Last stop, Bogota. 

It’s little more than a long layover, but it’s my final stopping point before heading back to the states.  After this it’s Orlando for a long-ago planned weekend with a group of 7 friends from Vermont (our Virginia buddy, Ed, got an exemption). 

Right now I’m eating my last South American breakfast.  I’m going to miss my South American breakfasts.  The Arepas and Empanada (which if you like deep fried wads of dough, crammed full of meat or cheese, then these babies are for you) are delicious.  Add a kick-upside-the-head cup of Colombian coffee and a fresh squeezed fruit juice, from one of the 700 or so different kinds they seem to have here and you’re looking at the best sub-$2 breakfast you’ll ever eat.

And it wouldn’t have been complete without someone coming up to me asking if I wanted to buy something.  This time, emeralds.  He’s barking up the wrong demographic with me on that one.  

I am going to miss that omnipresent sales pitch that is a day in Southeast Asia or South America.  At times it feels you’re constantly holding two conversations at once…the one with the person you’re with, and the continuous stream of ‘no, thank yous’ to the offers of taxis, sodas, beer, candy, woman, T-shirts, marriage, souvenirs, drawings, salvation, food, coke–both kinds–guesthouses, weed–one kind–tours and pretty much anything you can think of…including just yesterday…coloring books.  Again, I ask, am I really the right demographic for this guy to be wasting his time trying to sell a coloring book to?  My favorite offer though is the ambiguously wide open, “What you want?  I get it for you.”  And I don’t doubt he can either. 

“What you want?  I get it for you.”

“Oh yeah?  Well can you find me a case of uncooked #8 spagetti, cut them all exactly 3 and 5/32ths of an inch, paint 33.8% of them blue,  and build me an exact replica of Tampa stadium and then re-enact the entire Super Bowl with little rigatoni-Steelers and penne-Cardinals, but this time have the Steelers cover the spread?”

“Sure, sure…Give me 5 minutes.  I have a friend…”

—

I don’t seem to have the best sense of who to pick to take photos for me.  Check this beauty out. 

 

That’s me on the right, next to me is Steve, and then Kevin and Ragu, the two Canadians I spent time with in Santa Marta.  They had been off camping, but then we ran into them again here in Cartagena.  Seeing as they proved to be such good luck charms on the last bet, I told them to come along  with us to the casino…The sight of this picture.

It was a pretty scruffy place.  The lettering on the felt table where I dropped my roullette bet was faded and discolored from years of clumsy players spilling rum and cokes.  There was no consensus from the other three, so I opted for the 1-18 section.  If it hit between those numbers, the four of us would be testing out the Cartagena nightlife with house money.  If it hit 19-36 or Zero, then the four of us would be…well, we would be testing out the Caragena nightlife.  Only now, they’d have my dead weight and empty wallet along for the ride. 

I don’t know if it was the Canadian human good luck charms or a lucky bounce, but the ball popped out of 21 at the last moment and rolled over to 8. 

I cashed the chips, we took the picture and piled into a taxi and went looking for Cartagenian fun. 

Perhaps the Canadian good charms only work when it comes to gambling, because we happened to have chosen the one day of the year that Cartagena apparently shuts down.  One would think, ‘holiday’ would equate to ‘festive’, but whatever this holiday was, festive it was not.  We asked Freddie, a local guy we had met earlier what holiday it was.

He shrugged, “somebody was born.  Or maybe they died.  You never know.  We got holidays for everything.”

With Freddie leading the way, the five of us piled…clowncar-like…into a tiny taxi and headed, I don’t know, east? west?  somewhere out of town in search of “a place he knew”.  Steve was already down one wallet after the Bogota incident, so we were hoping “place he knew” didn’t turn out to be an abandoned factory with Freddie’s buddies waiting for us. 

Instead, it turned out to be the Pleyboy Club.  And, no, that isn’t a typo.  Who knows, maybe the owner was worried about Hef coming to Colombia and suing him for copywright infringement.

If one were looking for women, this was your place.

Though it was only your place if you should also be looking to pay for said women. 

We were not.  Or at least no one in the group was fessing up to it if they were.  So back in the clowncar we piled…Freddie in the front, Ragu, Steve and me in the back and about 4 feet of Kevin’s 6 feet 5 inches in the back and the remaining 2′ 5″ hanging over into the front.  During the ride Freddie told us about the time he rode in a container on a cargo ship to the states about 10 years ago.  He and a bunch of other guys were put inside the container with water, fruit and tins of tunafish and when they got to Houston area, the container was opened and they were snuck ashore.  He stayed a few years and then either came back or was sent back. 

We tried a few more places in the Getsimani area but they were locked shut for the holiday.  The few places that were open were graveyards, so we continued our wild goose chase.  Again, it was oddly difficult to spend the winnings.  Except for clowncar cab fare.  That we were burning up at a fast pace.

Finally, after numerous other dead ends we found a suitable place to squander my ill-gotten gains.  It took til 4:00 AM to do so, but do it we did. 

Another thing I’m not?  4:00 AM Guy.  I can do it, mind you.  It’s just that the next day I become Worthless Piece of Humanity Guy.  And the entire next day would have been shot if we hadn’t found the basketball game. 

After two months of seeing basketball courts filled with people playing soccer, finally a court was actually being put to proper use, and so Steve, Kevin and I jumped at the chance. 

Great thing about basketball is, no matter where you are or who you are, if you can play you can walk up to any pickup game and get in.  The other thing you can count on whether you’re playing in NYC, Vermont or Colombia?  There’s always going to be a ballhog.  I don’t know how you say it in Spanish–poleta de cerdo ?–but Steve got the short end of the stick and wound up with one on his team.  Steve was twice the player this guy was, but he would shoot most everytime and then bitch at Steve for not getting the rebound on the inevitable miss. 

Still, it was a blast to get out and play, get the competitive juices flowing again, and–after two months of trying to be unfailingly polite seeing as I was a visitor in someone else’s country–it was cathartic to jaw a little over bad calls. 

One other thing about the basketball…it confirmed my thesis that the less you spend travelling, the more enjoyable it becomes.  Whether it’s staying in cheap guesthouses where you’re bound to interact with cool fellow travellers, unlike in a ritzier hotel where there is little chance or encouragement to get to know other guests.  Or eating at cheap eats places where you’re crammed in at communal tables with entertaining strangers as opposed to being sequestered off in your own booth at a nice restaurant.

Or buses vs. planes.  Buses can be a major pain in the ass, but I’m going to remember bussing through Cambodia with a Spaniard or bribing cops along the border of VZ and Colombia much longer than I will my Hong Kong to Manila flight.

And I’m going to remember playing hoops with some good friends and some local Colombian guys on a cracked-asphalt court in a park in the middle of beautiful Cartagena as the sun set a lot longer than a good many other things I’ve done.  And it cost me nada.

—

I think this might be the penultimate post.  I get back to the states tomorrow, then it’s Orlando with friends as I mentioned.  I probably won’t get the last post up until Monday or Tuesday, but check back then for the last bit of Colombia, the re-cap on Orlando and my final bet.  (actually, I take it back…this won’t be the penultimate one, but rather whatever ‘third to last’ is.  I’ll drop one this weekend to let you know ahead of time what game I will be betting, then finish up with one final one on Mon or Tues).

I find it kind of funny that the trip began with Vegas–home of casinos like Paris Vegas or The Venetian that try to recreate foreign spots–and then ends with a stop in Orlando, home of Disneyland’s Epcot Center–a place that also tries to present its own sanatized version of the world.

And how about this for a bookend?  Check out the name of my last hotel in Colombia…

What starts in Vegas, ends in Vegas…