Quite a while back when I first started visiting Colombia I became friends with a European guy who lives in a village in Valle de Cauca. He lived in a house in town but had a finca on the outskirts where a young mayordomo couple lived. Evidently the guy was beating up on the girl so she was staying at my friend’s house in town. She was little Indian girl with one lazy eye that was always looking down to one side. She was twenty two and had a nine year old (not by her marido). Anyway one time I was in Cali my friend said hey why don’t you come up to my village for a few days, we can take a trip over the mountains and hike in some forests to look for orchids and poison arrow frogs, his two specialties. He also thought I needed an Indian girl and said why we don’t bring Lucia along. I said well we can bring her if you want but I’m really just interested in the trip and the things we’ll see.
In the village we talked to a guy he knew with a Willys who agreed to drive us over the Western Cordillera and wait for us while we went hiking. The roads were all unpaved and slow so it took us a day to get to Naranjal, the last town in Valle de Cauca before reaching the department of Chocó. Throughout the whole trip I hadn’t said two words to the girl or she to me. She was very shy. Once there my friend said you take Lucia to the ferretería and buy her some botas pantaneras, the trails we’ll go to tomorrow will be very muddy. I’ll go arrange for our hotel.
That evening we sat around the park while a few Indians came up and asked for money. That was all they knew how to say in Spanish. Then we had dinner and went to a bar for a while. Finally it was time to go to the hotel which was just a couple of rooms above a meat store. They cost three thousand pesos. When we got upstairs I was surprised to find my friend had rented only two rooms. I didn’t know there weren’t any more. In the hallway he said to Lucía who are you going to sleep with, me or him? Ha! So the next day I woke up with a girlfriend. Life and relationships are simpler in the country.
The next day we climbed into the Willys including my friend’s dog, a big black Rottweiler and headed down a dead end road that followed a river gorge. The end of the road was pretty much at the Chocó border. From there on it was just jungle interrupted by a few Indian villages all the way to the Pacific. Along the way after leaving Naranjal we came upon three young guys with big gunny sacks. They asked for a lift so we let them on. Our driver however gave my friend a warning look and he turned to me and said don’t say anything. I don’t want them to hear your gringo accent. When we got to the end of the road the guys invited us to go with them on a trail that headed downhill into Chocó saying there was all kinds of interesting wild life to be seen. We declined and told them to go on ahead, that we wouldn’t be leaving right away as my friend was going to take some pictures for the people who lived in the last house of their children. When they were gone we took a trail that went uphill into the forest.
When we got back to the jeep the driver said those guys were not from around here and he thought they were FARC. They had gone into Naranjal for supplies, the gunny sacks, and were dressed as civilians and weren’t carrying weapons. As it happened the village was occupied at the time by paramilitaries, in fact a bunch of them had been dancing with girls in the bar we went to. If the guys we gave a lift to had been recognized as FARC in the town they’d have been shot straight away. To this day I don’t know if they were indeed FARC but if not they were certainly coca workers.
On the way back we stopped for a couple our driver knew. I think they were relatives. Anyway they were a mayordomo couple for a hacienda owned by a caleño at a four corners named Dos Quebradas that was more or less along our way. If we could give them a lift we’d be welcome to spend the night at the hacienda. That evening we had dinner and sat around with them and some farm workers. My friend said it doesn’t matter how much Spanish you learn you will probably never be able to understand what these people are talking about. I’ve learned a lot f Spanish since but it’s probably true.
The next day (and by the way there was absolutely no charge for dinner or stay) the owner came up from Cali. He had a large acreage of forest and was going to inspect some trees to be cut. He invited us to go along with him and his worker so we had another great hike through fairly pristine forest including an encounter with a family of Howler Monkeys.
All in all an interesting paseo and it was Herman, the owner of the hacienda who told me I’d like Bahía Solano on the Pacific coast. Indeed a couple of months later on a return trip to Colombia I took Lucía there for a fascinating week.
After that though Lucía went up to Yopal to live with a sister and as I understand it took up with a guerrilla. At first I found that lazy eye to be a blemish but later grew to like it since it gave her a coquettish look, gazing shyly off to one side.
