Climbing the Andes – We make some progress now, no, Mister Alan?

Marino and I went into the dining room at the same time.  He was packing his bag with Aqua Pannela, a sweet drink, some very sugary lumps, and various other items.  I realised I had nothing much to sustain me for the trip.  I had packed my blue cagoule, my ruablo that I had picked up in Silves, a small market town south of Cali that had a large Indian population, and was wearing my straw Panama, which was my everyday apparel in Colombia.  Marino eyed me even more suspiciously than before, and I was getting the impression he thought I was taking the Mickey.

 The German couple opened the kitchen door.  Breakfast for the four of us was some bread and coffee.  Then we headed off.  I always get a curious feeling just before a long walk, that I am so tired that no way can my body get me through the whole day.  When I get into my rhythm I am all right then till after the first stop, then it becomes more difficult to go again.  I get very tired after lunch and then reach that stage where I can’t care whether I carry on or drop dead on the spot.  At no time do I really feel that I completely enjoy walking, and even afterwards I feel so dogged tired that I don’t really appreciate it.  I think it is only the after experience, the memories of the walk through rose tinted glasses that makes it all right again.

 I was certainly shocked by the severity of the walk from the first moment.  We went a short way back along yesterday’s track, then turned abruptly right and up over a high ridge between the Miras and Quindio valleys.  It rose a good 500 ft before slackening in its gradient, and we meandered still upwards through the cloud forest.  Then blow me if we didn’t go down again.  This confused me enormously.  I was supposed to be going up the mountains and here I was losing the potential energy I had fought to obtain over the previous half hour.  Marino and I managed to keep up a good pace, but we kept having to wait for the Germans.  This was slowing us down and Marino showed a carefully guarded impatience for them as we went higher.  He would say things to me when we were alone like “we aren’t going to climb far in one day, Mister Alan”.  We came down to the Quindio River and followed past some sizeable waterfalls, rock bluffs and gorges.  We crossed the river and climbed steeply once more.  This wrecked the Germans.  The man complained of a blister that was flaring up on his foot and they decided that they would turn back.  Marino ensured that they could find there way back, watched them disappear down the narrow rocky path and then smiled at me and said “We make some progress now, no, Mister Alan?”

Forest at the start of the ascent

 I wasn’t so sure of this.  He had already changed his mind about my walking skills, but I had had the excuse of having frequent rests to let the others catch up.  This was now gone and I had only my own weaknesses to blame for lack of progress.  Marino set off at a renewed pace and I found it difficult to keep up with him, but I soon found that my legs were stretching and my lungs were expanding.  To a certain extent this did not work, as the rising altitude was making it more essential to get oxygen into the lungs, and I had only had one day to acclimatise to 6000 ft before going further up.

 At one point, near the River Quindio again, we came across a huge wooden structure.  Apparently a new centre for research in the mountains, the building work had only recently finished.  I was grateful for a quick pause to look around it, but Marino was in a hurry to make more progress.  We’d been climbing for three hours and we hadn’t reached the end of the forest yet.

At the new centre

 We continued to rise and the cloud forest began to thin slightly.  We skirted the fringe of some cloud and then delved straight into it.  The temperature dropped dramatically and I continued to layer myself with clothes.  The trees began to reduce in height and a scrubby moorland took over, like that you find on the HighPeak but without the heather.  Fully mature trees were growing to less than three feet up here and the mist swirled between their gnarled branches.

 At various stages, Marino would stop, and he got out the Agua Pannela.  This was a very sweet drink, made from melting the Pannela Sweetbread (almost pure sugar as far as I could make out) into water.  Marino added lemon juice that gave it a delicious tang.  A few drops of this liquid were enough to refresh you, clean you mouth out and give you substantial energy to sustain you for the next stages.  He also had some solid Pannela which melted in your mouth.  These two victuals kept us going on the upward journey.

 I was getting a little frustrated that we had climbed to over ten thousand feet and all I could see was cloud. I got glimpses between wisps of an expansive moorland, and the strange plants of the Paramo became apparent.

The Paramo

A rubbery cactus style plant grew almost everywhere, which a thick stem rising up to three feet above the ground crowned by fleshy yellow-green leaves.  Hairs cover most of the plant, catching the condensation and various attributes keep the plants stable in this extreme climate.    Now, as far as the eye could see, these plants dominated.  Marino disappeared off into the mist as we arrived at another layer of cloud.  I struggled to keep up now, I had some of my own blisters to contend with, and an ache in my legs, back and neck from walking perpetually upwards.  I saw Marino’s outline ahead of me on a hilltop.  I decide to tell him that I needed to go back.  We’d be walking almost non stop for six hours and were now close to fourteen thousand feet.

 I reached him and began to speak, when my mind was blown away.  Not only was it very windy up there, which may have accounted for some of it, but I now saw that we were above the clouds and ahead of me was Tolima, the second highest peak in the Central Cordillera, capped in snow and glistening in bright light.  A higher level of cloud drifted over it now and again, but I felt so satisfied that I had seen it.  I got my photo taken and took one of Marino, wrapped up in his heavy green coat, ragged jeans, turquoise scarf and purple baseball cap.  Then I noticed, amongst the pimply green moorland around me, was a small finca, here at this level.  I was amazed to find that many people eke out lives up here, and Marino said “That is where lunch is, Mister Alan”.  I said I was very tired and wanted to turn back.  I had said “Bastante”, which I’d looked up in my dictionary, but still don’t know whether it was the right thing to say.  Nevertheless, my haggard look must convinced Marino that if he didn’t turn round soon, he would have to carry me off the mountain.

Above the clouds

Marino, with snow capped Tolima in the distance and the finca where we lunched below

Climbing the Andes – heading up the valley

 She came back and spoke curtly but kindly.  A guide was going up to the centre at one o clock and you can join his party.  Marino will come later and take me up to the mountains tomorrow.  I thanked her and said I would go for a walk around the town.  I went once more around the town square and as I did so, I saw a cross on a hill above the town.  I was getting used to these, either a memorial or a cross high above any settlement in Colombia.  I wandered back along the street where I’d stayed and climbed up a set of steps to this memorial.  From this position I got a good impression of Salento’s setting.  It was high and the air was rarefied, but it was still in the foothills. Across the town, which sat on a wide ridge I could see valley dropping away in all directions to a rich fertile farmland region, reminiscent slightly of the Scottish Borders.

Salento – main square

Salento from the top of the hill

View from Salento up the valley to be trekked and the Andes proper beyond

 Behind me was more like the highlands of Scotland.  A wide river snaked between a glacial valley, with a few rich fincas in the bottom, some small woodland. Surrounding this were steep sided hills covered in rough and forest, and up the valley taller mountains appeared and disappeared amongst eye level clouds.  I couldn’t see the tallest from where I was, the skyscape masked the highest peaks.

 I wandered back into town and grabbed another snack.  I headed back to the house I had stayed in which I had now worked out was the Salento office of the Conservation authority – Fundacion Herencia Verde.  They conserved the high Quindio district from development because of the distinctive layers of Andean flora and fauna that I was going to see over the next few days.  I sat around the office for an hour or so, wondering when I would ever get up into the mountains.  A large man came in sporting a beard that sort of looked like it was false and had slipped below his chin.  This was Marino.  He was probably between 35 and 40 but looked a lot older.  He shook hands with me roughly and said in Spanish “So, you go up to the Andes tomorrow, Mr Alan?”  I said I hoped so.  He eyed me suspiciously, not sure that my slim frame would last the walk into the street.  He probably thought “this is an easy buck”.  He explained that he had some things to get in Salento today and would meet me tonight at the centre.  He then disappeared out into the street.

 All of a sudden a minibus arrived outside the office, containing about twelve people, at least two families, a young couple and several others.  It came to my consciousness that I was to join them to go up to the centre.  There was a huge amount of luggage in the back, and I was told that we were going to walk up the valley.  My spirits sank at the prospect of having to walk up into the mountains laden with a backpack.  We sat in the bus and it circled under the monument I had walked to in the morning and down into the valley I had mapped out from the top.  We went passed several of the farms and ended at a bridge over the river.  Here were several pack horses, looking as unconcerned as pack animals anywhere in the world.  I was relieved to find out that they were taking supplies and our baggage up the valley, we were to walk freely the next four miles or so.

 With a little trepidation at where we were going, we set off on our gentle afternoon saunter through the valley.  We continued along the track a short way, rising above the river.  Trees were scattered around closely grazed grassland, and cone shaped hills rose steeply on either side.  The others were all in groups of two or more, which didn’t improve my “outsider” feelings.  I generally walked alone, which was nothing bad.  I was sapping up this wonderful scenery, unlike anything I had seen before, and yet so strangely familiar.  I expected to end up in Denbigh or New Galloway at any moment, rather than being 5000 miles across the Atlantic.

 The familiarity stopped as the track ended and we rose up over a hill brow.  There in front of us was a multitude of palm trees.  Incredibly tall, they clustered up over the next few hills.  Their green crowns were perched on long silver trunks.  They were probably the tallest palm trees I have ever seen.  They are certainly the highest.  Here at about 6000ft above sea level they swarm over the grassland.  The ones on the horizon appeared like the huge floodlights you get at motorway junctions in the UK.  The area is called Estadero Las Palmas, and the palms Las Palmas de Cera, a national tree reserve.  They were the trees Mauro had photos of back in Chatham.

Las Palmas de Cera

Monster palm trees

Heading up the valley

 We continued to follow the river, the Quindio from which the district gets its name, past some high cliff bluffs and on to a fork in the river, the Mirias comes down from the right, the Quindio from the left.  The reserve lies in a triangle between the two rivers, and our home for the next two nights was up at the back.  The path began to get much steeper.  We had been passed by the pack animals while we’d been admiring the palm trees, now we caught up with them as they stumbled up the narrow track.

The afternoon was drawing on and when we reached the centre, the evening was beginning to form.  Long shadows from some very high mountains were casting their net across our valley.  Looking back towards Salento, we saw the tops of stratus clouds trail across our view, and below the almost models of farms, palms trees and grazing land appeared like a different world.

The view back from the centre

 We were settled into our dormitory and made our way for dinner.  The centre hung precariously on a hillside, two main buildings sat on the left, the office and staff quarters and the kitchen and dining area.  Two more buildings were below us, two dormitories, below which were classrooms and the small museum.  Little paths linked the two.

 We dawdled before dinner, still taking in the views and the atmosphere.  We ate, and chatted.  I talked mainly to the German couple and told them of my intentions to climb the mountains (still not quite sure what this meant).  They were keen to join me.  The other families became more interested in me and they chatted amiably till well after dinner.  We were invited to a talk in one of the classrooms and headed down there.  I didn’t take much in but we were shown slides of the wonderful scenery, plants and wildlife.  I enjoyed learning about the ecology of the region, the palm trees low down, the cloud forest around us, and the Paramo, where it becomes too cold for trees to grow and the curious plants you find up there, and the snow on top of the mountains; four degrees north of the equator there are glaciers.

 We went back to the dining room for more chat.  I was very tired, despite the lie in that morning.  We were sitting around drinking coffee when the door burst open and the huge frame of Marino entered.  He looked straight at me and said “ you ready for tomorrow Mister Alan?”  I said yes and introduced him to the Germans.  He said, “Oh, fine;” (unconvincingly; he still wasn’t sure of me let alone this pasty looking couple), “we start at six.”

 I went straight to bed.  I didn’t sleep well.  The kids were too excited in my dormitory, the bed was itchy, it was incredibly cold, and I still did not quite know what I was letting myself in for.  Eventually though I nodded off.

Climbing the Andes – Emerging from the duvet

My guy had turned up moments before and he motioned me up the street to where his vehicle now stood. He got my bag out and we went inside a house, the shutters all firmly closed.  I met another young girl, said goodbye to the guy (another jolt; I had thought up to this stage that he was coming with me).  The girl led me up some creaking stairs and showed me a large room with a sloping wooden floor and a low bed in one corner.  It looked like the lower half of a bunk bed, with high wooden slats to stop you falling out.  She pointed the bathroom out down the way, I thanked her and I was alone.  I flopped on the bed, didn’t bother to get undressed, turned out the light from a cord above the bed and fell instantly to sleep.

 When I woke, sunlight was streaming through the slats in the shutters, and I could hear some banging about downstairs.  I lay there for quite a time, a slow throbbing headache developing in my skull.  The bed, despite being rustic and old, was supremely comfortable, and I thought I should like to spend the rest of my life here.  It is like those Sunday lie ins that you never want to end.  The rest of the world can go stuff as you move around the soft quilted portions of the bed, finding a cooler spot or a new lie.  You count the patterns on the wall paper, you pick out all the flaws in the decorating – chipped paint, mismatching paper, gaps in the floor boards.  A million things run through your head, but before you can make sense of them they have moved on and you are left with the feeling that you have solved all your life’s problems if only you can remember what the hell the answer had been.

 These states never really remain.  One of three things always happens.  A feeling of guilt comes over you that you shouldn’t fritter your life away in bed or a dawning realisation that your current situation isn’t particularly useful.  The third is that your bladder is screaming to be emptied.  It was the second one that I got that day.  I suddenly remembered where I was, and that I was meant to be trekking up in the mountains high above me.  I also remembered that the details of the plan to get me there had not really been finalised and that I wasn’t entirely sure where I had been sleeping.  I thought back to the night before.  I remembered someone’s broken leg, but thought that didn’t help.  Then I thought of the smell of horse shit.  It was an odour currently coming through the window.

 To help me think I went and opened the shutter.  Sunlight blazed through the window and my headache went up four octaves.  The view was not inspiring, a set of farm sheds with various animals running around.  A woman was swishing some clothes in a huge tub on some steps to the left.  She smiled at me.  The sky above was a very pale blue.

 I got back to sorting my brain out.  I remembered the guy who had driven me here.  And I thought I should find him.  Then I thought of the girl that had shown me to the room the night before.  I thought, find those two and my troubles will be solved.  I gathered myself together, had a quick wash down the hallway and creaked back down the stairs.  I came down into what appeared from the office, something I didn’t remember at all from the previous night.  There were four or five people here milling around busily, a couple of them smiled at me benignly and carried on doing what they were doing.  I went out in the street.  It was alive with people carrying out routine tasks.  I decided to have a quick walk around.  I went into a small café and bought some coffee and a rather tasteless pastry.  Then went down into the square. It sloped gently away from both me and a grand church with a large white belltower.  Surrounding the square were distinctive little houses.  One or two storeys only, they had wooden doors and shutters, some had balconies or decks with ornate carving for balustrades.  I found out that the town’s name was Salento and from my estimate contained  about five thousand people.

 I wandered back to the house, hoping to find the girl.  She wasn’t there, I couldn’t remember her name or even what she looked like.  So I asked for my guy who had brought me from Cali.  “Oh, he went back to Cali first thing this morning”.  I then had to try and explain in an increasingly faltering voice that I didn’t know what was going on.  I was supposed to be going up into the mountains with a guide.  They looked bemused at me, not knowing a word of it.  Then one of the senior women there said, “I’ll go and find Marino.”  She went out and I sat around the office, being very English and tried not to be any further nuisance.

Climbing the Andes – Night out in Quindia

Then we turned of the main road onto a still wide, but much quieter byway.  And immediately we started to climb.  Despite the fact I could see little out of my right hand window, I knew we were climbing out of the Cauca valley.  My guide tried to describe the geography in a strangled Spanglais.  We were heading towards Armenia, which sits on a small plateau in the foothills of the central Cordillera.  Beyond there lay the Magdalena River, the longest wholly in Colombia and beyond that Santa fe de Bogota.  To the west, the Cauca started to drop off the plateau that Cali sat on, into a series of gorges where you find Medellin. The world’s perceptions of Medellin is, like Cali, strangely warped.  It is one of drug gangs, violent killings and disorder, but most Colombians describe the second city of Colombia as the Garden City.  It’s refreshing climate above a massive valley of the Aburra River.   A bustling commercial city and the centre for most of the west and north west of Colombia.  I found that about Colombia all over.  Their attitude to their country was like mine to my home city, Liverpool. Against a barricade of abuse and contempt, they find themselves overselling themselves all the time to try to compensate for the bad press.  As I had already discovered in Cali and Gorgona, and was about to discover up ahead, there was really little need for their hype.  Colombia is one of the most fantastic countries in the world.

 The road twisted and turned and all I saw were high trees protecting farmland, little farm houses, occasional road side stalls all locked up for the night, and the odd person staring like a startled rabbit at the beam lights.  We started to drop and the outskirts of a city could be seen.   There were electric wires everywhere, more houses, bright flood lights on sports fields, road junctions, a prison, railway yards, and then Armenia approached.  We skirted the old city on a dual carriageway, then headed into the commercial centre.  Armenia looked much more friendly than Cali, a much smaller city, probably the size of Derby, it nonetheless had a feeling of pride and stature.  The central area was built with medium sky-scrapers, but the streets were near deserted at about ten o’clock.

 We drove out the back end of the city, up in the hills, the roads more winding still, less substantial.  The suburbs gave way to farms, but they were obviously more livestocking than anything else.  I was nodding off to sleep now, and still uncertain of how long we had.  My man kept telling me “not long”, but every half-hour after he said it, my doubts would rise further.

 Then we reached a brow of a hill and a small town was laid out below.  A few electric lights could be seen in people’s houses, the occasional street lamp attached to a telegraph pole, and almost deserted streets.  Our vehicle sounded booming as it traversed the narrow streets.  We opened into an enormous square and hangered left immediately.  We stopped and my guide got out and went off into a bar.  I followed behind and the first thing he did was buy a drink.  I was a bit amazed at this.  What I really wanted to do was go to bed.  I was even more uncertain as to what I was supposed to be doing.  I’d been promised some trekking in the mountains.  I was now in a bar ordering drinks in a town. Not a one-horse town, I grant you; by the smell of things I’d have said there were more horses than people.  And despite three weeks in Colombia, my Spanish was not good enough to say, “What the Hell is going on” and not cause offence.

 So I settled down with my unending faith in life that things will sort themselves out one way or another.  Not the best philosophy always, but when there is no alternative, I tend to go with the flow.  It doesn’t stop the nausea but it gets rid of any responsibility on my part.

 I was then introduced to some of my guy’s friends who were sitting at a table by the door in the half-light.  There were only 40 W electric lights in the room, enhanced by a few neon signs and occasional bursts when the fridge was opened, so I struggled to make out who was there.  There were a number of rather gorgeous Colombian girls, no more than 20, and one huge fat girl with a broken leg, big red lips, wild curly hair and raucous laugh.  She was the only one who spoke any English so small talk elsewhere was out of the question.  We sat and drank and I told them about my adventures so far in Colombia.  I soon realised that I was in small town America and that few of the crowd had been further than Armenia, let alone Cali, and most of them hadn’t heard of Gorgona.  Describing where I came from was equally difficult.  I used the bog standard “outside London” which covers a multitude.  It probably made no difference.  Chatham, Reading, Southend, Watford, Crawley; all are amorphous towns that have no meaning to anyone beyond their confines.  I’m not trying to upset any residents of these towns, but plainly stating a few facts.  Few people have heard of your town beyond the shores of Britain.  Little more than you have heard of Palmira, Buga and Popayan before reading this.  However, the questioning got round to where I was born, and I said, Liverpool.  Two responses immediately came back – Ahhh the Beatles, Ahhh Football (the memories of Liverpool’s European and Domestic domination were still overwhelming in those days).  I’m not sure that they were the things I’d like Liverpool to be remembered for, but it was a much bigger response than I got for saying Chatham.

 The inevitable question came “what are you going to do?”  Here I was a bit lost, I shrugged my shoulders and said that I’d intended to go up into the Quindio to do some trekking.  They all laughed and said “but your in Quindio.  That’s the name of the district you are in”.  This did not raise my spirits.  I said I was going up into some park?  At last, a positive response.  They told me it’s beautiful up there, there are huge palm trees and cloud forest, birds everywhere and loads of waterfalls.

 The stilted conversation carried on, often I would say something mildly witty in English, the limb challenged girl would repeat it in Spanish and there would be hoots of laughter.  I looked round to see that my guy, who had been chatting to another friend at the bar, had disappeared (with my bag still in his jeep).  I now became very worried.  It was almost midnight and I had no possessions, anywhere to sleep and no way of knowing what was meant to happen next.  However, I was enjoying the ambience of this little town already. Things were so much more relaxed here than in the big city.  I drank more, the conversation got more ridiculous, I understood less and less and started to close my eyes and smile benignly….

 Eventually people started to drift away into the night and I was told to keep in touch, see you again when you get back to town.  I made all sorts of promises and waved them off into the night, including the big lass on crutches, who’d given me a smackingly big kiss on the way out (nothing from the other girls, I think my new beard was getting a bit too ragged).  I never saw any of them ever again.

Climbing the Andes – A slow start

Two days after my trip to Gorgona, Mauricio (I suppose to get me out of Lucy’s house) promised me another trip.  It was to travel north towards Armenia and into the Central Cordillera between Medellin and Bogota.  I was quite looking forward to this.  I wanted to get high into the mountains after being at the Pacific’s edge.  I packed a small bag and waited around Mauro’s apartment most of the day. In true Colombian style and with their concept of time, I sat there all day when I thought I was going to get going early on.  I was beginning to think that it was too late to travel north that day.  I wasn’t sure about being out on Colombian roads at night, not from the hijacking angle, which has become more of a threat since my visit, but more from the accident point of view.  Colombians drive as if no-one else is on the road, despite the evidence around to show that this is not the case.  Like a lot of countries, the roads are in bad repair, and unlike the UK, there are few roads which are separated from the other aspects of life.  So you can be driving down the Pan American Highway and still have chickens crossing the road, children playing, buses stopping and porcupines copulating in front of you at any moment.  This does not deter your average Colombian driver.  They will try and drive at 160 kmh^-1 and have forgotten what a brake is.

 So I was surprised when Mauro turned up mid afternoon from work and said “Let’s go”.  We went over to the leafy hillsides to the west of the city centre and I was introduced to various people at the ecological foundation who ran the reserve I was to go walking in.  I then sat there while Mauro talked away, then he said “Bye, I’ll see you on Thursday”.  I wasn’t sure what was happening.  I sat there for another half an hour, in the reception area.  Looking at the posters on the wall from every angle, reading through the literature displayed on a series of coffee tables (despite the fact that I could only translate one word in six).

 Then a medium height man in black jeans, black shirt and a “Hey Gringo” moustache came out, smiled at me and went outside.  A moment later he was back and he shook my hand, and said “You Mauro’s friend”.  I affirmed and he picked up my bag and flung it in the boot of his pick-up.  He had a quick cigarette, talked to the receptionist (who was packing up to go home for the day) and then we jumped into the vehicle.  It was after five o’clock.  There was about an hour’s sunlight left and then we’d be driving in the dark.

 After a quiet start to the day, I realised that I had a long and strange time ahead before normality would resume.  I also had very little idea of what was going to go on.  Mauro in his loveable way had given me the sketchiest details.  I was going with this guy to the Andes, to a reserve run by this foundation that contains the highest palm trees in the world.  I could get hold of a guide and climb the mountains for the day.  More than that I did not know, and it was as I set off into the evening rush hour traffic of Cali that I realised there were a lot of gaps in the story to come.

 We inched our way through Cali and I thought I would never see the industrial areas to the north that would show us that we had reached the countryside.  Finally the road opened out and we made some proper progress.  We followed the main road on the west side of the Cauca valley, a route I had travelled on the very first day I had arrived in Cali.  We passed through Buga, where Mauro’s research institute have a field station. On we drove, into new territory for me, further down the huge Cauca valley.  We were on the true Pan-American Highway now, the arterial route through South America and on up into the north.  It would be little more than an old fashioned trunk route in UK, a wide enough single carriageway road, bit of varying quality, usually tarred but often rutted.  It bypasses few towns, instead the huge trucks and 4×4’s have to dodge the farm wagons and chickens throughout, and your journey can be seriously disrupted when a market or festival is going on in the local town you pass through. It is usually packed full of vehicles, and it is a joy to get to an open stretch where there are few disruptions.  The highway runs north from Chile, through Peru and up to Ecuador before crossing into Colombia south of the city of Pasto.  It then drops down to the ancient centre of Popayan and to the east of Cali.  Despite its size, Cali is on the west side of the Cauca valley.  The highway goes to the east, with several roads leading to the metropolis.  It then heads north through Palmira to Buga and on towards Medellin.  Beyond there it becomes less of a highway as it descends into the jungle towards Darien.  At one point it peters out completely and you have to pick it up in Panama City through some other route.

 The night was drawing on now, when my friend calmly stopped the vehicle. He got out and banged his front wheel. A number of smelly trucks belched passed us.  I got out to have a look.  It was difficult to really make out what was going on as it was on the dark side of the truck and the sun had long since set behind the western cordillera.  It was just a flat and we fixed in a few minutes.  We set off again but he stopped a few minutes later, pulling into the sort of diner that the Flintstones frequented after a night at the movies.  It was round and had a bunch of flimsy looking 4×4’s parked outside.  We went in and there was a brightly lit room with a series of bewildering counters serving anything from rice to hamburgers, beer and soft drinks, cabinets full of Coca Cola, and utensil trays and salt and pepper satchels distributed in the most awkward positions the designers could find.  These sorts of places are common at most service areas in the UK these days   (although perhaps not with the same range of foodstuffs), but at the time it was all novel to me.

 I remember having something akin to shredded beef and rice with bits of plantain and a large cup of coffee.  It wasn’t my real choice of meal at that time but several factors contributed to the selection.  I was actually very hungry as I had eaten lightly at lunchtime and it was now after nine o’clock.  But I was not very sure of the arrangements for bed that night (it appeared that it would be very late when I got there) and this made me unwilling to tackle a huge meal.  When I’m nervous, I have terrible problems looking at food.  I find when I eat it, I’m not so bad, but unfortunately to make the stuff get into the mouth, I do have to look at it.  And thirdly, in the dreadful arrangement of counters, I couldn’t really find anything that I wanted, nor could I really ask for it in Spanish and their were a bunch of cowboy looking people in check shirts and bristly moustaches breathing down my neck as I fumbled along the pots of vegetables, pies, sweet stuffs and hot sauces.

 I felt a little better for having stemmed the hunger and we set off again along the main highway.  The traffic was probably heavier than it had been before, with more delivery lorries ploughing along the thoroughfare, the exhaust fumes swirling around in their headlights.  Occasionally, jeeps carrying some militia of one sort of the other would overtake us and several times we were waived through checkpoints.

The Gorgona Trip – Paradise at last

 Go to the First post in The Gorgona Trip

Possibly the most magical moment of the whole trip to Gorgona was the trip home.  The little coaster we had travelled in had dropped us off and moved on, southwards and apart from one other supply ship coming north, nothing had arrived at the island, and no-one had left, in the four days we had been there.  Now we were to stay on the beach and wait for the returning boat.  We were promised that we would see its lights in the eastern evening, board, and travel overnight back to Buenaventura.

 We gathered in the gloom at the little shelter on the beach.  There is no natural harbour on Gorgona, which is why we had done a ship-to-ship on the way in.  Now, this shelter was all that protected us from the windy channel between here and the mainland.  It covered a set of smaller boats and some fishing equipment, and we made ourselves as comfortable as possible on our makeshift chairs – buckets, boat sides, logs and masts.

Waiting for the boat

We all took it in turns to peer out in the gloom. Several lights were visible of many coasters ploughing up and down the Colombian Pacific Coast, but it was obvious that these were all miles away and travelling parallel to the coast, none heading out towards Gorgona.  The evening drew on, it was getting quite late now, and I was beginning to suspect that we might not be going tonight.  Each little pin prick of light, lost and rediscovered in the tossing waves, was analysed by us shoremen, and rejected as they moved further up the coast or disappeared from view over the horizon.  The crowd left sitting started talking and joking.  Four days had gelled us well together and even in my broken Spanish, I found myself joining in to the conversations.

 Then our attention turned to a pin prick of light which did not move across the sea in the same way as the others, but appeared almost stationary.  We realised after some time that it was indeed getting larger, and decided that it must be our boat.  There were moments when we thought we had deceived ourselves again, but then, unmistakably, it was growing larger and larger.  The single source split into two and we could discern other lights on the boat.  Then, all at once, a series of floodlights came on across the bridge and the whole bay was lit up.  It was a magical moment as we realised that our rescuers had come, and for all our respect and love of Gorgona built up over the last few days, we knew this was a good moment to leave.

 Activity increased on the shore now as the fishing boats were made ready.  We found ourselves paddling across the coral shingle in our bare feet, shoes tied around our necks and rucksacks on our backs, the black water hiding our toes as we headed out to the boats, but the water still deliciously warm and soothing.  It was after midnight when the last person had been hauled aboard the coaster, the flood lights were turned off, final good byes said and the coasters engines roared into life as we headed into the channel once more.

 That was a beautiful evening.  I don’t remember going inside.  Graeme was very tired and spent the night in the cabins aft.  I remember little, but there was a small amount of room on the deck that wasn’t taken up with cargo of one sort or another.  At the bottom were piles of timber, ready cut, deep dark tropical timbers (possibly illegal although I wasn’t going to argue while on the boat).  Above them green bananas and plantains of various sorts, and I was perched on a sack of hard oranges.  I lay there looking up at the sky, marking the progress of the little lights on the sea, or watching the clouds drift in and out over the stars and a huge yellow moon, almost full.  The boat made steady progress and apart from the engines, the main noise was the constant lap lap lap of the water as it hit the bows.  I must have drifted off for I woke when it was almost light, a softening mist lay across the sea, and the outline of the Andes was clearly visible in the middle distance.  I could see the main South American coastline and the heavy jungle coastline looming up.  All at once we were rounding the corner of the coast and entering the grey harbour of Buenaventura.

What a contrast to our previous journey on this boat.

 Of the rest of the journey, well it was a bit of an anticlimax coming back to the realities of civilisation and the noise of Cali.  We said some tearful farewells at the bus station and Graeme and I clambered into our taxi for his house.  But our minds were still full of four wonderful days.

 The island had not the rarities of Galapagos, or the beauty of Caribbean Islands, the corals of the east, the ruggedness of Scotland, or the scenery of some Atlantic islands.  But it had a wonderful air about it, and although the circumstances for its preservation were due to the utmost cruelty, you felt that here at least some of Colombia’s rich diversity was being preserved properly.

The Gorgona Trip – in the camp and around the island

In the afternoon, Graeme and I decided to try out the hammock.  This yellow net had been provided by Chris, one of Graeme’s English friends in Cali, and we were all thumbs trying to get the thing set up, but eventually we had it strung, albeit lowly, between two palms and I spent most of the afternoon dreaming away.  Graeme went to sleep beside me and the lap lap lap of the breakers soon made me drift off also…

The sun was already setting when we roused and we left the hammock hanging.  After dinner, where we chatted to many of the guests and I gave them an update on the state of my hand, to which they all replied in the usual manner in their only English.

We read in the community room after dinner.  There was no TV in the camp and no organised events to keep us occupied, so we just amused ourselves in the wide-open room (where at least there was electricity).  Graeme and I set ourselves up sitting astride one of the large low window sills to the room.  It was just slightly uncomfortable for us to sit there, but you stretched your legs and got used to it.  We sat, one leg in the light of the room, one in the dark outside and played Backgammon.  Graeme had brought a pocket set from home in Cali and we had some good battles, fairly evenly matched.  We were so absorbed in the game that nothing else seemed to matter.  Some of the kids from one of the families were playing some form of tag game out in the dark, and I became aware that there was a bit of a commotion among one of the groups.  A French woman from our party came across to us, and said, in English, “You do realise that your foot is right next to a snake”.  I smiled, misunderstanding her completely because of her accent.  Graeme seemed to have comprehended more easily and repeated her words verbatim in English.  I looked to my right to see a head, only slightly smaller than my foot, of a boa constrictor.  It’s huge body trailed off into the night.  It lay there, more or less asleep, but I think quite aware of my presence there.  Graeme and I were too surprised to say anything and resorted to calmly lifting the backgammon board between us and moving our outside feet up very, very carefully.  We balanced the board between us to the other side of the room and placed it carefully on another window ledge.  Then we both screamed.

The next morning, the constrictor was spotted again in the camp and followed rather too avidly by several of our party.  I saw its body disappear into a hedge, I saw over ten feet of it and I’m not sure I saw two thirds.

That day we went on a long expected boat ride around the island.  One thing Gorgona is famous for is being on the migratory route and feeding grounds of several whale species, including, in the right season, Hump backed whales.  We’d seen some whales out far in the bay from the restaurant one lunchtime, but this was the opportunity to get close up.  The weather was not so brilliant again, and the skies were grey and the waves quite large as we boarded on of the little fishing boats.  The trip was a big disappointment  – we saw the island off to the left, and we saw grey waves to the outside, but no whales did we spy and the trip passed off uneventfully.

On a boat trip round the island

That afternoon, one of the guys who we had befriended, a huge black guy with a shiny shaved head and a wide white smile asked us to join him in his personal quarters, some way off from the camp.  Graeme and I felt very honoured to be asked back there.  He spoke only Spanish, so most of my conversation with him was through sign language and smiles, but Graeme was able to get a stumbling conversation going with him.  There was another disappointment when we got to his little cabin.  Instead of finding some great ecological treasure trove or and insight into island dwelling life, we were shown a television and told we could stay here and watch it.  It polluted Graeme and myself.  For the first time in Colombia, I had been away from all this and it was a rude awakening to see that even here the mindless game shows, soap operas and American import movies were saturating into Gorgona’s supposed paradise.  We stayed as long as it was polite, and when we made our move, the guy showed us some of the little wood carvings he did.  We quite liked the dolphin, and he gave it to us as a present.  I think I’ve lost mine, like I have a hundred other trinkets since, but this was one of the first I received, and partially made up for our embarrassment at not seeming to appreciate the guy’s invitation to see civilisation.

The Gorgona Trip – Starting to immerse

I was slightly stunned at this sight but called over the guide, and at the same time tried to stem the flow of blood by clamping up the hand.  However, because it was on the side of the hand that naturally stretches with any movement, anything I did opened the wound further and blood came out faster.  The guide arrived and sized up the situation quickly.  He looked up nervously at me from his golden curly hair as if to say ”I knew you English bastards were going to be trouble.”  He then guided me back to the shore, holding my right arm up in the air above my body.  I had attracted the attention of most of the other members of the group, and one large lady, who happened to be a nurse in Cali, came across and sucked through her teeth with the best of them at my wound. At this stage I was pinching the side of my right hand to stem the blood flow with thumb and forefinger of my left hand, but I realised this was an impractical solution for the rest of the holiday.

 The guide took his snorkelling mask and ripped off the rubber straps.  He wrapped them around my hand, using the thumb as an anchor and tightened them over the wound.  The bleeding seemed to stop and I was now free with my other hand.

 Much chagrined, I sat on the grassy bank while the almost fruitless snorkelling went on.  I felt a little faint, and particularly foolish, strapped up in a snorkelling mask and with my hand in the air.  The rest of the team dressed and we tromped back through the forest to the camp.  Once there, Graeme and I tailed off with the guide to the infirmary.  The nurse followed me in and several camp workers came in for a bit of sport.

 This was only my second time in the third world, and there are several nightmares I had had about travelling abroad.  One was being mugged, the second was getting the shits, the third was insect life and the fourth was having to be hospitalised.  The last was by far the worst, as the shadows of dirty needles, shoddy practices, AIDS and hepatitis rained heavy.  I asked Graeme to get my medical kit from my pack, at least I knew where those needles and bandages had been.  The decided that they could bandage me up and I should be all right to continue on, but they were going to clean out the wound, as coral could harbinger dangerous diseases.  I saw a large bottle of something with iodine in it.  It fizzed as they poured it into a white enamel dish.  It fizzed again as it touched my flesh once the guide had removed the straps and wiped the worst of the encrusted and still free flowing blood from my wound.  The heat from the liquid was intense, and Graeme and I agreed that nothing could survive under that concoction.  I was a little uncertain as to whether I was included in that blanket destruction, but decided to keep my thoughts to myself.

 The sun was drawing long shadows across the camp as we headed back to the communal room.  I had to show my hand to everyone, who showed such concern in their best English (usually consisting of a few “Tsschh tshh”, or a “Pheww” or a “oh no no no”).  I was however, firmly an insider, like every Colombian here, I had suffered.  It wasn’t the sort of icebreaker that I had hoped for.

 We slept remarkably well that night, partly for all the activity of the day (partly due to my shattered nerves following the accident) and mainly because we hadn’t slept much the night before on the boat.  When we awoke the next morning, the mugginess of the day before had somewhat lifted, but it was still showery.  We ate a hearty breakfast.  The food at the camp was fairly basic, but nourishing and the setting for breakfast was magnificent.  We headed off on a three mile trek across the island to the western beaches and Isla Gorgonilla – the smaller of the two islands here.

On the far side of the island

Gorgonilla

 The walk was fascinating, as it went behind the concentration camp, then rose steeply into the rainforest.  The rain of several days still lay heavy on the ground, and our boots squelched over bright red soil in our tracks.  We saw several snakes scurry out of our way as we tromped through the forest.  Tiny pencil thin beasts that didn’t wait to stick out their tongues.  Several frogs, some brightly marked, and insects weird and wonderful every step of the way.  But what was overpowering was the stuffiness of the forest floor.  Above us was the canopy and in between all manner of plants and animals trapped in the space.  The claustrophobia was almost unbearable, and the fact that even though we were on a very short walk, the forest felt unending.  I got the feeling that I never wanted to see the Amazon if this was what it was like.  I had passed by Mauro a wish to travel to Leticia on the SE corner of Colombia, actually on the Amazon River, but this thought went out of my head forever as I tromped through the tiny forest on Gorgona.

 Then, all at once, we started to descend and the fresh air of the beach once more wafted across our faces.  The canopy broke and we tumbled down through the palms and on to the true Pacific Coast of Gorgona.  This beach was probably the most remote place I had been to at that point.  The grey volcanic sand was untouched by human feet before we descended on it, at least it had been since the last tide had cleared it.  The view off into the Pacific was still grey and dismal, the humidity was intense, but the edge was taken off by a fresh wind that blew across our faces.  Thousands of fiddler crabs ran off in all directions to their lairs, waved their outsize hands at us and disappeared down their holes.  The crabs were one of the first things I had noticed about Gorgona when I arrived.  It reminded me of DuckIsland in Arthur Ransome’s Peter Duck.  In that book there had been little crabs everywhere during the day and at night large crabs came out.  Graeme and I had paced around the beach in front of the camp and we’d seen the thousands of small holes for the Fiddler’s, then as we came back into camp, I joked when I saw the large holes under an evergreen hedge on the way back into the camp.  I said to Graeme “That’s probably where the large crabs live.”  I had to eat my words that evening when I was going around with a flashlight and came across a massive blue and red crab, toying calmly with a coconut shell.  It must have been eight inches across its body with huge, amazing looking claws that I decided to keep well clear of. I really must stop making stupid statements like that.

Crabs

 We spent most of that morning on the beach and I came across crabs everywhere.  We swam, and despite the murky nature of the sky, the water was beautifully warm and soothing, and I felt good enough to swim despite my bandage.  Graeme was looking distinctly healthier as well.  At the south end of the beach a spit of sand linked Gorgona with its near neighbour, Gorgonilla.  At high tide the link was severed, but at the time, a set of rock pools and jagged stonework could be explored, and I went off for a walk on my own around these areas.  More crabs could be seen, flat green ones that clung to the vertical rocks and scuttled menacingly as soon as you approached.  Hundreds of small fish, dull coloured but of infinite variety played in the small pools until they were released from their more humane solitary confinements by the new high tide.

 Eventually, we headed back to the camp.  Some took a boat which had come around the point but I decided to walk.  As we descended into the camp, the cloud eventually broke and for the first time since we had arrived on the island, I got the true sense of being on a paradise island.  The blue sky and sea joined to each other; in the distant mist to the east we could see great mountains of the western Cordillera rise into the clouds.  The palm trees swayed gently and everything, our clothes and ourselves included, steamed in the sun.

Resting after the injury

The Canteen

The Gorgona Trip – The prison and trouble on the reef

I tossed my bag over into the small wet fishing boat and precariously dangled for a moment between the two boats.  We loaded up our boat and set off in a wide loop to the shore, where the only way onto dry land was through the gentle breakers above the coral-shingled beach.  We scuttled up the beach and assembled in a large open sided building where we were allocated our cabins.  The men were in one large dormitory, the women in another.  Only twenty four visitors are allowed on the island, and everything we brought had to be taken back by us, and everything on the island had to remain here.  Gorgona is a preserved island, where the fragile balance of the island’s ecology is protected at whatever cost.

 We found out why the island had remained so “untouched” after a simple breakfast.  We walked about half a mile south of the camp along a steamy pathway.  Several types of monkeys chittered in the thick branches above us, tormenting us as we walked onto a concrete platform.  We saw a large number of derelict buildings with barbed wire protecting the jungle from them, or vice versa.  The division between jungle and building was now fuzzy, and insects swarmed throughout the area, plants grew out of every available crevice and the hard concrete façade was fading in green moss, mildew and fern.

Gorgona Prison

 We suddenly were aware we had been brought to a high security prison.  Colombian governments had used this for about 30 years to keep opponents away from the public eye.  They were shepherded off to Gorgona and held for years, often without trial, and without any contact to the outside world.  The conditions were unbearable now; what they had been like when the place was supposedly habitable, one can only guess at.  The jungle may have been tamed to a certain extent when the gaol was in use but the barbed wire must never have kept the flies, cockroaches and scorpions away.  Now, hoards of termites rampaged up and down walls, temporary tunnels and permanent encampments splattered the walls.

 We were shown the normal quarters, the ranks of bunk beds, as they had been when the camp closed down, only a few years before in 1983.  And behind the kitchens and guards quarters were a set of holes in the concrete filled with storm water.  We wondered whether they were latrines, or holes for superstructure now rotted to nothing.  No, this was the solitary confinement block.  The holes were barely wide enough for a man to get his shoulders into.  They were lowered into these deep holes, and deprived of movement even to scratch their noses or move their aching limbs, they could be left in these holes for up to twenty-four hours at a time.  And they were prey to all the creepy-crawlies that would come, and some were left in the open air, so the rain, wind and sun would torment them for all this time. These simple rounded holes in the concrete could barely show the extent of the inhumanity that was inflicted on these people and yet the stories our guide told us made the scenes so vivid that we all shuddered to contemplate the ordeals the prisoners had to go through.  There may have been a glimmer of understanding if these people were proved to have caused similar hardship to others, though I would be hard pressed to subscribe to that philosophy.  That many of these people were here merely for holding a different opinion, liberal rather than conservative, or vice versa, made it even more unbearable.  And the final bizarre thought, as we left this ruin behind, was that somehow, the inhumanity between men had meant that the other species on the island were left untouched, and that humans were now able to protect this ecological niche for the enjoyment of others only because of the suffering of their fellow men.

 We headed back to lunch at the camp, and then in the afternoon were invited down to the coral reefs on the southeast coast to learn how to snorkel.  This was my first time ever snorkelling.  Graeme and I had been into a shopping centre in Cali to get ourselves kitted out.  We had bought the cheapest snorkelling gear we could find, it looked the right colour, and a pair of swimming trunks, which I had neglected to get when I was in the UK.  We headed down to the beach with all the others and stripped off.  The guide was giving a run down on how to snorkel.  I don’t remember much (Chris Hillman in Eritrea taught me a lot more several years later, but then again he did it in English not Spanish).  I worked out I had to spit in my goggles to stop them clogging up, and how to breathe through the pipe at the top.

 I put my head in the water, and my goggles filled up with water immediately, and I swallowed a gallon of salt water.  I stood upright immediately and coughed and spluttered over Graeme.  We tried to tighten the back of the mask, but they would still fill up, albeit more slowly than before.  That was the one valuable lesson learnt; buy cheap, expect mistakes.  But we did manage about thirty seconds of snorkelling every time we went down.

A beach on Gorgona

 The sea was quite rough and it was difficult to make anything out.  We were told not to put our hands on coral as it was very sharp, and also you ran the risk of irreparably damaging the reef.  So we were careful to swim to the side the reef.  To be honest, it wasn’t the best reef in the world.  It was quite steep and the roughness of the breakers made it difficult to see anything but bubbles and fizz.  Eventually, as my eyes became used to it, I did see some brightly coloured fish, but moving too quickly for me to find out what they were.  All in all it was a disappointing first experience. This being the landward side of Gorgona, I expected that this was the best of the coral reef.  Then came a disaster that almost ruined the whole month in Colombia.  I was trying to stand up when a large wave hit me and I toppled onto some reef.  I put my right hand to break the fall and landed straight on a piece of razor sharp coral.  It was a second or two before I realised that I had hurt myself.  I felt the bang, and got up.  Graeme was nearby and went whiter than he normally looked.  “Al, look at your hand”.  Blood was streaming down the side of my hand away from my little finger.  A wave hit it and washed it off, but immediately the whole area was full with blood again.

The Gorgona Trip – Bumpy Crossing

The land opened out again as we neared the coast and a sprawling, dilapidated city came into view.  This was Buenaventura.  After the Amazon rainforest and the loneliness of Darien, this was the wildest part of Colombia.  Graeme was justifiably paranoid when we halted at the quayside among a throng of people.  We both wanted to get out of the coach and put our hands firmly on our bags before they disappeared down the road.  I looked around at the harbour, more grey shacks tumbled into the harbour.  Some on stilts hung over an equally grey area of water and grey pelicans lazily flew across the lagoons collecting grey fish in their grey mouths.  I’ve never seen Pelicans quite so dirty.

 I was then aware that a small grey boat was chugging into the harbour.  It was a small coaster with a long flat front for cargo, a group of cabins upon which perched the bridge and a small deck aft.  I laughingly said to Graeme “That’s our boat”.  I really must stop making comments like that.  It was our boat.

 In a haze of activity, we were offloaded from our coach, and we stood helpless as we watched a flurry of nonsensical activity go on in the boat before we were finally allowed to board.  I say nonsensical because at the end of the furore, the only thing that seemed to have been achieved was some slops had been washed overboard.

Our Boat

Buenaventura

 The weather really was grim now, it was oppressively humid, even the grey pelicans had gone off to see whether they could find some relief elsewhere, the hot drizzle annoyed everyone and the air became dark with the thunder clouds, and a rapidly onsetting dusk.

 We gingerly stepped aboard and had a brief but comprehensive tour of the boat.  There were a number of bunks around the back of the boat.  Graeme and I were in the aft cabin, and I flung my bag on the bed.  Graeme shoved his into a corner on the floor and we went out to watch the movements on deck.  I got a whiff of the on board toilet and decided that whatever happened, I could wait the ten hours or so that it would take to get to Gorgona.

 The sun was setting magnificently somewhere, but not here.  All I was aware of was approaching darkness as we let loose our mooring and drifted out into the murky lagoon.  The engines were on a low setting and we gurgled a few hundred yards to a floating platform with a petrol pump on it.  There we immediately stopped and spent the next half-hour refuelling.  I wondered whether Buenaventura was indeed purgatory and I was destined never to see another location ever again.

 Finally we drew away from the petrol pump, now blazing in lights in harmony with half a dozen other ships around the harbour.  The dimmer lights of the city were in the distance, but so few houses seemed to have electricity that it made little impact compared to the marine equivalents.

 We moved easily through the lagoon, but now the wind was rising and to the east we saw the flickerings of a major storm.  The hills behind the city were repeatedly silhouetted against the lightning flashes and the rain swept across the harbour out of the dark to chase us on our way.  The boat lurched against a squall that hit us end on, and we hove left and right for a moment or so. Then another squall, then the rain hit us and the lightning flashes and thunder joined the ensemble.  The almost empty little wooden boat tossed and turned in quite small waves and I suddenly began to wonder what would happen when we hit the open sea, a few miles to my west.  We were distracted by a number of people being sick over the gunnels and I felt proud that I had gained at least a modicum of sea worthiness in the few moments aboard.  Graeme was beginning to suffer and, although he always looked pale from his recent illness, he was looking almost white now.  Again, we were distracted from our thoughts by the guide coming round with his rucksack.  He dug deep inside and brought out a cold sandwich wrapped in silver foil.  I opened it up and remembered that I hadn’t really had much to eat since a very early and small lunch in Mauro’s mum’s house.  I was quite hungry but this was tempered by the rolling action of my stomach, a few seconds behind the rolling of the boat.

 I ate it gingerly, and felt better with some ballast in the alimentaries.  It was useful as we hit the open ocean a few moments later and the little boat was driven high into the air and down again into huge water troughs.  Or so they felt at the time.  The thunder and lightning were all around and I was aware of incessant noise.  I tried to get some rest in the cabin below (it was now around 11 o’clock) but the aft cabin was right beside the engine and the drub-drub-drub was intolerable.

 Water was washing all over the decks, both from above and from the sea.  The rails were drenched as the drips gathered and refell through the boats fretwork.  I tried to read.  Graeme came in and hauled himself up onto the top bunk.  A few moments later he was down again and rushing for the side.  I gulped and gulped, trying to keep what little dinner I had eaten inside me.  The heat was oppressive in the cabin, the air outside so dank and turbulent to caused me more misery.  Everything was wet, and the noise of waves, and engine and rain and thunder just would not let up.  I thought of the money I had expended to have this once in a lifetime experience.

 Somehow, I must have got to sleep eventually but I remember awaking several times in the night and it seemed like we were still in the same place.  I realised the rain had stopped, but the wind was still quite fierce, and the waves on the open ocean still battered the boat quite mercilessly.  I say open ocean, but I suppose we were never more than twenty miles from any coast.  Although I could not tell, on leaving the islands to the west of Buenaventura, we had turned almost due south and gone parallel to the coast, then turned out to the south west to cross the narrow channel to the two islands; Isla Gorgona and Gorgonilla.

 Finally, when I awoke again, I noticed the sky was a mizzly grey and that the noise of the engines were a slightly different tune.  I came up on deck and a beautiful tropical morning was emerging, with a thin veil of mist and cloud covering the ocean, and I could see a few identical coasters to the east and to the west, a small volcanic island rising above the waves.  This was Gorgona, to be our home for the next four days.  I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next so I went back in to raise Graeme.  He was not a happy man.  He had been sick a few times in the evening and was thinking he was regretting the whole idea of the trip.  He came off his bunk and reached for his rucksack on the floor, to realise that the wash had soaked the bottom half.  I had left mine on the bunk, absent mindedly, but in the end fortuitously, as it had escaped the worst of the wetting.

 The engines cut out and we saw a small flotilla of boats emerge from the island to take us in.  Several people started the ship to ship transfer, and at that moment, as I watched the two boats bobbing independently, among a calm sea, no engines and no storm, my stomach gave in to its instincts and I threw up over the side.