Thursday 28 August 2008

el Parque Tayrona

After effectively traveling alone for the previous two or three months I had now stumbled onto he well trodden Gringo Trail where I have resided ever since. Traveling alone had been great but you do work for it so it has been nice to jump in with others and just be lazy about it. By traveling alone, you have the liberty to make your plans up as you go along. I have seriously indulged in this and its great to have that freedom. You are exposed to so many more people. Yeah when you are traveling in a group you get to meet people, but these people rarely become actual proper friends. Also traveling alone allows you get to pick and choose who you hang around with. Any morning you can just wake up and decide to head off again on your own. Fuckin mercenary or wha !?

The Santa Marta region is in Colombia´s North East and is host to many wonderful attractions. I spent the bones of three weeks in the area. After spending a few nights in Santa Marta itself I headed to Taganga - 10km up the road. Taganga is the hub for a lot of the activities to be done in the surrounding areas. Anyone who thinks Colombia is off the beaten track should take a trip to Taganga, its a backpackers mecca like somewhere in Thailand and finally I realised where all the Israeli´s had been hiding, its like little fucking Jerusalem there.


After a night out in El Garaje with my roommate Devon from Seattle, I took a belated boat ride with a boatload of Shron´s to Parque Tayrona. This is a place I´d first read about in a Guardian article about the 10 best beaches in the world, which it voted as its number two. Having been mightily impressed by my visit to its number one choice (the phenomenal Islas Cies off the coast of Vigo in Northern Spain).

Tayrona certainly didn´t disappoint. In fact it was savage. I camped out with an Irish couple Daithi and Sandra with the rest of the backpackers on a campsite at the edge of the jungle fronting onto the Carribean. Magic. While it was the Carribean, it wasn´t the aqua-marine water that you usually associate with it but it was pretty fantabulous nonetheless. Its pretty idyllic to be able to groggily make the ten metres trek at 7 in the morning for a dip in the empty, tranquil Carribean. Luckily, I had my own tent and camping gear but one night I decided to just sleep under the stars in a hammock. I spent 5 days in Tayrona doing, well, fuck all really. It was pretty memorable.

A few of the local lads would come back from a day of fishing in the afternoon and would profer up there catch for a decent price and well there´s not much like a dinner of fresh fish on the beach. Because it is a National Park there´s fuck all there, just a few straw roofed restaurants. So we were essentially hanging around where the jungle meets the Carribean.

Loco-mbia

And now I had finally reached my goal of returning to South America to visit the glorious Colombia. When the five of us headed off wide-eyed and bushy tailed for South America back in 2004 we were unanimous in agreeing that the only country we wouldn´t consider visiting was Colombia. It was just too fucking dangerous.

Ever since then, anyone I´ve met who had hit Colombia just raved about the place. And not in a "its so dangerous and wacky its cool" way. They all maintained that it was just an allround quality joint. And I´m often skeptical bout people´s opinions on such places but again these were just your average travelling punters.

So Colombia was gonna be one of the focal points of my voyage. Even from the outside its charms are pretty obvious: mountains, the jungle, cosmopolitan cities like Medellin and Bogota, pretty little colonial towns, the Amazon, the Carribean and the Pacific.

Prior to arriving here I was aware that the country had done much to improve its plight. In his first term Uribe had become a very popular president among his people. He had pushed the FARC deep into the jungle and had done huge amounts to tackle the security problems experienced by ordinary Colombians. Apparently by 2004, two years after coming into office, homicides, kidnappings and terrorist attacks had decreased by as much as 50%.

This, allied to the attacks led by previous governments on the drug cartels namely that of Pablo Escobar´s has placed Colombia and its people in a far healthier place today. I recently read that Medellin, once the home of the majority of the Colombia cartels and obviously a place where you tread lightly, is the safest city in Latin America. All of this has helped Colombia to be a more attractive place to live in, visit and do business.

Thursday 14 August 2008

The Raging Bull

After an absolute mothertrucker of a journey I reached Colombia. I had connected in Maracaibo to get a local bus to the border. About 40 minutes from the crossing I was the only one left on the bus so the driver decided it wasn´t worth his while so he turfed me out in the middle of some absolute hole that stank of shite and petrol.

I then started to pile into one of the trucks that act as taxis with a rake of locals when the bloke in charged stopped me and said "No Gringo´s". After getting about two hours sleep the night before on the bus I was not a happy backpacker. I lost the plot at this slight and unleashed on the guy, initially in Spanish, then I just started abusing him in English! Probably not my finest hour but the guy just got up my shnoz. Dickwad.

Then after another half an hour of people refusing to pick me up or quoting me exorbitant prices I got collected by this couple in a cab. Yer one was a right wart of a woman and demanded cash up front. Another argument ensued, I told her she´d get her money when I arrived where I was supposed to arrive. After a few minutes more when I got my head together I realised that it wasn´t actually a taxi but just two punters with a car. Started to get a bix anxious about this. Most people emit positive vibes but these two fuckers certainly didn´t.

When we got to the exit point from Venezuela, I had to get out to pay my Hugo Chavez Departure Tax. As I was pretty pissed off and paranoid at this stage I decided to lug all my bags from the car with me contrary to the advice of the two assholes driving me. When I came back from paying the tax the fucking car was gone !! Thank fuck I took my bags and thank fuck I didn´t pay them. But now I had to walk the 2km to the Colombian entry point with my enormous backpack in the sweltering heat after which I had to queue for another hour to get in. I was like a demon at this point !

As I mentioned previously, I´d only gotten about two hours snooze on the bus. This is not unusual for me with bus travel in the developing world. Often for shorter journey´s I take the ´chicken bus´option. The ones with all the street trading grannies and where people bring all their worldly possessions on. So there´s as much a chance of you sitting next to a bag of radios as, lets say, a goat. They´re always good for a bit of humour.

But for the over night journeys you gotta go with the luxury coaches really. But even still there´s always a surprise in store for you. Often they flake the air-conditioning (another american obsession down here) up to Artic levels. Anyway, as I was just about to finally fall asleep at about six in the morning, they decided to lash on a dvd. Not the usual Steven Seagal batch but a live concert of this atrocious but widly famous Venezuelan singer. He was this big fat 25 year old dude with a bushy moustache, a Hawaiin shirt and a truly awful awful taste in music. If that wasnt bad enough, the tv speakers were right above my head, the volume was appallingly loud and the old woman next to me started singing along to all the songs.

When I finally arrive in Santa Marta in Colombia, with the plan that I´d be ready for a good saturday night out, the only thing I wanted was a bed and by 9pm I was out of the count. Yip, travelling ain´t always so rosy !!

Monday 11 August 2008

Viva la Revolucion ?

If you´re not interested in politics - skip this part !


Venezuela is a very divided country. And there is a very visible gap between the two types of people it seems. Not so much in a rich/poor sense like other countries I´ve visited like Bolivia, Brazil or Mehico. But more pro or anti Chavez.

For the most part the people I spoke to were of the middle class and very anti-Chavez but its predominantly the poor and rural who adore him. And its pretty obvious as to the reasons for both sets. The middle and upper classes have lost a lot during his reign. In the developing world the rich, in many countries, live in a very privileged position, often having the run of the place and can use money to achieve most everything.

It seems that Chavez has really gone about getting up their noses and made the country economically more conservative. Nationalising much of the oil industry (although I still noticed a few foreign companies like Shell and BP) and clamping down on the abilities of Venezuelans to obtain foreign currency (which has led to a huge black market) and on private individuals ability to buy foreign goods for import.

His supporters say that the international press´s (mainly from the States) reporting is largely biased against him which is probably right considering I´ve only read negative reports about him. Essentially he has widespread support and his party holds the governorships of all but 2 of the regions/provinces. He seems to be pumping a lot of resources into education and social programmes and is currently undertaking a large rail network project which is pretty progressive for a Latin American country. I presumed that he´d be more interested in building statues of himself.

The main economic story about Venezuela is Oil. After traveling around the US and seeing how paranoid they are getting about fuel prices, I had to laugh my ass off when I learned about Venezuela´s situation, as being one of the top five oil producers in the world. The Yanks are crying blue murder for having to pay $4 a gallon when we in Europe have been paying the equivalent of of $10 a gallon (get a fuckin grip like !) . In Ireland petrol is around 1.40 Euro ( i think) a litre, in Venezuela they pay, wait for it, 0.03 Euro a litre !! 3 fckin cents. unreal.

They don´t report that in the US. Goddam Communists !!!

In all seriousness its probably not a good thing in Venezuela cos they have a huge level of car ownership and Caracas has some of the worst traffic i´ve ever seen. Essentially though, it probably does more to add to Chavez´z reputation as a populist than anything. That plus the fact that he gave all the public workforce a 30% salary increase in the last two years has sent prices rocketing so much so that in my experience it is now the most expensive country in Latin America.

Whatever about the pros and cons of Chavez, most sane people were happy when his bid to amend the constitution to allow him to extend his term indefinitely was unsuccessful. He is definitely power hungry and the power he craves is very unhealthy for the nation. Even Mother Theresa herself would have turned for the worst with the amount of power! The strange thing is that he seems to have enough popular support to withstand the opposition for quite a while yet.

Generally I think he is positive for his country and it will be a better place because of him when he finishes in 2013. But more so I think he is positive for the continent. Latin America has suffered greatly over the past 50 years at the hands of the Yanks by being weakened through successive civil wars. Now the region is seeking to stand on its own two feet which can only be a good thing. The less positive side to Chavez is his quest to Cubanise the country. Cuba took that direction through necessity and during different times. Venezuela doesn´t need to do that and it seems that Hugo craves the longevity and power that Castro had.


I don´t think he has half the acumen that Fidel possesses. Castro never made his reign about him personally, it was always about the ´Revolucion´. You don´t see any statues or murals of him in Cuba - its all Guevara and Jose Marti. But in Venezuela its all about Chavez. The fucker is everywhere.

The other thing that I distrust about Chavez is his background. You show me a country ran by the military and I´ll show you a people that have suffered greatly as a result. Chavez is ex-military and it shows.

The other problem the rich have with him is his ethnicity. Generally speaking, the ruling powers in most Latin America countries are white Europeans. Chavez is a mix of white, indigenous and black. I can´t imagine the Venezuela rich being happy to be governed by someone racially "inferior".

The other thing that marks the anti-Chavez brigade from the rest are their lifestyles. Its very ironic that the country that is most anti-US in its orientation is one of the most US influenced countries in Latin America. In fact, apart from the colonial architecture and its Spanish language, there is little evidence of any European influence remaining in the country. The front page of the newspapers was covering not Euro 2008 but American baseball. The middle classes have a love for American style consumerism - be it really awful designer labeled clothing, lavish cars, a love for shopping malls and really expensive tacky bars and restaurants. Basically, if you have any cash in Venezuela, you do everything in your power to show it - bit like Ireland really !!

Two more little anecdotes about Chavez. The fucker decided that as part of his term in power that he would change the time. Yip, the time. So he moved the clocks back, not an hour, not two hours but ...... half an hour. If thats not egotistical I don´t know what is!

The other thing that struck me about Venezuela was that there were very few backpackers around (certainly compared to Colombia). But even of the backpackers I had met, there was one nation of people that were surprisingly missing. Nope not Americans but Israeli´s. Anyone who has travelled in Latin America or Asia will have met them in their truckloads. I couldn´t figure out why they weren´t there. Yeah its really expensive which would turn a lot of them away but still. So I put this to one of the locals , he started laughing ( a Chavista no doubt!). Apparently as Chavez is not exactly a fan of Israel, he makes them all apply for a visa to enter the country. So they don´t !