Caño Cristales, Part 1

It was too dark to really see anything, but the sound of combat boots trudging through the grass toward our campsite was unmistakable.  Two armed soldiers approached the tent where Saul and I had set up for the night near a small farm house in the boondocks of Meta, Colombia, a region swarming with army types thanks to the land’s infamous fertility for certain not-so-legal crops and the consequential presence of not-so-governmental military groups.  

Honestly, I was relieved that someone had arrived to relieve the impending awkwardness when Saul and I would run out of conversation topics.  We had already spent the entire day together traveling and hiking, going through our stories and jokes like a tube of Pringles and we were reaching the last crumbs of interesting material.  So when the camouflaged men arrived in the night, we both greeted them enthusiastically: “Hey!  How’s it going?  Hot day today, no?  It’s cooling off now though.  Did you guys walk far?”

Despite what the townsfolk had warned us about the scary soldiers of the backwoods with their big guns and their bureaucratic rules about trespassing, these two turned about to be normal friendly humans.  Within two minutes, we were all chuckling and chatting it up in the near-pitch blackness of the starlit jungle evening, swapping adventure tales about their boot camp and our travels a La backpacker.  Eventually they fessed up why they had come to pay us a visit in the first place:

“Some people from the town called us on the radio and said they had seen two young folks walking by themselves out to the caño.  They said one was a pastusa (a person from Pasto, Colombia) with a funny accent and a fake ID number and it seemed fishy.”

Saul and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.  It seemed a simple joke had gone a little too far.

Let me back up a bit...

When we arrived to the town La Macarena, guides fluttered around us like moths to a lantern.  Tourism from the renowned Caño Cristales river is the only thing keeping the economy afloat out there in the middle of war-torn cocaine land.  But Saul and I had come with heavy backpacks, light wallets and a hankering for adventure.  We were simply not interested in paying $50 per day to be herded around with a flock of sun-screened families listening to a local in blue jeans calling off names of the plants and the birds.  

The people in the town told us there was no other way, that only the guides had permission to access the caño, inferring that the jungle soldiers would pounce on us from behind and tear our throats out with their fangs if we didn’t have the proper paperwork, which was coincidentally only available through their outrageously overpriced services.  We smiled, nodded, thanked them for their advice and continued walked to the port of the Rio Magdalena which separates the town from the road that leads to the caño.  

...to be continued...