Nights alone, nights in company

Cartegena de Indias. Wooden balconies, coloured stone walls with green flowering creepers, horses pulling carts with massive wheels. A carved cross above a window in the Palace of the Inquisition, the window from which heretics were denounced. The crashing surf just beyond the thick city walls. The smell of arepas with cheese, of fried chicken, of sweat and salt. Slow moving tourists, looking up, looking everywhere. The hollers of frizzy haired teens in school uniform. Limestone churches with huge wooden doors and tall ceilings and pews dotted with quiet people, sitting, crossing themselves. Carts of avocados and limes and eggplant. Heat.

In Plaza de Bolívar troops of dancers perform for thickets of tourists, twitching and shaking and jumping and wiggling to the rapid thump of large drums, their hips quaking and feet stomping, tall, beautiful, African Colombians, barefoot and dressed in bright primary colours, black muscles, big grins. They collect money in straw hats, and the spectators disperse around the square, past perfect fountains and the old men selling collared shirts and flavoured ice and cups of watermelon juice from square tubs on wooden wagons. It is late in the day, it is almost magic hour, but the humidity is still strong, and the outdoor cafes are filling up with groups of tourists from across Colombia, the Americas, the world.

Then it is night. In the Plaza de las Coches skinny whores wait in the yellow lights beneath the arches of the old city wall. "Hola, mi amor!" they whisper, holding slender white cigarettes between brown fingers and winding their waists subtlely to the reggaeton spilling from a tinny radio. There is not much work tonight - President Uribe is in town this monday and there has been a city wide ban on alcohol declared for the whole weekend, - so without nightclubs to comb through the girls are left to roam in the quiet squares. I stop and talk a while to a girl named Erica; a gentle mulatta with big eyes and a white skirt that flicks up in the breeze. She tells me about her life - she has been working this way for two months, she has a one year old daughter called Rosario whose father is gone, and they live with her parents in a distant bario. She is studying cosmetics by day and working by night. She is nineteen years old.

We sit astride wooden benches and watch the soldiers with their heavy black guns pacing the streets. We drink freshly squeezed lemonade through thin straws as blue clouds pass across the sad, bent moon. She says she wants to be alone with me in a hotel, that its a quiet night and so it will cost me just 30,000 pesos, which is just under $US13. I decline, but give her 40,000 pesos instead to walk with me a while through the old city. Her real name is not Erica, it is Marja. We walk, and we dodge the approaches of smug dealers offering 'crystal', and watch as the well dressed trickle in and out of a private wedding party as warm light and the rhythm of vallenato blasts over the wall and through the trees and into the shuttered streets. We converse in a combination of Spanish and charades and the night presses on and turns into morning and so we bid farewell beneath the illuminated face of the plaza clock. I give her another 5,000 for the moto-taxi home, to her parents, her daughter, her real life.

I make other friends too, while in Cartegena. While loitering under the huge street lantern in Plaza Santa Domingo I meet Camillo, my first bonafide Colombian hipster, who works in television and is due to act as third producer on the up-and-coming British film production of Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, which I have just finished reading, and which is due to start filming soon around both Mompox and Cartegena. While on a boat cruise out to some nearby islands I meet Jenniffer, a hard-rock loving teenager with huge biker sunglasses, and her working-class Bogota family who have saved hard for a four day trip to the coast, by a bus trip of 24 hours each way, to see the ocean for the first time. She approaches me on board the boat and gives me a gift, a small white and brown shell she has found while beachcombing, after she sees me grinning sheepishly at her after thinking that she sees me taking sneak pictures of her, along with many other awkward looking tourists, from across the deck of the boat. It is a warm gesture, and a brave one, and the next day when I bump into her family under the statue of Bolívar's horse they invite me to walk with them, and eat with them, and visit the grey sand beach with them, where they spend hours lolling in the shallows in unfashionable clothing while Jenniffer sings, in makeshift English, all her favourite songs to me ('Stairway to Heaven', 'Enter Sandman', and so on) on the jagged rocks where crabs scuttle and waves smash.

On the bus to Santa Marta I meet a woman from Cali, her face thick with make-up, who interupts my reading to quiz me in heavily accented Castilian. She is in private security, she works around Cali with the obscenely rich and/or famous as a private bodyguard, in a company called SNIPER. At the moment she is in the employment of the owner of a large hacienda, with cows and coffee and sugar cane but, she assures me, without cocaine. She is one of ten (10) men and women employed to protect this one guy and his family from the threat of murder, kidnapping and theft. She says she loves her job, which only occasionally actually involves violence. She touches my leg a lot and giggles and asks if I have a girlfriend. Soon after I say that I do she cuts the conversation short and drifts into sleep and I go back to Garcia Marquez's autobiography. Past Barranquilla we skirt the coast line on a thin road cutting across the Ciénaga Grande, an expansive area of swamp land which laps upto the Caribbean Sea, and then there, in front of us, across the plains of cartoon cacti and brown marsh sits the purple mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, rising sudden and triumphant out of the coast, steep and snowcapped.

Here I am, now, at the foot of this moutain range, my feet in the ocean and my skin burned, drinking juices made from fruits with names that sound like distant planets: Lulo, Cipote, Maracuyá, Guanabana. It is a small town, this Taganga, packed with backpackers from all over, but overwhelmingly from Israel, scores of them, hippified and with grins of mischief, their presence being so overwhelming that it leads juice stand proprietors and hotel owners to have a great number of their signs in Hebrew and Spanish, with English third if there at all. Small boats wedge in the dirty sand, five metre cacti pierce the sky along the hillsides, rainbow coloured fish live on in the smashed up former reef. It is from here that I depart: tomorrow to Bogotá, and then half a day later back home to Australia. I'm out of time. Oh Colombia, there's so much more, but I'm out of time.