky taxi driver who happened to be driving by.

Of course, the bombers were obviously FARC. The question is why they chose Easter Sunday late at night to blow up a bomb in Cali.

Either it’s because they wanted to make the point that they can still blow shit up when they want to, but didn’t want to kill any civilians in the process (you can’t have a revolution without a sympathetic civilian populace); or, it’s because the only time they felt they could get away with it without getting caught was on a quiet off-night like Easter Sunday night.

I’m just bummed I didn’t hear it go off. Everyone was saying the windows were rattling and the plaster was falling from the ceiling. I must have slept right through it.

Update: There’s Spanish language coverage of the event here, also a good photo of the destroyed building here.

After a long illness it’s as though the whole world appears again in ghastly grey newness, ready to be loathed afresh. So it has been recently after a seemingly-endless bout with that favorite tropical friend and companion, dengue.

How did it began. It was a Monday. How fitting. Even if it was a public holiday. The girlfriend wanted to go for a picnic down by the river. Bah, I said, I hate picnics, and off we went.

An hour’s drive later, we found ourselves among screaming kids, nowhere to sit, flies (and, unnoticed, mosquitoes) galore, and an adjacent paddock full of testicular-challenged colts with what can only be described as a bowl cut for their tails.

Great. We made short work of the sandwiches we’d brought, looked rather sheepishly at each other as yet another ear-splitting yelp of some small humanoid rodent caused us both to wince, and simultaneously began packing up to leave.

So much for that idea, we both said at practically the same time, and went for an ice cream at a nearby shopping center to soothe the annoyance.

The day ended on a real upbeat note, it was the same day my brother emailed to say he had been kidnapped, and finished very late after a telephone conversation with the Colombian anti-kidnapping police (see other post).

The kidnapping incident dragged on, and with it a not entirely unexpected general sense of malaise. It was to be expected; I was under a lot of pressure, it would go away soon.

Except it didn’t. (more…)

It was the Monday of a long weekend when I got the email. “this IS AN EMERGENCY,” it said. “Many lives are at risk… THIS IS NOT A JOKE.” It was a message from my younger brother. He wanted my phone number. I gave it to him.

The phone rang about half an hour later. My brother was in Colombia, in a small mountain town, and had gone to his Colombian girlfriend’s farm for a couple of days, an idyll interrupted when three men showed up claiming to be FARC and demanding fifty million pesos ($25,000) to let them leave town alive.

I had known my brother was travelling in South America and had intended to come to Colombia, but I didn’t know when he was going to arrive.

He was very insistent I tell no one, and that we find a way to convince my father to pay the ransom money. After we hung up my first call was to my girlfriend here in Cali. I told her I couldn’t talk over the phone — my brother was convinced all our phone calls were being tapped — so I asked her to get dressed and come over right away. It was already late.

What do I do, I asked her? Well, she said, there’s risks either way. Many times you pay the FARC a ransom and they kill the hostage anyway. Sometimes you pay the ransom and they sell the hostage to a different guerrilla group, who also demands a ransom. Simply giving them what they wanted was not necessarily the best solution to the problem.

What would you do if you were me, I asked her. I’d call GAULA, she said. GAULA, she explained, was the Colombia anti-kidnapping and extortion squad. There were more kidnappings in Colombia than anywhere else in the world, so GAULA, she argued, were some of the best people in the world to handle this sort of situation.

So we called GAULA. Unfortunately, we didn’t know where my brother was. He had called me from a land line, but I didn’t have caller ID, so it was impossible to know where he was calling from. I did have the IP address from his email but, as we were to discover later, that didn’t help much at all. Come into the office in Cali tomorrow between 7am and 7:30am, said the man on the phone.

I didn’t sleep too well that night. My brother and I are not exactly close — we’d seen each other in Buenos Aires last year for the first time in more than a dozen years — and I hadn’t had a single email from him since. Still, he was my younger brother, and I was responsible for him. My father didn’t know Colombia as I do nor does he speak Spanish, putting the onus squarely on me to get him out, alive.

The next morning my girlfriend and I rocked up to the police station and made it past several sentries to the GAULA office. The office itself, far from suggesting burly men with guns who rescue hostages, was replete with blue cubicles punctuated by the occasional meeting table. It could have been the head office of a grocery store in Boise.

Two men eventually greeted us and sat down. What was my brother’s financial situation, they wanted to know. What did he do for a living. Well, he was a poor backpacker who I thought had done some English teaching work in BA. They looked at each other significantly. Are you sure this isn’t a hoax? We deal with a lot of fake kidnappings, self-kidnappings, stuff like that. You say you don’t know your brother really well. Is it possible this is some sort of a joke?

I think about this. The thought had, in fact, crossed my mind. Was it simply a ruse to burn my dad for twenty-five grand? But then, the kid was definitely scared. No one can act that well. He was definitely afraid for his life.

No, I said. It is possible, yes, but I consider it highly unlikely. I gave them my USB key, which contained a downloaded copy of my brother’s email, with all the routing headers showing. This was passed off to a Colombian geek to process. Meanwhile, we stared at the opposite cubicle wall, and my girlfriend and I gossipped about the various boob jobs and outfits on the women in the office.

Finally the word comes back: the email was sent from an email cafe so remote that it was routed through a satellite link. Only one company offered that service in Colombia. They were a private company based in Bogota, and it would take eight days for them to process the government’s request.

My brother had been told he had only five days left to live. (more…)

So I’m walking down the street the other day on the way back from the supermarket, and I see this guy leaning on a short wall in the driveway in front of a small apartment building. He has his right leg perfectly straight, and the left leg is bent to support his weight against the wall.

Then I do a double take. Mid-thigh on his right leg is the unmistakeable hand grip of an M-16. He has the gun draped down his leg, so that the black of the gun blends into the dark blue of his jeans. He’s got his hand on the trigger, but the gun is rotated out and down against the outside of his thigh.

He notes me doing my double take, but never makes eye contact or turns his head. I’m a gringo in shorts with two big grocery bags: I am correctly assessed as Not A Threat. He watches me out of the corner of his eye as I walk past and turn the corner to my house, just a few blocks away.

It is generally not a good idea to linger for long when you encounter a professional bodyguard in Colombia. Bodyguards are there to protect someone from attack; you don’t want to be in the accidental crossfire. Locals will make a point of crossing the street and walking fast if they see a professional bodyguard.

Friday night in Cali, Colombia, and I’m having a quiet one with a few
beers and some cable TV. I live just a few blocks away from La Sexta,
the strip of dance clubs that’s ground zero for nightlife here in the
“World Capital of Salsa”.

It’s 11:30 at night, just as the clubs are starting to pack ‘em in,
when suddenly:

BOOM.

Louder than thunder, coming from just those few blocks away. The lights
go out. The TV flickers and dies. I’m left with half a beer in a totally
dark room and suddenly, growing in the distance, the sounds of sirens
approaching.

They’ve finally done it, I thought. The bloody FARC just blew up a
nightclub. There’s bodies strewn all over the street, bottles of
aguardiente and rum suddenly forgotten in the stampede to get out in the
open before another one blows.

I suck on my beer. Now’s my chance, I thought. Maybe this is the story
that will finally get me that foreign correspondent gig, something in
the pages of the Guardian or CNN or a byline with AP or Reuters. It
might even get air time — I could see myself now with that little
microphone attached to my shirt collar, trying to sound grave and
sufficiently baritone for an international news audience. All I had to
do was get up, put on some shoes (there would no doubt be broken glass,
and I was wearing flip flops), walk about 500 meters with a camera and
notebook and start collecting anguish-infused quotes from people with
limbs blown off.

I sat on the sofa and slowly, meditatively drained my beer. I listened
in the darkness. The sirens were getting louder. What if another bomb
were to go off? Do I really want shrapnel implanting itself in my fine,
northern european features? How badly do I really want to see blown up
bodies, anyway?

I put the empty beer bottle on the floor next to the couch, got up off
my duff, and trundled off to bed.

The next morning the power was still off. Over breakfast one of my
roommates exclaimed, “Bloody incompetent morons. Did that f—ing
transformer blow again?”

It’s hot here in Cali. Really, really bloody hot. And finally the unthinkable, the undoable, the unmentionable crossed my mind — to trim my armpit hair.

I know, I know. How unmanly could it be to not have that straggling serpent-like mass of curly black madness reaching out at passers-by, trying to pick their pockets, cop a feel, or attract nesting birds?

The heat, the heat… finally I could stand it no more. Standing in front of the bathroom mirror with a pair of scissors, I snipped, snipped, snipped my way to my now drastically-reduced, almost hair-free ‘pits.

Let’s be clear now. I didn’t shave my armpits. That’s a line I’ll not soon cross. I merely trimmed them, a whole world of difference.

It feels weird. Sticky. Like the hair was some sort of lubricant when I walked, now the arm skin sticks to the torso skin, like the inside of your knees if somehow your legs were attached with your thighs inside your chest and your calves jutting out where your arms are.

I was worried that the lack of that instant black flash of hirsute masculine goodness would be immediately obvious to the casual observer when, for instance, I might sit back with my hands on the back of my head when talking to someone. But no, much to my surprise there is still a distinct patch of black fuzz, like a month of five o’clock shadow.

Arise men, at least ye dwellers in unseasonably warmish climes, and throw off these unspoken fetters. Trim I say, and you too shall know the joy of a cooling breeze where once you could only make fart noises with your hand.

Through scissors lie comfort and destiny — for when they write the books of hairy history they shall remember our names and this day — for we did trim our ‘pits!

Behold, the Lulo:

How is it that this exquisite fruit is not more popular outside of Colombia? Wikipedia claims the fruit is indigenous to Ecuador as well, but I don’t recall seeing it during my time there. (Although I didn’t visit the Ecuadorean coast, perhaps it is more popular there than in the mountains.)

Lulo is most commonly served in juice, and when blended with ice and milk is delicious. Colombians wince when they see me take a ripe lulo, cut it in half, and eat it with a spoon. They don’t know what they’re missing. Lulos are also excellent scooped onto granola or muesli in the morning, and their sweet-tart tang would add a unique flavour to desserts.

If ever you come to Colombia and go shopping in the supermarket, don’t be surprised to see people picking up lulos with the inside of a plastic produce bag. Lulo skin is covered in fuzz, only it’s prickly fuzz that hurts and sticks in the skin. I don’t mind it and I use my fingers, but if it bothers you, you can get rid of the spikes by running your fingers through your hair — the oil in your hair will lift the prickles from your fingertips.