Incidents of Travel in Latin America Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by Arktos Media Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Softcover ISBN 978-1-910524-55-8

  BIC-classification

  Travel writing (WTL)

  Latin America (1KL)

  Editor

  Jonathan Paquette

  Layout and Cover Design

  Tor Westman

  ARKTOS MEDIA LTD.

  www.arktos.com

  Contents

  At the Gate

  Colombia

  Parque de Tayrona

  Medellín

  Santa Fé de Antioquia

  Never forget your hat!

  Boca Chica

  Galéras

  You are in a Third World country if:

  Zauberberg

  Capurganá

  In Cielo

  A trip to Panamá

  La Coquéra

  Aguacate

  Triganá

  San Juan del Sur and a return to the pleasure of crustaceans

  Turbo

  Necoclí

  Bahía Soláno

  Caracól, Tikál, Calakmúl

  A season in Puerto Rico

  A sailing trip in the Gulf of Honduras

  Antígua

  Lake Atitlán

  The Bus

  Hotel del Pacifico

  Boca del Cielo

  Taking to the heights

  Yet another ascension

  The ultimate ascension

  Epilogue

  Other Books Published by Arktos

  Planetai (πλανῆται) means Wanderer.

  This book is dedicated to all Lonely Planets.

  The author at the top of Cerro Tusa (Venecia, Antioquia, Colombia) after a somewhat strenuous ascension! (Photo: Asíle)

  At the Gate

  My plane to Barranquilla, Colombia, wasn’t delayed but it had proved impossible to prolong the car rental without paying through the nose. Since that would have been an ugly sight, I decided to return my stately vehicle hours before take-off. This left me with time to kill. I figured Las Olas Boulevard in downtown Fort Lauderdale would be the place, and entered the local bus servicing the Hollywood International Airport. Truly, it would have been easier to say hasta la vista to a Corolla. But this was a state-of-the-art American beauty, with all that goes with it. The reason I ever enjoyed the privilege to hang out with her for so long was the following.

  As I arrived in Miami one month earlier, the compact cars were in such demand that the rental dealership didn’t have enough of them available. To make up for the vehicle shortage they’d thrown in some Mercury Grand Marquises — a more elegant edition of the Ford Victoria preferred by police forces and cab drivers nationwide — in the lot, offering them at economy price. Generally unable, even under normal circumstances, to resist temptation, I jumped at it. My European heart made an extra beat at the mere thought of turning the key to an eight-cylinder monster with a 4.6 litre engine, knowing I was deliberately and willingly indulging in sin. Since Miami (or to be precise, Miami Beach herself) is pretty much the emblem of it, there simply couldn’t be a better way to arrive there.1

  South Beach is a case in point. In the 1970s and 80s its population was up to 80 % Jewish and South Beach itself is practically still a ghetto. Before before World War II Jews, though allowed to buy property anywhere, could only settle south of 5th Street and this restriction on their activities was only suspended as late as in 1949. After that, South Beach became known as ‘the waiting room of death’ as increasingly older people found it desirable to retire there. At this time there was nothing really fancy or upscale about it. If designer perfumes nowadays permeate its atmosphere, back then the streets smelled of mildew and gefilte fisch and on a visit you would overhear a wild array of eastern European languages blending with Brooklyn twang and Yiddish — it’s no coincidence that Michael Corleone in order to visit with businessman Hyman Roth in the second Godfather film has to go to Miami.

  The Jewish scene was to remain relatively unchanged until the late 1970s, when Fidel Castro opened all of his prisons and mental asylums and poured their contents into clandestine boats destined for Miami, thereby creating a tsunami of crime inundating its beaches. South Beach quickly became one of the most dangerous places in all of North America and the Jews began to move northward. Then came the Art Deco renaissance, initiated by prominent Jews of the modern art scene determined to save the beach and restore it to pre-war glory. Some TV shows — pioneer among them had been the iconic Jackie Gleason Show, since the mid-1960s produced in Miami — and criminal series (Miami Vice, followed by the contemporary CSI Miami) helped to put it back on the map, and in the 1990s it began to be hyped up to its present level of mediatised hysteria. Although today in many ways synonymous with Sodom, South Beach is simultaneously home to a large Orthodox Jewish community that has gradually come to supplant the original population of more liberally oriented Jews, and paradoxically seems to thrive in the shadow of its frivolous glitz. Or perhaps not so paradoxically, after all.

  Besides, it isn’t just Rabbi Rabinowich who knows how to profit from it, even if he occasionally gets caught with his pants down. We also have the heritage of pushers and dealers in the grand Cuban tradition of Scarface. We have Cuban Jews and Israelis mixing freely with Colombian, Venezuelan and Russian goy mafiosi distinguished by gold chains so heavy that they can hardly keep their necks straight. Their women, (as artificially big-chested as they are self-absorbed — that is, when they’re not absorbed by their cell phones) prefer diamond rings and necklaces since their values never decrease. Add to these a set of modern day WASP retirees populating the entire Florida coastline, but in particular its south, as well as the steady coming and going of foreign tourists and well-to-do Europeans taking refuge there during the winter season.

  If Asians don’t make up any significant portion of Miami’s population by and large, Latin families do, clustering around Calle Ocho (SW 8th Street), Little Havana and West Little Havana, with their rather picturesque mixture of small malls, cash only gas stations, restaurants, shops and Latin bakeries, seedy one-night stand motels with names like Venus, Stardust and Jamaica, strip joints, dry cleaners, PC repair shops, dollar stores and lawyers advertising for clients needing help to file for bankruptcy, divorce or to get off the hook for speeding or ‘Drinking Under the Influence of Driving’.

  Like an oasis appears to the south of mid Calle Ocho the wealthy and serene Coral Gables (by no means off limits for Latinos who have made it) with its lavish golf courses, long tree adorned alleys, manicured gardens, elegant mansions in a variety of colonial styles, streets with Spanish and Italian names marked in black print on whitewashed corner stones, a chic downtown and a jeunesse dorée pitching camp in the gardens of the Biltmore Hotel. It also, somewhat surprisingly, includes within its perimetre a token trailer park for people of considerably lesser means, symbolically located next to a funeral parlour and a cemetery.

  The contrast is immediate and only announced by the drive-through archway and extended gable made from coral that have given the name to this town. Driving south on 49th street — which is another thoroughly Latino dominated residential backwater tucked in between the major traffic artery Route 836 (separating it from the airport
), and 8th Street — you find yourself transported, once you have crossed over 8th Street into the Gables, by the fairy’s magic wand. Here the rather inconspicuous SW 49th Avenue completely changes appearance, like Cinderella going to the ball, congenially assuming a new name resounding of saga and history: Granada Boulevard. Whereas the single plane villas to the north of 8th Street would no doubt announce a wealthy neighbourhood in Managua and Tegucigalpa, they are just plain ordinary in Miami. From the absence of barbed wire to protect the residents from unwanted intrusion you can tell you’re actually not in Managua or Tegucigalpa, but doors and windows are indeed covered by iron bars, just as in those places.

  Once you’ve entered Granada Boulevard on the other hand, bars in front of the windows would be an unpardonable faux pas, giving you away as a despicable nouveau riche from the Third World. Here we don’t rely on iron bars but on the Coral Gables Police, discreet cameras, alarm systems and Neighbourhood Watch. The streets are clean — not a dog turd as far as an eagle’s eye can see — and hardly frequented by pedestrians. Although there are perfectly maintained pavements in place everywhere, there are times of the day when the residences of Coral Gables are akin to a vision of serene, golden America painted by a late Edward Hopper. The effect of its flowery gardens and long canopies of trees arching the streets for miles give a surrealistic impression: on a clear day the colours are overly vivid and, seen through a pair of good sunglasses, almost psychedelic. Adding to the enchantment is a full scale lighthouse in Moorish style overlooking the green sea of the golf course with its huge Banyan trees. I have sometimes remained motionless in front of the lighthouse thinking I’m the only witness to the world on Day One without humans. It’s rather like the dream in which you wake up to a perfect world but there’s nobody besides yourself in it. So, like a King Midas everything you touch does turn into gold, but you also starve to death by the means that made you rich. A memento to ponder for sure.

  Add to Coral Gables the various Central and South-American nationalities populating communities such as Fontainebleau and the City of Doral. In the middle of it sits, as the heart of ultra-urban civilisation, Miami Airport set against the vibrating, silvery skyline of downtown. To the north of the airport is Latin Hialeah, and the predominantly Afro-American scene of Little Haiti, North Miami and Miami Gardens, which, in spite of its seducing name, features many a thorny, unkempt shrubbery. Some houses look more like abandoned tool sheds, flaunting rebar and naked concrete. Aluminium chairs litter the grass and loaded boat trailers clog up the driveways. There are entire blocks filled with military looking barracks (housing projects) with people aimlessly hanging in street corners, or drifting in and out of utility and second-hand stores — that is, when they’re not actually pushing a department store trolley ahead containing all of their belongings, including a cardboard mattress custom made from a FedEx delivery box.

  As a contrast there is the strange amalgamation of former hippie homes at the opposite end of town, tucked away in quaint Coconut Grove, with its vaguely bohemian younger generation and wealthy Coral Gablers ‘with a difference’, living practically next door to the Bahamian ghetto around the intersection of Grand Avenue and Douglas Road, where rape, abuse, robbery and murder allegedly are still on the weekly menu and police cars are frequently transfixed, flashing their strobe lights for hours.2

  The Miami University campus is further down, constituting Coral Gables’ southwestern corner along the US 1, also called South Dixie Highway.3 Continue down that main stretch and you reach South Miami with its interminable automobile showrooms and car sales parking lots. Off to either side, tranquil Pinecrest, Cutler and Palmetto Bays to the east, Kendall, Homestead to the west, and still more remote neighbourhoods which the imagination is keen to populate with alligators lurking in the swamps. Having passed these vast areas there remains only the frontier town of Florida City with its last call discount liquor stores still within the limits of Dade County, as well as the 18 mile long desolate causeway through crocodile infested mangroves bringing the traveller to the endless Florida Keys, where a different story begins.

  The very last of these is the liberal haven Key West where Papa Hemingway settled down in the 1930s in order to be as close to Cuba as possible without having to deal with the Cubans themselves. I have to admit that I belong to the non-negligible category of people that is more fascinated by the extravagant Papa Legend than by Papa’s books. I wish I could say that I truly enjoy the latter, but to me Hemingway’s prose, though so often praised precisely on this account, appears frugal and simplified to the point of sterility (the only one of his books that truly captivates me from the beginning to the end is The old Man and the Sea). I thus fail to fathom its hidden depths and underlying symbols, of which critics and connoisseurs have spoken so eloquently.

  It’s therefore all the more surprising, and indeed gratifying to be able to marvel at the titles of his books, since they are almost invariably (A Movable Feast is in my opinion a notable exception) charged with rich suggestion. I don’t know if he made them all up by himself, if it was his editor, his wives, or some other person with a particular genius who invented them. Whatever the case: they’re just perfect. Please do me the favour of listening to the inner reverberations of titles such as: The Sun also Rises; not ‘Farewell to Arms’, but precisely A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Absolutely not ‘The Snow of Kilimanjaro’, which would have been trite and commonplace, but again, precisely, The Snows of Kilimanjaro; The Old Man and the Sea; and my personal favourite: Across the River and into the Trees. It’s very possible that I shall one day have to change my appraisal of Hemingway’s works, based on yes, unprejudiced, but also limited and, above all, face value reading. I do wish it would happen. For now I stay with the titles that have always haunted my imagination.

  If Hemingway’s prose sometimes, per chance, seems flat, this is even more accurate about the Florida ground he walked. From Jacksonville in the north to Key West in the south, Florida is not only thoroughly developed but also flat like a pancake — the only hills you’d come across are either made from landfill garbage or they are highway overpasses. South of Jupiter, to the north of West Palm Beach, palm trees, precisely, gradually come to dominate over and against various ferns. This is not just because of the latitude but has to do with the Mexican Gulf Stream which runs closely along the coast to this point and then branches off into the Atlantic Ocean, in this way ensuring South Florida’s year round tropical climate. A predominant eastern trade wind, heated by the surrounding tropical waters, effectively shields off southeast Florida from the incursion of northern winter storms, making cold spells rare and almost relished as a temporary contrast.

  Original nature scenery on the other hand — exception made for the inhospitable Everglades — is scarce in the southern part of Florida. Seen from the air, the immensity of Miami-Dade and Broward County’s two-dimensional urban grid becomes apparent; it might even dawn on you that you don’t need to be stranded in Alaska to realise how infinitesimally small your personal, physical existence really is. A look at this cityscape at night from an airplane reveals a geometrically precise system of highways and other thoroughfares lit up by endless rows of white and red light dots. There are myriads of cars on the roads even late into the evening. They meet, part and blare their horns in intersections enclosing square residential blocks, like the symmetrical arrangement of molecules as revealed by the electron microscope in quest of the vanishing point of matter.

  What you don’t always think about when you (a single ant within the entire colony) drive past one residential block after the other, which in any given neighbourhood, and in the absence of topographical land marks, all have a tendency to look the same, is that the number of villas and their adjacent gardens is not just accumulating numerically but by the square: what seemed to you a row of 15 houses enclosed within the intersections of main roads in reality is a cluster of 150 residences. This exponential repetition ad i
nfinitum adds an almost hallucinatory dimension to the city, as splendid and monotonous as the ocean surrounding it, and gives a vertiginous idea of the staggering number of humans in this once unforgiving marshland which, wherever asphalt and concrete subside, has an artificial tendency to transform into a tropical garden.

  It really is an Eden of sorts. There are many Adams and many Eves. There might be a God-Father somewhere too, and an archangel announcing his will and ultimate condemnation of mankind. But the most conspicuous other character in this scenario remains the snake holding out his promise of the apple. Not only are there many explicit casinos and gambling spots. All of South Florida really is a gigantic money making machine. This is more paradoxical than it might seem at first glance. Some of the money is obviously made here, most notably by the commerce generated in the harbour area at the estuary of the Miami River. It’s the first East Coast port of call for cheap Chinese merchandise to Wal-Mart and also home to an impressive fleet of Caribbean cruise ships. Next to it there is the Miami downtown, featuring a wealth of bank and corporate skyscrapers. Consequently there is a constant need of various kinds of maintenance crews — sun, wind and salt take a relentless toll on any man-made structure. Aspiring to be North America’s only tropical Paradise, the place also is in constant need of gardening, gardening and more gardening. Finally there is the tourist trade of Miami Beach.

  But apart from these evident sources of income, Miami-Dade County possesses no real industry. Conclusion: the vast middle class apparently thriving here must either have made enough money to be financially secure, and/or be engaged in the social service sector. A whole society built on providing services — for what, for whom? The inevitable question rears its head: what do all these people live off? The answer is probably akin to what I imagine applies to Los Angeles on the other side of the continent: there is a giant influx of money and investment from other places gathering and circulating in the internal economy of South Florida. Money that doesn’t primarily come from the sales of local dairies, orange juice and avocados, but from all the peoples of the north who have saved throughout their lives to be able to buy a place in the sun, in the rays of which they now bask hoping to spend some more of their money. This said, in the wake of the 2007–2008 financial depression, an astonishing number of brand new condominium high rises still gape eerily empty all year round on the sandy eastern beaches, meaning someone must recently have lost tons of money by investing in them.