So after taking it easy (read a few drinks here and there and white water activities) for the first few weeks of our trip,
we decided to rage hard in Taganga. Taganga is formerly a little fishing town
outside of Santa Marta that has become in recent times a hub for backpackers
looking to ‘party’ in the various senses of the word.
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| Taganga: what it lacked it looks, it made up for in... I'm still not sure. |
There seems to be a higher than average concentration of
gap-year (the year in between high-school and college) backpackers and Israelis
fresh out of the military, two groups notorious for letting loose in the
developing world (with all due rights, they just spent the better part
of two decades being told what to do every weekday, or the last 2 years
kicking people out of their homes and dealing with the stresses of armed
conflict in the hot sun, respectively). Any party enhancers were readily
available; many of the Laundromats doubled as purveyors of Colombia’s
finest—washed, dried, folded, and jacked, truly one stop shopping. Furthermore,
if you didn’t plan ahead, there were always more pushers waiting in the
bathrooms of clubs with fanny packs of jewelry bags filled to various levels
with the proverbial white girl.
After each of our initial crew of 8 from the hostel drank
more per person than any 8 humans should all together, we trekked down to the
clubs by the beach— twas truly a caravan of international sploshedness. After
drinking and dancing at the club for a few hours, I realized I hadn’t seen Jack
in a while. I asked Dan, an awesome Belgian backpacker and jazz musician, where
Jack was. In heavily accented English he responded, at the top of his lungs: I
DON’T CARE ABOUT JACK, I CARE ABOUT MORE COCAINE!!!! Fair enough.
I found Jack hanging out with older ladies on the balcony of
the club; it was apparently the oldest of the older ladies’ birthday. Being in
a celebratory state of mind, I started chanting happy birthday. They laughed
and started pouring me shots, as they had been for Jack. For the next 20
minutes Jack and I were their slam-hammered entertainment; they fed us more
shots, we acted dumber… cause and effect.
After a while, we made our way back over to our gringo posse,
but before the ladies left, one came over and introduced herself as Lara, gave
me her number, and said her mom had a nice condo in a nearby town that we
should come visit. I ingrained this to mind, hoping to get a dose of Latin American
hospitality (one of the better hangover treatments I’m aware of), never
imagining things to pan out the way they would.
The rest of the night went well; Fatimah and I went back to
the hotel around 3 and slept until we were awakened by Jack coming in at 7:30.
He excitedly (albeit a murmuring drunken type of excited) told us that he had met a
boat driver and drank a bottle of rum with him and that he would get us a cheap
boat ride into Tayrona park; then he went on to mumble and ‘practice spanish’
for a little while longer before falling asleep sitting up with his mouth wide
open and staring at the thatched ceiling of our top-story cabana.
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| Perhaps the only surviving photo of the night (It's probably best that way). Why I have a full bag of stuff to go to the club, the world may never know. I do faintly remember bringing a knife for protection and having no issue bringing it into any clubs. hmmmm. |
Hungover and halfheartedly ready to take on the next day at
11 or so, we forced some juice into our systems and I called up Lara. I baited
her to invite us to stay the night, and she said we were all more than welcome
to stay at her mother’s ‘condo.’ We followed her instructions and took a few
different public buses to get out to her mother’s small town and then I
borrowed someone’s cell phone to let her know we had arrived.
She showed up, and I realized she was not in the late 20s
age bracket I had remembered from the dimly lit drunken atmosphere of the
previous night; I would say she was more in the ballpark of 40. She brought us
to the ‘condo’, which was her parent’s ‘house,’ and showed us our room, then
started trying to sell crafts her mother had made out of ‘eco-friendly’
materials (in all honesty, they were pretty bad crafts, but we were polite and
said ‘oh, nice’ and ‘that one is cool’ and so on and so forth). Then she
offered us lunch, and we said yes, still thinking she was trying to be a good
host. Then she gave us a key to our room, which had a number on it. At this
point I was realizing we were being tricked into paying to stay at an
unattractive house in an undesirable location. Shit.
We talked a little while longer and she dropped the n-bomb
while talking to Fatimah, and claimed Afro-Colombians were happy with mundane
lower-class jobs, among other racist and semi-racist sentiments. Then she told
us that our lunch would be 30,000 pesos apiece (17 bucks or so), which is about
6 to 8 times the typical cost of a meal at a decent restaurant. Then she said
she was heading back to Santa Marta and leaving us with her old parents inside,
who were busy weaving lopsided lanterns out of recycled bottles.
I should add at this point that Lara lived and studied in
New York for 5 years—she knew what she was doing, she knew the word ‘condo,’
she knew that invitations are usually not how you get someone to stay at a
seedy out of the way hotel (which this place quite well seemed to be), she knew
that she was drawing us in with the prospect of free food and lodging, then
rapidly shifting to milking us for every dime she could, and she definitely
knew the gravity of the n-bomb to an African American.
At this point, hungover and pissed at the duping we were in
the midst of receiving, I told her it was out of our budget and that we would
go somewhere else for food. She suggested the mall, and I said ok and which bus
to take. She insisted on taking us.
I was assuming this mall, based on the area, would be more a
market than a mall, per say, but this mall was, we would later find out, the
nicest one in Colombia (Outside Santa Marta… what are the odds?!). It had
designer stores, 30 foot ceilings, and indoor fountains. She took us to the
food court, her toddler alongside of her. We let her get ahead a bit and we all
established amongst ourselves how little we wanted to be in this situation we
were in, and that ditching Lara was our best option, before she tried to
squeeze us out of any more money. I didn’t want to be a total dick so I slipped
off into a toy store to get a gift for her kid—just a small toy or something.
Come to find out, the cheapest thing in the store, a single Hotwheels©
ambulance, was priced at 14,000 pesos (nearly 8 bucks, apparently these fancy
stores actually pay the import tariffs… go figure). So that idea was out the
window. When I got over to the food court, Lara was attempting to get Jack to
buy a pizza for the group, and I quickly interrupted. I told her we had to go and
that I would call her so we could see more of the area, with no intention of
actually doing so.
Instead of staying around to hear her try and keep us there,
we just walked away— in just a few moments we were out of the mall, on a public
bus, and feeling the tension of the last 4 or 5 hours magically melt away.
Befittingly, Lara served us up a hefty dose of LARA (Latin American Run Around,
feel free to use it, but remember where it came from) that ended up being the
most costly in terms of time and stress that we got on our whole trip (and
there are a lot of run-arounds to be had as a tourist in Latin America). We got
back to Taganga in time for a delicious meal of fresh fish at about a sixth of
the price of Lara’s chicken dinner, a little wiser and a little more skeptical
of invitations to condos in Colombia.
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