Day 245 - Monday 22nd May 2006

Aaron & I woke up early as planned, packed our things up and checked out of our hostel. Our plan was to head to the Pacific coast of Colombia for the week before heading back to Cali for the weekend to hit the town.

We left our bags in the hostel whilst we searched for an Internet place to email our families and let them know we’d most likely be out of contact for the best part of the week, in order that they wouldn’t worry. This is always something I would rather do, especially when I am in a place like Colombia which isn’t exactly renowned for it safety.

As I looked on the Internet and in particular the BBC I noticed a small headline in the Americas section saying ‘Bombing Spate In Colombian Port Town Injures 5’. Interested to know exactly whereabouts for future reference I opened it up and lo and behold it was in Buenaventura, the exact place we were about to head to.

Erring on the side of caution we decided that it probably wasn’t the wisest idea to be heading to a town that is in the middle of a spate of bombings, and decided that maybe a week on the beach wasn’t going to happen.

We went for a little breakfast to discuss our next move and sitting at one of the tables was a guy we had met in Pasto. We sat down and started talking about plans and the usual and he mentioned in passing that because of the upcoming elections that weekend, everything in the country was shutting for the weekend. Everything. Shops & banks wouldn’t be opening, buses wouldn’t be running and even bars were being forced to close. This was going to start on the Friday and last for the entire weekend until the elections on Sunday.

There were two stories going around as to why everything was closing. The first was that in the run up to the last elections there was a large bombing in a bar in the capital Bogota which killed lots of people, and it was in an attempt to curb the effect of any bombings that everything was closing down. The second story went that if the bars and shops didn’t close the Colombians would either go shopping instead of voting or just get too pissed and forget to vote! I prefer the second story but in reality it was probably the first that was true, especially considering the President has declared war on the terrorists and the paramilitary group FARC had come out and said they would be trying their best to oust the president from office.

So everything closing on the weekend had put another spanner in the works. Cali was a party town, and so there wasn’t really much to be hanging around for if we weren’t going to have a party at the weekend.

We returned to the hostel and decided to take a taxi to the bus station and make our minds up on the spur of the moment. The two options we were considering were Popayan and Medellin. Both towns were supposed to be pretty decent places in which to hang around. Popayan was 2 hours away, Medellin 9 hours. When we got to the bus station for some reason I went a little crazy and made the spur of the moment decision that we should in fact get on a bus for 22 hours to the Caribbean coast and stay there for the election week.

The thinking was that a small beach town wasn’t likely to be the target of FARC terrorists, and also that the laws concerning alcohol sales might not be enforced as highly! Thus we boarded a bus for Cartagena on the north coast, a journey that was purported to take 22 hours.

Settling in on a pretty comfortable bus we were pretty pleased with our choice but looking forward to 22 hours time. I was excited about taking my new Valium pills and getting a decent sleep for the first time on a night bus. Up until it was time to take the Valium and drop off into the world of slumber, I tried to get through some more of Atlas Shrugged. That book was proving to be a real challenge. The story is interesting and it is very well written, but it isn’t a book that you can just pick up and put down at will, it takes a fair amount of concentration to read it.

I read most of the time, only being disturbed when a group of Army soldiers - all aged about 14 – stopped the bus, and made every male on board get off whilst they searched us at gunpoint.

Anyway, the time to take the pills came around, so take them I did. That’s where it got interesting. Not 10 minutes after I had taken them, we pulled up in a traffic jam. Bear in mind this is about midnight, on a road where you wouldn’t expect traffic. The bus didn’t move for about an hour, and everyone on the bus was getting more and more tense.

Aaron & I were the only two tourists on the bus, the rest were locals. Normally the locals never get tense. Which meant something was wrong. This didn’t worry me too much as the Valium was by now in full force and I was pretty drowsy. Then I looked out of the window of the bus and there were flashing lights in the distance, like flashes of gunfire lighting up the midnight sky. These went on for about another hour, lighting up the sky intermittently. All the time Aaron and I were getting a little more nervous, having heard the stories of travellers being kidnapped and taken off into the jungle.

There wasn’t really much we could do, sat in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night, apart from wait it out and hope that whoever was holding up the traffic wasn’t in the market for two English lads!

After two hours, we got a knock on the door of the bus, and a guy covered head to foot in camouflage, with a scarf/bandana across his face, holding an AK47 came on board. We’d been searched before and made to show our Passports, so I was expecting the same again, but this guy wasn’t the police or army, he had no badges or ID, so we concluded he must have been something to with the FARC.

Whether or not we were right in our conclusions I have no idea, but for the next hour while we were sitting there we were not really sure what to think, and so when we were finally given clearance to carry on with our journey the relief came over us and we sat back and fell into a deep, Valium-induced, comfortable-in-the-knowledge-that-we-had-survived-our-first-FARC-experience sleep.