Colombia Carnival Barranquilla
Oh holy crap, you guys. Phase Two of the Colombian adventure started out rough, complete with a taxi ride I would have been SURE was a kidnapping if the taxi hadn’t been officially summoned with a phone call, and another taxi ride that I sincerely wasn’t sure we were going to survive at all, kidnapped or not.
OK – I joke about the kidnapping, but seriously, Colombia is much safer than it used to be and it’s not really a thing here anymore for some time. Maybe the bad guys realized it’s easier to sell drugs than try to squeeze a few bucks out of a moderately poor North American’s family. Or maybe the government got so serious about tourism that it treated kidnappers like murderers and took all the fun out of it. But anyway, we aren’t going to get kidnapped.
But I thought we WERE going to get killed in two taxi rides today – one in Cartagena getting us to the ridiculously distant bus station and the other in Barranquilla getting us from the also ridiculously located bus terminal to the hotel. When the first driver had to swerve out of oncoming traffic because he was telling us a story – in Spanish we didn’t understand at all – about a lake we passed, Mom and I looked at each other with a heap of fear in our eyes. It didn’t help that he kept saying, “Cartagena” over and over in different voices with different intonations kind of like he was crazy. But the second guy – the one in Barranquilla – jumped a median and nearly killed a motorcyclist, a little kid on a bike, and us during our terrifying trip to the hotel. After he jumped the median, which bottomed out his car hard, I just kept waiting to smell the gas that was eventually going to cause us to flee the car with our clothes burned off.
The good news is that we reached the hotel with our clothes and lives intact, and we are immediately in love with this place. Built with a heavy Arabic influence, it looks just like the tile and architecture I saw in Granada, Spain, a Moorish stronghold for centuries. The rooms are extremely simple, but the common areas are incredible.
Barranquilla is different in 500 ways from Cartagena, but the top three are:
1) There doesn’t seem to be a “tourist zone” here. It is a big, gritty city that extends a big F-you to you if you don’t like it. Blaring music, horrible sidewalks, and menus in Spanish only – it’s definitely not putting on a touristy face for us North Americans. But this unabashed authenticity has a charm to it that we like. Mostly.
2) After six hours here, I would like to report that absolutely no one in Barranquilla speaks English. Also, to keep things fun, I can’t understand most of their Spanish. I used to think I spoke reasonably good Spanish, but I see now that that’s all bullshit.
3) Carnival here seems to be primarily touristed by people from Latin America, and North Americans are fairly hard to find. The good news is that it means you have a story to tell that most of the U.S. hasn’t heard, and the bad news is that those handful of people from the US or Canada that you stumble across are pretty much the only people who are going to speak English to you, so if you want something, you need a translator.
Today was a day of stepping back from the madness while also being entirely immersed in it. The taxis, the bus ride, the utter and complete language barrier – it all just builds character- at least that’s what I told my mom. Hahaha.
Really, though, we continue to be captivated by a country that is now showing us its gritty side, complete with hair cuts at stalls on the street, menus with zero English on them, and more stray animals than you care to think about during a happy vacation experience.
But this is Colombia – the real deal – with all its beautiful features and flaws and curiosities. And though it took us more than a half an hour to figure out how to get out of the bus station, and I’m ordering food with little real idea what’s coming, and nearly every Spanish word spoken to me is treated to a dumb stare because the speed and dialect of the language here is so different, I’m completely intrigued with Colombia. I think my mom is too, but the truth is that, more than anything, she’s just been a trooper, especially since we left the cushy tourist experience behind today and off-roaded it to this new part of the trip. That takes guts. And trust. The pressure on me to find us fun and not get us killed is crushing. Haha.
Tomorrow the parades start. We have some sweet, primo tickets for a grandstand for the next three days thanks to a fortuitous conversation with a hotel staff person. I’ve learned while traveling that those conversations are everything – or at least are the difference between a clueless trip skimming the surface and a trip that goes deep into the heartbeat of a place. I’ll take the heartbeat every time.
But for now, this heartbeat needs to go to sleep. It’s a big day tomorrow- it will probably take me a year to get through the photos I will take of the spectacle that is Carnival in Barranquilla. The things I’ve posted so far are just from my cell phone – but there are some photos on my camera card that make my heart happy – I can’t wait to share them.
I hope you are all well and surviving the winter weather in North America. Down here near the equator, every day is more or less the same, which I can only imagine would get old over time. But it’s not old for us yet. Haha.
