The planes are chartered in Miami; the small ones make refuelling stops in the Caribbean, the larger ones fly direct to the Guajira. Occasionally, arrests are made - flying an empty plane into Colombia is a criminal offense- but only the small-fry are sent to jail. The rest buy their way out or pull strings in Bogotá - only the most naive person balks at the suggestion that many Colombian politicians are closely involved in the drug trade. The successful American smuggler can make millions in this way; the Colombians use their money by buying expensive houses, or cars, refrigerators, hi-fi sets and deep freezes in Miami; they set themselves up in Barranquilla as gentry. But, apart from their unusual houses, they try to remain inconspicuous. One drug dealer imported a Rolls-Royce Comiche at a cost of $400,000; but the other dealers would not let him drive it on the streets of Barranquilla -they felt it was too ostentatious, and that reprisals would be made against them. As for the small-fry who are caught and jailed - not much can be done for them. Their money is confiscated and they serve long sentences. There were twenty Americans in the Barranquilla prison when I passed through, and the American consulate which had been closed for a number of years had reopened solely to deal with them. But the consulate also issues visas: the demand for American visas increased a hundred-fold after the Barranquillans became rich in the drug trade.
The election was over, but the Bogotá train was not leaving until the next day. With a day to kill I did what most people do with time on their hands: I went sight-seeing. I took a dreadful local bus west along the coast road to the old-it was founded in 1533 -city of Cartagena. Cartagena had been what Barranquilla is now, a place of smugglers, pirates and adventurers, and the fortifications are like the Barranquilla houses on a large scale. If you can ignore the pitiful huts along the way, and the scary road, and the scream of the horn, and the heat, Cartagena is charming. It is venerable and attractive, a museum in the open air. The castle, the sea walls, the plazas and churches and convents are all pretty and well-preserved. But it is boredom and idleness that motivate sightseers, and even in this fine city there was not enough to take away my feelings of restlessness. I wandered into the Hotel Bolivar. The upstairs dining room was empty, but cool; four fans turned on the ceiling and the boughs of trees rattled against the balcony. I had fresh hearts of palm and a dish of Cuban rice and wrote a letter to my wife on the hotel's note-paper, and at once it seemed a day well-spent.
On my way to the post office to mail my letter I passed the curio shops. The curios were identical to the ones I had seen all through Central America: leather goods, Indian embroidery (it struck me once again that the Indians had been subverted, if not blinded, by having been turned into seamstresses: or was the crocheting of table napkins a native art?), clumsy carvings, cow-hoofs made into ashtrays and alligators into lamp stands and more stuffed toads with glass eyes. Trade was brisk. Here was a line of tourists near a cash register: one carried a coconut mask, another a stitched tablecloth, and others fibre mats and alligators. The last, a rather abstracted woman in a sweat-stained frock, held a coiled whip.
One street in Cartagena I found worthy of study. Here there was nothing but pawnshops, each with the sign We Buy And Sell Everything. It was not the old clothes, the toasters, the watches and used boots that interested me; it was the tools. Half the merchandise in these pawnshops was builders' equipment. There were wrenches, drills, screwdrivers in many sizes, awls, clawhammers, planes, axes, monkey-wrenches, plumb-bobs, spirit-levels, plasterers' hods and spikes and trowels. All had been pawned, all were for sale. And I began to understand why no one was working on those half-built houses between Cartagena and Barranquilla: the workers had pawned their tools. If there had been a few tools in each shop, or only a few shops selling tools, it would not have seemed so remarkable. But these pawnshops were like hardware stores, and the signs said that the pawned goods would be kept for three months and then sold; this was resignation and no mistake. There were enough tools in the shops to rebuild Colombia, and enough idle people, too. But it was a smuggling, thieving society; a hammer or a saw was not a tool - it was a form of currency, an article oftrade.
But, so far, what had I seen? Only this small stretch of coast. I decided to move on; I might, I thought, find something different. I began to seek information about the train and I rediscovered, after that pleasant train-ride in Panama, the difficulties of train travel in Latin America. It was never simple. And it was not the poor service or the bad trains, but rather the fact that no one knew anything about them. The general routes are well-known from Mexico to South America; many people travel from capital to capital. But they fly, and the poorer travellers take the bus. Few people seemed to know that the railways exist, and those who claim to know have never taken them. One person says it takes twelve hours from Santa Marta to Bogotá, another swears it is twenty-four hours; I was told there was no sleeper, but the Cook's Timetable listed one. Was there a diner, did I need a sleeping bag, was it air-conditioned? 'Do yourself a favour,' I was told. Take the plane. That's what Colombians do.'
I found that I was always travelling to a popular place by an unknown route. I seldom had any idea of how much it would cost, or how long it would take, or even whether I would arrive. This made for a certain anxiety, since I was always presuming or drawing my own conclusions from the thin black line that signified a railway on the map. I knew I was not in Europe, but this train service was less dependable than any in Asia. No timetables were published locally, little information was available, and what there was to know could only be found out at the station itself, if I had the good luck to locate it (The railway station - are you sure you want the railway station?' I was asked by any number of vague locals). The information I needed I usually got from a man sweeping out the waiting room or a mango seller at the door. Before each journey, I inquired at the station from these people (who knew the answer because they were always there: they saw the trains come and go); I found out the times of the trains. But I was still uneasy; I had seen nothing in writing, I had no ticket, no official confirmation. Ticket windows were only opened a few hours before the train was to go. The mystery was not solved until the day of travel. I would arrive at the ticket window and give my destination, and the ticket seller would be surprised to see me, and a little incredulous, as if I had penetrated his secret by some devious stratagem. He would hesitate and giggle; but the game was over -1 had won by finding him. He had no choice but to sell me a ticket.
And it did seem something like an elaborate game in which I was pursuing something that often eluded me; discovering the train, finding the station, buying the ticket, boarding and dropping into a seat became an end in itself. The travel was epilogue when it was not anticlimax. I was so preoccupied with this ticket-business that I frequently forgot where I was going, and, on being asked, found the question of dubious pertinence and said, 'Nowhere.'