‘This is a story of a trip with a group of friends in the north region of Colombia, the trip started in Santa Marta and finished in el Cabo de la vela. The story is told in 7 parts, this is Part 2 of the story, you can read part 1 here.
Part 3 of this story is all about how we moved form one destination to another during our trip to the northernmost point of the country, and is possibly the most exciting part of the story. Although I must confess it wasn’t my brightest moment and many of the things I did were incredibly dangerous and I would not recommend anyone to attempt anything similar; this is the reason why I was originally going to omit this part of the story. I need to begin by explaining how, after the reckless way in which I made my way to Palomino and met my friends to finally land in total safety, the series of errors continued as we were about to leave, towards the Flamingo park.
It was the first of January and we were hoping to catch one of the flotas that made their way towards la guajira, however none of us knew that on the 1st of January, flotas are not available and private taxi drivers were too hungover from all the new year celebrations to get behind the wheel safely. We were expected at the park, we had made arrangements and another friend was joining us there so it was imperative that we arrived on that day and so, we decided to hitchhike. Luckily, a man was driving back to el Cerrejón, the coal mining area, and agreed to take us all in his pickup with the condition nobody rode in the deck, since it was a company car and carrying passengers was forbidden.
The six of us jumped into the truck, two in the front and four in the back, we couldn’t wear seat belts on account of the lack of space and extra people in the pickup. However we were really excited to feel the AC for the first time in weeks. The man who picked us up was really nice and enjoyed having someone to talk to during a portion of his long drive from Cali and was particularly excited to show and play for us music from his carefully organized and labeled salsa CD collection.
And that was when one of the scariest moments of my life happened, the driver got distracted while changing a CD, when he looked up the road was curving and we were about to leave the road, he maneuvered the wheel to the left, entering the incoming traffic lane at a high speed and following up with a counter maneuver that ran us out of the road, into a ditch and a few centimeters from a tree.
Nobody got hurt, the car was fine and our friendly host was able to drive us to our destination, but the remaining half an hour of the drive we all just sat there quietly staring straight ahead and with our hearts beating in our throats while the sounds of Cali pachanguero inundated the cooled pickup truck.
End of part 3, you can read part 4 here.