We set off in two Land Cruisers early on Friday morning, with Colombian drivers, in high spirits and full of expectation. After two weeks on the edge of the jungle, everyone was ready for a bit of the old vida regalada, or, as some call it, high life. Everyone, that is, except Sparky Springer, who preferred to stay in camp on his own, eating shit, and refused to spend a single centavo if he could avoid it. Since he was easily the most proficient guy on the 319 radio, it was no bad thing that he stayed on site.
By third-world standards the road was pretty good, with only the odd mega pothole to double up the Toyota’s springs, and the main obstacles to progress were pack-animals and buses. Donkeys and mules were plodding along under huge burdens, often with loads so wide that they took up as much space as a car. The peasants leading or riding them mostly wore dark-coloured hats like pork pies, with little turned-up rims, although some of the women had their heads swathed in black scarves.
The buses were going faster than the carts and donkeys, but not much. Just to look at, they were quite an eyeful, because every square inch of the bodywork was painted in brilliant colours, hot reds, yellows and blues. A lot of the decoration was in formal patterns, but often, in the middle of a panel, there’d be an elaborate picture — a view of mountains, a stretch of coastline, a church or a bridge. Every vehicle must have taken hundreds of hours to paint. They were grossly overloaded, stuffed to the gills with passengers, and most were leaning drunkenly to right or left, with half the suspension knackered. Black diesel smoke poured from their exhausts, and the slightest uphill incline dragged them down to about 20 m.p.h., if not to a halt.
Some of the hilly country we went through was farmed, but thousands of acres were still scrub. Beside the road peasants were selling fruit and bottled drinks from little shacks made of corrugated tin. Every village had a whitewashed church with a big cross above it, and all along the roadside were shrines to the Virgin Mary, with statues set in little arched recesses. As we progressed through a mountain pass, we saw that some of the shrines were hacked out of the living rock. Everything looked primitive and peaceful, and it was hard to imagine that the country was in the grip of narco-war.
As we trundled along I tried to think forward. The Colombians wanted the grand finale of our training to take place in Bogotá. The idea was that a team of our best recruits would show off their newly learnt skills by taking the president himself, or maybe his deputy, straight through the centre of the capital in a three-car motorcade, with a big, armoured limo in the centre, to the national stadium. Even though that great event was still a month or more ahead, I was keen to see some of the course over which it would take place.
For almost all our four-hour journey we were climbing, so the air became progressively cooler. Peter Black had warned us that we might feel faint at first, because the city’s nearly 9,000 feet above sea-level, and if you go up to that height quickly you can suffer from lack of oxygen. Maybe the drive had been slow enough to allow us to acclimatize; whatever, we simply felt relieved to escape from the heat.
The run-in to Bogotá was across a level plain, with a haze of smog ahead of us, and big mountains dominating the eastern skyline. Our first sight of the city was a severe let-down. Along the sides of the road there was a straggle of tumbledown shacks, which gradually thickened up into a vast and incredibly sordid jumble. Corrugated tin, parts of old cars, wooden boards, inverted bathtubs, doors, canvas, sheets of metal, plywood and cardboard — you name it, the Colombians had used it to run up their hovels. Mangy-looking dogs were nosing about the heaps of garbage. Tethered donkeys stood around, eyes shut, ears back. ‘Shitsville!’ cried someone — and so it was. These were the notorious barrios, or slums, that people had kept telling us about. Even passing through with the car windows closed, we got the impression that the place must stink to high heaven.
Soon, though, we were through the worst, and into an area that was still poor but at least had proper buildings. Our driver, Simon, who spoke a few words of English, had been proposing to head round the western outskirts to our destination in the northern quarter, but I told him to go right through the centre, so that we could get a look at it. Shiny high-rise blocks loomed ahead, and after a few more minutes we came to the centre itself. Another world. Suddenly we could have been in any prosperous European or American city — Frankfurt, Brussels, Chicago. Gleaming skyscrapers of glass and steel soared into the sky, and at street level the shops were as glossy as could be, full of expensive clothes, furniture, video cameras, hi-fi and other electronic equipment. Cafes, bars, restaurants and cinemas jostled in between. The contrast with the slums was incredible.
The city had been built on a grid system, with the main streets running north and south; but every one was jammed solid by cars and buses. With so many engines ticking over, the pollution was horrendous. The combination of smog and altitude made it difficult to breathe. Whenever lights changed and a mass of traffic surged forward, every driver clapped his hand on the horn and kept it there, so that the noise was outrageous as well.
‘We’ll need to watch ourselves here,’ I said as an old woman narrowly escaped death under the wheels of a cement truck. ‘They don’t give a flying monkey’s for pedestrians.’
‘Sure don’t,’ Tony replied. ‘And the other thing you need to watch out for is pickpockets. See all those kids — those street urchins? Gamines. They’re partly beggars, partly thieves. While one’s accosting you, another slides up and tries to snatch your wallet.’
Soon I realized that the system of street names, or rather numbers, could hardly have been simpler. All the big roads running north and south, parallel with the mountains, were called carreras, or avenues. The streets running across them at right-angles were calles. We were heading north on Carrera Septima, and the further we went, the higher the number of the calles became, rising from single figures in the centre. As we inched our way forward, Simon kept up a running commentary, pointing out sights of interest.
On one corner, where crowds of people were milling about among some stalls on the pavement, he pointed and said, ‘These men selling esmeralda.’
‘Emeralds in the street?’
‘Ciertamente,’ said Simon indignantly. ‘Every day.’
I had a sudden vision of an emerald necklace flashing on Tracy’s skin. Wouldn’t green stones look fabulous on her freckled neck, framed by that chestnut hair?
The Calle numbers kept rising, through the twenties, into the thirties and forties. Our hotel, the Bonavento, was way out on Calle 93, but conveniently placed within a few blocks of the British Embassy on 98. The further north we drove, the ritzier the surroundings became; from the number of big houses set back inside walled compounds, it was clear that we were entering the smart residential area of the city. There were also fancy-looking restaurants by the dozen.
The Hostal Bonavento turned out to be smaller than I’d expected, and they tried to pack us in three to a room; but I insisted that we got four rooms altogether. That meant one lot of three and three pairs, and I went into a room with Tony. We dumped our kit, had a wash and went for a quick lunch. I’d already arranged to go round to the embassy at 2.30, and I wanted Tony to come with me; but I told everyone else that they could fix their own programmes, provided they were back at the hotel and fit to travel in time for our return journey at lunchtime on Sunday.
I think at the back of my mind I’d been hoping that the embassy would be a beautiful old colonial building, standing in the middle of a walled garden. Far from it. It was merely a suite of offices on the fourth floor of a modern tower block, with the amazing name the Torre Propaganda Sancho. Having sat on our arses for four hours we opted to walk round there rather than take a taxi.