Cartagena: The Gringo Within

(This entry is taken from my regular blog http://frankgetsabout.wordpress.com/ where you’ll find numerous other hilarious stories of heartbreak and adventure)

They say that sometimes you have to hit rock bottom to bounce back… Or something like that.

Well, this weekend I finally let my guard down and went full gringo, no holds barred, and in the cold light of day only 48 hours later, the ramifications of my actions are becoming clear to me.

I’ll start at the beginning.

On Friday night we took a bus with 35 international students (mostly from Mexico) to Cartagena de Indias, Lonely Planet’s number 1 location in Colombia. I was trembling with excitement for the full 18 hours of the journey, eager to put a nice precise tick next to another “must see” place and thus come one step closer to the dream of “doing” Colombia.

We arrived on Saturday afternoon and ate fish with coconut rice and relaxed on the beach two minutes from our 25-floor hotel. That night we all bundled into achiva, a big old party bus which came equipped with a band and someone with a microphone sitting next to the driver getting each row to go crazy to see who could make the most noise and win a bottle of aguardiente. We eventually ended up bumpin’ and grindin’ in a local discotheque.

So far, just about ok. Big hotel and organised night out definitely mean minus offthebeatentracknomadpoints, but that’s ok once in a while.

However, my behaviour on the Sunday, on our trip to a beach an hour out of town, was a disgrace…

We arrived and it was raining, so I got a hot chocolate. It actually turned out to be a standard cafe con leche, but I was charged 4000 pesos, which is actually about 8 times what it should have cost. Gringo behaviour strike 1.

On the front cover of my diary there is a panini sticker of Juan Cuadrado, my favourite Colombian footballer and the man pictured to your left and right. Slightly wondering what to do in the rain, and having given up on trying to look ponderous and brainy in front of the Mexican girls by writing my diary, I decided to accept a mother and daughter duo’s offer of braiding my hair. It felt like the right time to see if I could get that little bit closer to my Colombian idol by mimicking his hairstyle. One of the hair braiders had a penis-whistle hanging round her neck. That was what made me trust them I think.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, it didn’t really work out. My hair wasn’t long enough to do actual braids so they just did some extreme gel action and twisted my hair into little tapeworms that hung crisp and hard from my stupid, grinning, head. I looked like a 14-year old Backstreet Boys fan from Ipswich. They even gave me a 6-inch colourful plait that hung down the back of my neck in the colours of the Colombian flag. No one really laughed; they just looked at me and then looked away, puzzled or smirking.

To Rich’s credit he had it done too, mainly to support me I think, but annoyingly his hair was long enough to actually braid so he looked like slightly less of apendejo. And he could go in the sea. I couldn’t because the gel would run, and for some reason I stuck to it and missed out on the warm, welcoming, Atlantic water, just to conserve my new ‘look’. I don’t think I’ve ever been so aware of my tourist status than when Rich and I walked down the beach with our cameras on our waists and our N-Sync hair. Colombians stared, dumbfounded, and when we grinned at them as if to say ‘let’s all laugh about this, we’re just fun-loving guys messing around on our hols’ they turned back to whoever they were with, looking as if they had just been visually insulted. We looked like two gap year schweffeswho’d drunk too many piña coladas, got bored of jet skiing and got over excited spending foreign currency. Gringo behaviour strike 2.

Then, to top it all off, I got a full-body massage, from a woman who’s inner thighs and ample bosom brushed my head and neck from time to time as she told me how nice my new haircut was, and worked into by back, buttocks and legs with just the right amount of firmness and sandy oil. By that point I was well and truly past the point of no return and handing over another 20,000 pesos felt natural. Gringo behaviour strike 3.

I spent about £20 that day on the beach, which is really obscene; especially considering that a large lunch of fresh fish was £3. The only thing that kept me from riding the big banana shaped inflatable thing towing people around by speedboat was my weird half-pride/half-shame decision to commit to my hair and not go in the sea.

That evening I did a lot of hair brushing and shampooing before we went out again and no one bemoaned the sudden disappearance of the morning’s coiffure. The final act was a ride around the old town in a horse drawn cart. Having previously said that I wouldn’t do it because the horses were clearly malnourished and suffering, I got in and couldn’t help but enjoy myself. Gringo behaviour strike 4.

The next day my feelings of equine exploitation guilt decreased slightly when we saw a horse head-butt a kiwi bloke who tried to cross the road in front of it. That was good. Bloody tourists.

The next day, before embarking on a mammoth return journey, a few of us peeled off from the main group and spent some time walking through Cartagena’s colonial old town. We ate fresh coconut, cheese arepas and ice cream, and wandered through the quiet streets in the shade of the colourful old buildings with their ornate balconies, with the occasional horse labouring by pulling behind it a group of old white people in hats and shorts, accompanied by tour guides with American accents.

Walking in the tranquil old town, sheltered from the brutal midday sun, felt like the moment I began my return from gringo tit to normal.

(Well maybe I’m not exactly ‘normal’, maybe I’m a bit off the wall/kooky? But who isn’t hahahahaha) (sue me hahaha).

On the whole, I like to think of myself as neither your typical ‘two-week-in-a-resort-getting-room-service-thrice-a-day’ kind of tourist, nor your ‘gap-year-hareem-pants-finally-left-small-town-in-Somerset-can’t-believe-how-cheap-beer-and-hash-is-abroad-so-I’m-going-go-completely-mental-for-5-months-then-go-back-to-England-for-freshers-week-and-university-where-I’ll-mostly-go-back-to-normal-apart-from-a-tattoo-of-some-tropical-animal-and-a-few-novelty-vests’ kind of tourist, more like your ‘cultured-intelligent-traveller-well-versed-in-the-art-of-getting-under-the-skin-of-a-country-to-be-found-in-local-parks-reading-local-authors-or-conversing-with-locals-about-issues-pertinent-to-them’ kind of guy.

Normally, the latter is clearly spot on (I recently unstitched all the flags I’d sewn onto my backpack during my gap year, for example) however in Cartagena I went the other way. I think being with a big group of tourists- all taking the same photos and temporarily colonising local restaurants and asking for group discounts- makes one more prone to do touristy stuff, but there’s no excuse for letting go as much as I did.

In a strange twist of fate, that was undoubtedly karmic payback for the weekend’s indulgences, a fallen tree blocked our route on the way back to Medellín and we had to wait from 2am to 6am while gnarled men in orange overalls chain-sawed off the different branches of the giant tree in the drizzle and the early morning light. The journey took 22 hours.

The weekend was a blur of disturbed sleep, hair gel and coconut milk. I apologise to all involved and anyone associated with me for the resulting photos and dishonour caused to the family name.

Cartagena’s nice though!

And I’ve moved into a big sociable house full of Colombians on Tuesday, so let’s just never mention this weekend again.