Water cascaded out of a pipe dropping a couple of meters and landed heavily on a tin roof. Motorcyclists in panchos rode through deep puddles. After three days of clear weather my first excursion is scheduled for a rainy day. At eight my traveling companion showed himself and we discussed whether or not to go on our trip. Richard thought that he could call the girl he met the night before but then figured she wouldn’t show up in the rain anyway. After a bit of putzing around we grabbed the grub I had procured the night before, a couple of sandwiches and 4 skewers jammed with chicken and headed off in a random direction. After a while we decided that we could cut the trip short by actually going in the direction of the river which by this time we could not ascertain. A few inquiries and a couple of turns later we headed to the dock to meet Roberto, who was to take us on our cruise to Isla Miko (Monkey Island). Roberto was nowhere to be found so I inquired about and was finally directed to somebody who might be interested in a longer excursion. I wondered what the rest of these people were planning to do all day if they were not going to take people out. The guy told us that he could take us for two hundred thousand pesos. Yesterday we had established a price of one hundred fifty thousand, but Roberto was not here. The man went into the usual bullshit about the high price of gas, (ok it’s five dollars a gallon but you are not going to burn more than five gallons) and then showed us a pre-printed price list as this ostensibly gave validity to this high price. I took out a sheet of paper and prepared a pre-printed price list that was much lower. Richard found this amusing. We failed to conclude a deal and started to walk off. A man around the corner observed this and clandestinely approached us and we struck a deal. We procured some ice, 10 bottles of water and 6 beers and put them in the cooler along with the food and headed out. The boat was one of the smallest on the river but it did have a cover. We droned down the river for a bit and stopped at ???? were we could observe the flora and fauna. Two parrots were perched under a thatched cover. A raised boardwalk beckoned us and then fell to nothing. The rain was not abating and my camera was fogging up.
The man explained that the cost of walking around and taking pictures was ten thousand pesos and Richard squawked “It’s five dollars, Christ.” Then we started our tour. Richard didn’t want to walk in the mud, “Hey bud, you are in the jungle, it rains. You are wearing sandals that you can wash off in the river, what is the big deal? Do you just need to bitch about everything? God you whine a lot.” So we saw the big trees and the lilies that were a meter and a half across, viewed the garden took a few pictures and left. We continued up the river and Richard bitched about the duration of the trip, the rain, This was becoming wearisome.
A couple of hours into our trip arrived at the island. We walked by a gift shop with monkey skulls and piranha jaws, blow guns, bows and arrows and the various accoutrements of indigenous Amazonian people. A large man wanted to know how long we were going to be there. Why do you need to know? What difference does it make? Forty thousand pesos to feed the monkeys? I don’t think so, let them fend for themselves. Then we walked down the board walk, when we neared the end we were told that to go further for the 10 minute walk to where the monkeys were would cost us forty thousand pesos and yes this was a private preserve. I said “I’ve seen a whole lot of god damn monkeys in the wild without a charge of admission” and this time I agreed with Richard and we walked back to the reception area. The restaurant probably had 20 tables, each of which could seat 6 people, these guys had a good little deal going for them. Thirty locals just stared at us, having obviously nothing else to do. We walked over to the gift shop followed by a crew of observers. They demonstrated their proficiency in English. Picking up a blowgun, “Blowgun.” Picking up the jaws of a Piranha, “Piranha”. I picked up a caiman tooth and said, “dente camain.”, “Si”. Picking up a wooden phallus, I said “penis”. Whatever, adios.
We wanted to stop at one of the villages on the banks and pointed to one but our captain told us that that was Peru and he couldn’t make an international trip. I guess that is because they didn’t have an immigration office like Santa Rosa where you could find an immigration official if you looked hard enough. We entered and opening on the Colombian side of the river and wound our way around the bends and the floating debris; now this was more like it. Typical Indian village, wooden shacks, no electricity, outhouses, a couple of sidewalks, some dirt trails, chickens. A great many children peered out the windows at us, Women looked at us suspiciously. What the hell are these white guys here for anyway. Richard observed “I don’t think they want us here.”
I walked over to a kid, put my hat on his head, he smiled and I took his picture, his friends laughed and everybody loosened up. The women smiled at us, waved back at us. These were some really pretty women. As we walked by a man with a chisel and a hammer Richard stepped away like he was a poisonous snake even though he was 12 feet away. I said, “got you are such a git” and walked behind the fence and talked to the man expressing interest in his work. He showed me that he was mortising a rail for a bed, showed me the bed and then a big one inside his house. I asked him if he was like Joseph padre Jesus Christo but he had no idea what I was talking about. A nun walked down the street and I thought I saw Richard drool lustily. We returned to town, went to a bar and watched amazingly drunk Indians stagger around. Locals tried to give us home made rum. I am not sure how a bar works where patrons show up with their own liquor and the other patrons don’t even know what planet they are on. One guy picked up a bottle of soda,
put his lips to the straw and then lifted the bottle as if he was going to drink out of it. As it was now two inches from his mouth and his mouth was closed around the straw it just spilled off his chin, down his shirt and onto his pants.
Three people at the next table wanted to practice their English on us. I figured they were having enough problem with their own language, maybe due to the lack of dentition; there wasn’t a full set of teeth between the three of them. This was getting tiresome and I suggested that we go to across the road there being a bar on the river with more things to see. A couple of kids sat there and clacked bolos, two balls on each end of a string, an ancient hunting device that I explained to Richard. Two guys and an incredibly hot young woman sat at a table. I joined them, one of the guys was a student studying law in Medellin, the others had never left this small city. The woman avoided my eyes, finally told me she was married. We watched the boats go by and the clouds on the horizon while the sun set behind an island.
We walked back into town and had no success with any of the women we approached. Richard agreed that they did not demonstrate the usual Colombian willingness to be a companion for a day or a night. He had to get online to place some bets. I had some catching up to do so we went to the internet café and then went our separate ways, probably in pursuit of the same thing.
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