AUTHORS NOTE
The following is not the story of just a single trip to Colombia, but rather a melange of tales taken from half a decade of travel to Colombia. I have, for ease of reading, made no distinction between the dates of my Colombian trips or the surfers I was with at the time. Though I have tried to be objective with my portrayal of Colombia and, hopefully, have painted the nation in a positive light there is no getting away from the fact that Colombia remains a nation a war with itself and is, in places, highly dangerous. Therefore neither this magazine nor I recommend that you visit Colombia at the present time.

BITTER SWEET KISS

Images, words and encounters all creating impressions, contrasting and fighting against one and other. A thousand pictures whirl through my mind and even now, after so much time, I have no idea which one to believe in. At times sensuous, exotic and compelling, at others dangerous and deceitful, if there’s any country in the world that can be described as sexy, then it’s Colombia. And like so many before us, we were drawn to her, seduced by her mystery and the promise of her delights.

Over the years she has enticed people too her for many different reasons. Some, like the earliest Spanish conquistadors, raped her of all the treasures she had to give and then left her abandoned. Others have found themselves so caught up in her passion that they are unable to leave, whilst many more have been pulled into her embrace by gold, coffee, and emeralds, but then, once she had the world enchanted under her spell, she delivered a deadly kiss.

In 2005, 5% of the world’s population between the ages of fifteen and sixty-four used illegal drugs at least once and today there are over fourteen million users of cocaine worldwide with the US, followed by the UK and Spain, being the largest single market. The vast majority of coke on the streets of the US comes from Colombia, where it creates massive profits for the drugs cartels and, as it seeps into every aspect of existence in this beautiful country, slowly sends Colombia cascading over the brink into a humanitarian crisis that the UN has called the worst in the western hemisphere.

Late evening in the city of Medellin and the streets are emptying fast; people scurry back to their homes and hide behind the solid iron bars that shield every window and every door of the city. Freshly arrived only hours before, we’re Colombia’s newest victims and she’s gone out of her way to put on her most desirable face for us, beautiful dark eyes have surrounded us from the moment we stepped off the plane and a hotel mini-bar has given us the courage to go beyond the iron bars and onto the streets for our first date with Colombia. At first, like everyone else, we are captivated by her relaxed and playful smile, but as the evening wears on she becomes slowly more moody and spiteful. The girls, whom she sends slinking up too our bar table come with hidden extras – angry pimps, who emerge from the shadows to glare and demand our money and, like a Jekyll and Hyde story, her split personality has been revealed to us and this other side is much blacker. With the highest kidnap rate in the world, an ongoing guerrilla insurgency, paramilitary death squads and the massively powerful drugs cartels, it really is little wonder that the central government seems to have almost totally lost control of her. Every single day we would wake up to the news of more bombs and more gun battles, and it became clear that if we wanted a taste of her jewels, then we would have to be prepared to journey through all her wild and unpredictable personalities.

Conflict has swayed across Colombia for sixty years now. What began as a struggle between poor farm workers and wealthy landowners has morphed its way through the Cold War, the War on Terror and the War on Drugs and in its wake it has left an impossibly tangled web of lies and deceit. Funded by drugs and extortion the left-wing guerrillas battle both the army and a right-wing paramilitary that was originally established by the leaders of the drug cartels - yet is indirectly supported by the government. Meanwhile the poor terrorised farmers, whom everybody claims to be fighting for, are being massacred in their thousands by all sides in a war that, in reality, saw politics and compassion long ago leave the scene to be replaced with the simple truth that, funded by the West’s addiction to Colombia’s white powder kiss, has turned into nothing more than a free for all over control of the drug fields.

Long known as, ‘the murder capital of the world’, Medellin is Colombia in miniature. It’s a city that prides itself on its energy and sophistication, but whose other face looks just like a stunning starlet who cannot get enough of a bad thing. For, as if the war taking place in the cocaine killing fields of the countryside weren’t sufficient, Medellin has long been the leading lady in a vicious urban war, that, after cancer, has helped elevate drug fuelled urban crime into the biggest killer in Colombia today. For many years the city was essentially ruled by one man, Pablo Escobar, boss of what, at the time, was the most powerful drugs cartel in the world. ‘El Patrons’ reign may have come to an end in a splattering of bullets in 1993, but his legacy is remembered in a monument to peace placed in a city centre park that, in what could be seen as an ironic joke, was ripped apart by a bomb placed beside it by Escobar’s cronies.

This Colombia of destruction and news headlines is the one that we all know about, but as much as possible this story is not about headlines. This story is about the other Colombia, the beautiful Colombia of colour, love, passion and a people who live life with a greater intensity than anyone else I have ever met and it’s this Colombia that we hoped to encounter when we flew north from Medellin, to the Caribbean coast. We’d heard that things were mellower up here and that she’d be gentle with us and true enough it was smiles and sunshine all round. Palm trees tangoed in the wind; there were white sand beaches in abundance and a snow-coated mountain standing defiant just back from the ocean. This was the Colombia that you don’t hear of, the Colombia of salsa, rum and good times, but were there waves? Our first port of call were the jungle beaches close to the holiday town of Santa Marta, and here it seemed we had it all, a quiet beach skirted by the greenest of trees, a place to hang our hammocks and an empty line-up of punchy beach break waves bouncing off a granite boulder and forming zippy rights. We didn’t suffice ourselves with this one wave though and, in our search for other beaches, we covered miles of tracks, trails and roads that led to small beaches divided by pink hued rock headlands. Sometimes we’d be rewarded with a fun little shore break, but more often than not, we’d travel miles only to be greeted with messy, wind bruised closeouts slamming down with no form or finesse.

A glaring light and burning sand plains, even with a lady of such contradictions this wasteland was unexpected. Cabo de la Vela is a bulb shaped peninsula of empty desert, in what was once a forgotten corner of the Caribbean, but now, on its desiccated and parched gravel plains roam the bad men of Colombia. For it’s off the coves of this twisted shoreline that her most renowned export is pushed far out into the Caribbean and onwards to a world that’s ever more desperate for a kiss laced in coke. We slept on the beach at the edge of a small fishing village of corrugated huts set around a wide bay and, despite the bounty in the surrounding sea, we found that food was scarce and for much of the time we went hungry. With no roads and little transport, we found ourselves spending several hours a day walking through this scorched wilderness in our hunt for waves. On our first day we scrambled over rock strewn hills to the northern tip of the peninsula, where we came upon a miniature right hand point break. It was barely big enough to ride, but we were given a glimpse of its possibilities as it broke into a near constant offshore wind and peeled down the edge of cliffs for fifty metres or more; a hollow take-off subsiding into a gentle wall, which in turn gave way to a racy inside section. If we’d been there a week earlier when the swell was bigger, then who knows what watery bliss Colombia could have given us. It was returning from this wave late one evening, when Colombia instead gave us a taste of her evil wrath. Lost deep in our own thoughts, silently trudging over a sandy plain, we didn’t even notice the parked truck until we were almost on top of it. And by then it was too late; we’d been spotted and from around the back of it emerged half a dozen scruffily dressed men, Kalashnikov rifles hanging lethargically from their hands. We stopped dead, caught our breath and began slowly to back away. They started to shout and waved us over to them, but with no idea as to whether we were facing friend or foe we turned and ran towards a low ridge. Three of them followed us on foot and it became a tense few moments; horror stories flashed through my mind and I begun to question the sense of a surf trip here. It wasn’t until we were able to duck out of the way behind the ridge and that it became clear that our pursuers had given up the chase, that we felt able to breath easy. Even though we never saw them again this incident brought it home to us, this was no flirtatious game we were playing, for Colombia could hate us.

This encounter sent us into a whirl of doubts and we spun about and shot down the coast to the safety of the polished vanilla yellow city of Cartegana. A city that, with its bougainvillea crammed wooden balconies and bubbly street life is almost idyllic. Its plazas and boulevards are like an endless circus parade, there are mime artists with ghost white faces and dozens of sooty black painted human statues. There was the man conducting street puppet shows and the best jugglers I had ever seen. There’s an old historian and author who quoted the classics and looked the perfect part in bow tie and panama hat and the twenty-something girl who kissed me on the cheek and slipped me her phone number as she passed. There were the soldiers with machine guns who fed the pigeons in a flower filled square and the dirty kids, high on glue, who worked the Monday afternoon street crowds. Sitting on ancient city walls, eating ice-cream and watching a small right hander breaking below us, unmolested and uncaring to all the moods of this city, it was easy to forget that Colombia could despise us and, with our faith restored in her, we packed our bags and, like gallant knights of old, set forth to conquer her heart.

From the moment we arrived in Colombia, we knew that the journey we were about to undertake would always be the toughest challenge we would face here. The massive countryside of the Pacific coast is one of the least known places on the entire continent, the rain comes down in such torrents that it can wash away houses and makes any attempt at road construction futile. Walls of dense jungle, rampant malaria, little communication with the outside world and a strange little insect that eats people from the inside out have all combined to make this one of the world’s last great, unexplored wildernesses. Our launch pad to the secret heart of Colombia was the seedy port town of Buenaventura, sitting on the Pacific shoreline, it is, in every sense of the word, as far removed from glowing Cartegana as you can get. This small and water-logged town is a hotbed of armed illegal groups and is one of only three places on the entire Colombian Pacific coast that can be reached by road. For a man after a wave this lack of roads means there is only one way in which to travel and so we set out with enthusiasm to find a boat to carry us southward in a hunt for waves. This turned out to be a hot and frustrating task and no-one seemed keen to take us, but eventually our persistence paid off and late one evening, as the sun sunk from the sky, we pulled out of the port on a rotten wooden cargo boat and, leaving behind the sticky mangrove swamps that surrounded the town, we set sail, destined for a place we didn’t know. That night was rough, cockroaches crawled over our bodies and the intensity of the heat kept me from sleeping. Instead I spent much of the night sat on the deck with the rain pattering down around me, listening to the rhythmic chugging of the engine and the occasional eerie cry from the distant forest. The next morning revealed a leaden sky and heavy rain drumming at the boats deck, we were no longer out at sea, but were moving ever so slowly through a watery maze of river channels and impenetrable forest. Just as I started to think that mans influence no longer existed in this world of giant trees, we came upon a village, where it seemed as if the whole population had gathered on the river bank to greet our arrival. Our boat was continuing its journey upriver, and so left us here; we had no real idea as to where we were and not much more as to where we wanted to go. Small motorboats were leaving for other misplaced jungle villages and we clambered onto one whose owner assured us he was heading towards the sea and possible waves.

Wet, cold and shivering, we sat huddled out of the rain under a sheet of polythene with the other passengers, we were drifting at the whim of nature, caught in eddies and currents, bouncing off muddy river banks and drifting to a halt on shallow sand bars, this was natures domain and we had no control over her. Our driver had failed to bring enough fuel with him for the whole of our journey and now we had nothing to do but wait. Eventually, with the help of the currents and some paddling we reached a tiny village of wooden stilt houses, where, with much reluctance, the headman was persuaded to sell us some fuel. Through narrow river channels and backwater tributaries we continued our journey, passing under the great canopies of trees, the rain continued to fall in torrents and all around us was the misty silence of the forest.

Then finally, and without warning, it happened. We rounded a corner and there, peeling down the side of the river bank, were head high waves, unseen, unsurfed waves. We were amazed, we hadn’t even realized that we were near the sea, and to be honest, I’m still not sure that we were. All around us was jungle and the ocean felt a long way off. The waves were strange, unlike anything any of us had ever before seen and they can only really be described as bore waves, but ones that broke in regular sets, they were long, but fat, good for plank riders. It was however a creepy place, trees overhung the waves and the water was a thick, sludgy brown, its inhabitants unknown. From this point on it happened again and again, we would sink back into a black river passage and the sea could be a hundred kilometres away, but rounding a corner and a wave would spring up, always they were strange, we had the feeling that they weren’t quite real, that this was just a one off occurrence. Some peeled down the riverbanks for hundreds of metres, others broke onto shallow sandbars and were hollow, but maybe none had ever before seen a surfer. Even now, I could never really point to a map and show you exactly where we were; it felt to me as if reality were fading and that maybe those river channels had carried us back in time to a prehistoric surf world, whose true potential may never be known to anyone but the occasional village fisherman whose life is spent fighting the hidden waves of the river. Eventually our journey through the untamed jungles of southern Colombia came to a halt somewhere near the border of Ecuador. We left the boat feeling dazed and beaten and I couldn’t help but wonder if those waves really had existed or were they just mysterious images that had drifted into focus deep in the dark guts of the forest?

From here the plan had been simple - catch a boat over the border to the playful waves of Ecuador, but in the end things didn’t follow this path and it proved too complicated to charter a boat. Instead we found ourselves on a bus, heading back inland to the official border crossing, with heads ducked low, out of sight of the guns that lined the road, behind which stood the guerrillas who are helping to tear the tormented heart of Colombia to pieces. It was her bitter goodbye kiss to us, and our final glimpse into the cauldron of moods and personalities that sit behind the dark and compelling eyes of every irresistible mistress.

As always thanks to Oceansurf Publications, www.oceansurfpublications.co.uk and C-Skins Wetsuits, www.c-skins.com for sending us on such a seductive date.