Going South

At that time I was having major trouble legalizing my stay in Colombia. I had overstayed my tourist visa and the extension, paid the fine and applied for work visa through Colombo. I had made one trip to Ipiales and across the border on Puente Rumichaca into Ecuador, the little town of Tulcán that had the nearest Colombian consulate but got no visa...they said that the telegram from the Ministry of External Affairs had not arrived.

That bus trip to Ipiales and Tulcan was a long one: it took 10 hours from Cali to Pasto over and around the mountains, through sleepy Caucan villages, with stops for dinner, breakfast, a cup of hot chocolate at the dead of the night up in the Andes at some tiny Indian hamlet. The scenery was breathtaking, the sheer height of the road and the depth of the gorges beside the road, with tiny silvery ribbons of rivers meagering in the bottom of those chasms was an unforgettable sight. After a change of bus in Pasto the trip from there to Ipiales took about four hours and the road was higher, the gorges deeper, the rivers further away from us in the bus and the road more dangerous. My whole body was aching after a sleepless night on the unconfortable bus seat, but I had my boyfriend with me and felt no fear. The vegetation was more sparse and the land was mainly cultivated: little square patches fenced in, in varying shades of green clinging to the sides of the mountains. Tiny houses stuck on great heights, on the top of the farms and I was wondering how did those people ever have the strength to climb up there after a day of hoeing and scraping on their fields. (I was told that the Indian rode his horse uphill with his woman walking behind the horse carrying a bundle of firewood on her back).

Ipiales is a cold, sad little Indian town right next to the Ecuadorean border. The locals get drunk on weekends and lacking the necessary enzymes to break down alcohol they get very intoxicated and pass out during the night, falling asleep on park benches and sidewalks; a good thing thatthey carry their traditional ruanas on them as a wrap. This was a weekday, however, and we checked in a cheap guest house or hotel and took the taxi over to Tulcan only to be sent away without any stamps in my passport.

Fabian suggested that since we were in Ipiales we should go and see the Cathedral called Las Lajas. He told me the legend that gave birth to the construction of the church: a little Indian maiden had seen the face of Virgin Mary on a flat slab of stone and the cathedral was built at the spot over a gorge with a great height and stunning scenery; it was and still is a major site of pilgrimage for the local indigenous population and people from other parts.

I made another trip to Ipiales, later that fall of 71, by plane this time and was sent back again, no telegram, no authorization, no visa. The DAS was looking for me, they had visited the apartment earlier and I was getting worried. I went and talked with Colombo's immigration lawyer again and finally it turned out that the authorization was never sent from Bogotá because Colombo had refused to pick up the tab for the cable since I was no longer working for them. They just didn't think it was important to let me know, so as soon as the Ministry informed that the authorization was granted I travelled to Ipiales, but the telegram was not sent because nobody paid for it. I offered to pay for it myself and that worked!

Two weeks later the cable was sent to Tulcán and I bought a plane ticket to Ipiales.

The 6th Panamerican Games in Cali

That was a memorable year in Cali: the city had been selected to be the seat of the 6^th Panamerican Games and went through a fabulous transformation. The sports arenas that Cali has today were built at that time: the Panamerican Swimming Pools and Baseball diamond, the Bicycle Velodrome, the Pascual Guerrero Stadium already existed and the Gimnasio Evangelista Mora next to the Football Stadium completed the sports installations.

 (In the back of the photo, written with a delicate hand by Leonor Cuervo:
Cali, Julio1971
"La pareja tricolor"
Uno de los ensayos previos a las justas panamericanas")

 The student residences at Univalle were converted into Olympic Village, the fountains and parks on the Fifth Avenue were constructed, the whole city vibrated with energy, renovation, growth and joy. A totally new traffic police corps was formed:Los Guardas Bachilleres, they were high-school graduates all in their new nifty blue uniforms.

We were, of course, in the middle of it all. My boss was in charge of providing the city the group of bilingual personnel that would be employed as interpreters and translators at the different events. Both my brother and my boyfriend took the training, for some reason that I don't recall, I didn't. It may have well been that I didn't feel confident enough with my Spanish at that time. I sat with Fabian in the classes and even if I didn't get full credentials I still had a badge and the sleeve with ”Interprete Oficial” written on it. We were att he initial Press Conference with the delegates from different American countries; we were interpreting for people from Barbados and I remember understanding only about half of what they said. Then we all got our assignments, some people got sent to Lago Calima for the sailing and yachting competitions, my brother was assigned to the Country Club for the shooting events and we went to the newly built velodrome with a track made of wood imported from Africa. We were assigned a booth right next to Radio Todelar and the Colombian TV. Fabian announced all competitions and the results in Spanish, I did the same in English. The media people sent us food and soft drinks hoping to be first to get the official results before their competitors, nothing was allowed to go out before we said it. It was a lot of fun and totally exhilarating to announce the new Panamerican records made by Martin ”Cochise” Rodriguez and hear the whole velodrome, all 20 thousand people jammed in there burst into cheer and applaud. I was complemented a lot for my good media voice and diction.(perhaps I should have chosen to study to be a journalist anyway, like I had initially planned when graduated from high school).

On our free time we went to every sports event in town, the swimming competitions at the Olympic

Pools, the football matches at the Pascual Guerrero, we didn't pay for the entrance and went before others in the lines. What a summer! In the fall, after the Games were over, Fabian's parents went on a trip to USA and Fabian got to use the family car, a 54 Chevrolet BelAir meantime. It was kept in mint condition of course and he had promised to take good care of it. We went for picnics and rides, visited the neighbouring towns and villages, drove to Pereira where he had studied industrial engineering at the Technological University but had quit because he was sick all the time (bad climate) and saw naked Simon Bolivar statue. The car broke down, though, and he started a frenetic race to get it repaired before his parents's imminent return. He believed that they would never let him have the car again if it was broken at their return. The mechanic screwed in the last new part the day before mum and dad came home.

Fabian had been teaching at Colombo, mostly in high schools and also as Spanish teacher before the games; yet Colombo had decided NOT to give their teachers leave of abscence to work as interpreters at the games, probably out of spite because it was the competition, Donald Harris who obtained the contract to provide this personnel. People took time off anyway for the games and my brother was eventually re.-hired, but Fabian decided to look elsewhere. I spoke with my boss and Fabian was hired to teach English at Harris Institute together with me.

SPRING BREAK AT JUANCHACO

We had moved from the 13^th floor apartment next to Sears to a tiny two room and a kitchen apartment in Juanambú, just a few blocks away from Colombo. It was a house owned by a German couple and they had rebuilt the house so it had a rentable apartment with its own entrance. The neighboring house was owned by the same family, a daughter, I think and they had done the same thing so we were a bunch of young foreigners living up the hill there. It was a steep climb and very lovely up there; in the evenings the camias and palosantos would spread their almost intoxicating tropical fragrance all over the barrios: Granada, Juanambú, Centenario.

That was before those lovely, old-fashioned barrios were sacrificed to the progress of the city of Cali and the Republican-style homes became offices, boutiques, restaurants and bars, the gardens with camias and jasmins became the thoroughware between the north and the south of the city and the charmful villas were removed to build the bridges next to Intercontinental Hotel.

There was a discotheque called Saint Tropez, not far from the Cafe de los Turcos, that we used to go to, very popular with the foreigners. We never hang out with my brother, except on a few occasions when we went hiking up the Three Crosses hill, or followed the Pance River up the hillside to a swimming hole with icy, crystal water.

We went to Juanchaco and Ladrilleros beaches on the Pacific coast on one Easter week holiday, together with Arties new girlfriend, Adela and her two sisters that she had to bring along to be allowed to go on a trip with the gringo. (They rented a cabin for three in Juanchaco and my brother had to sleep on the beach;( ) We took a bus to Buenaventura and Fabian bought a bottle of aguardiente at the docks, he later claimed that the aguardiente was bad, but it was probably just his own natural intolerance to alcohol which made him a useless, miserable drunk the first day of the vacation. The trip from Buenaventura to Juanchaco took almost an hour in a tugboat and there was no peer, we had to walk on some planks to get ashore and got really wet. We rented a cottage, which was...very rustic to say the least. It was made of grey, unpainted boards, the floor was made of planks with a centimeter or two-wide cracks between each board and the furniture consisted of two beds, That's it. No electricity, no bathroom, nothing but walls, roof, floor with cracks and two beds. And a drunk boyfriend who was in a black, horrible mood.

The tropical night fell on the beach, grey, wide, shallow water and clean shoreline; there were a lot of people mostly from Cali, university students, couples, groups, young people and it was party on the beach, bonfires, aguardiente, guitars and singing. We fought, made up, fought and made up again and finally Fabian fell asleep drunk and exhausted.

The next day was a little better; we swam in the ocean, walked on the beach and dealt with a lot of issues, most of them stemming from our different cultural background and upbringing. He had a horrible hangover and was very remorseful: he said he resented the fact that he was not the first man in my life and that was very much in love with me but felt that he could not trust me entirely because of the different values we had. We sorted out a lot of personal stuff that day, never to take them up again. We ate lunch and dinner at the local eateries: rice, fried plantains and canned tuna: the fishermen had not brought anything back in their boats. We drank cocacola and postobon direct from the bottles and probably got amoebas anyway.

The third day we hiked with a bunch of other young people through a neck of woods on a narrow path to another, smaller but whiter beach, Ladrilleros, a perfect half-moon of a beach, clean and pristine. On the way back we followed the shoreline and stopped at some frehwater falls to bath in the warm, sweet shower plunging down over a cliff formation. My sandals broke apart there and I got to walk rest of the time barefeet. I also got one of my most horrible, painful sunburns I have ever had; with resulting fever, blisters, peeling and unbearable itch all over my arms, face, legs, back and neckline.

Roots and Feria: Sugar Barons and Conquistadores, Indigenous Tribes and Beauty Queens

FERIA DE LA CAÑA DE AZUCAR

Santiago de Cali was founded in 1536 by a bypassing Spanish conquistador, Sebastian de Belalcázar whose statue still stands, horseback and ironclad, looking over the city from a vantage point on the Avenida Circunvalar. He came from the south, having started out from the Viceroyalty of Peru and following the ancient Inca roads crossed the border to the viceroyalty of Nueva Granada with a small warband, founding cities on his way, He had just founded Popayán and was on his way north to meet up with the other conquistadores and join them in their search for El Dorado, the Golden One.

There were native tribes living in the area: the Calimas with beautiful golden handicrafts, the Yanaconas of the mountains, originally from the south (they're related to Incas), the ferocious Jamundies of the River Lilí Valley and the settlement grew very slowly at the beginning. The Spanish and the Criollos who moved in the area were struggling until at the beginning of the 18^th century the sugar cane started to be grown in the fertile soil of the valley and with the cane came the economic prosperity. The area around Cali had agricultural importance the soil being of top quality and lots of other foodstuffs had been grown and continued being cultivated both in the lowlands and on higher elevations: cotton, rice,corn, vegetables and fruits; this was the first place where I saw a pineapple field too. But the backbone of the Cali economy was to be the intensive cultivation of sugarcane and the sweet smell of cane juice impermeated the very air the caleños breathed. Cutting cane is a backbreaking job and the poor populace of the countryside around Cali was employed at the fields: even today you can drive up the road to Palmira and beyond northward and see men carrying machetes going to the fileds, in small groups, at the first break of dawn. After being cut, the cane is transported in ”cane trains”, carts loaded with cut cane and hitched to each other and finally to a tractor that pulls them and transports this cane to the sugarmills where the juice is pressed out of the cane and the sugar is processed. The brown sugar is pressed into blocks of panela, a staple in the Valluno kitchen and all over Colombia. The leftover (bagazo) is used in making paper or burned to fertilize the fields. There's smoke hanging over the fields at certain times of the year, after the harvest from the cane fires.

The Sugarcane Fair or just the Feria of Cali as the festival is also known will forever be part of my Christmas memories. It started on Christmas Day, with Horse Parade, when people mounted their horses dressed up as Spaniards or mestizo cowboys would ride on a prearranged route, usually a main street or throughfare. Beautiful horses from the country clubs and outlying fincas, people all dressed up and perhaps a few aguardients under their belts already; it was a pleasure to watch. (The horse parade had to be suspended lately, because of the drunkeness and disorder, animal cruelty and abandonment; several horses had been flogged to death and left to die after the drunken riders had gotten off them...this is part of the loathsome legacy of the drug cartels in Cali.)

The next day there would be the beauty queens parading through the city in carrozas or decorated floats: I was mesmerized to see so much colour and decorations, such tropical splendour and lavishness. It was this year that the Cali newspaper started printing colour photographs and I used to clip them out and send them with my letters to my mum and sisters.

Señorita Do You Know The Way To Ipiales?

SEÑORITA DO YOU KNOW WHERE IPIALES IS LOCATED?

I just stared at the pilot. Was he kidding? No...it didn't look like he was kidding. Isn't he supposed to know where he was flying to or how to get there? ”No”. I answered. ”Isn't it your job to know that”? ”Well, yes”, he said, ”I had no trouble finding it yesterday and that was the first time I flew there.” ”All these mountain villages look the same”, he added. His radio was on and he was communicating with flight tower in Pasto. ”We're flying over a town with a football stadium in the middle”, he said to the radio, ”that can't be Ipiales”. ”No, that's Tucarres” came the answer, more to your left...and then coordinates and instructions. ”Gods alive” I thought, ”he really doesn't know! I'm the only person in addition to the young pilot here in this 20-seat air taxi who knows that we're lost in a tiny bimotor over the Andes.”

The whole trip had started out rather badly. The night before while I was getting my stuff together my brother just had to come with a nice piece of information of an Avianca Air Taxi that had just come down on the Andes near Manizales, all 18 passangers and the pilot dead. In the morning Fabian drove me in the Guanabana (the family car's nickname) to Calipuerto, the old airport in Candelaria instead of Palmaseca that had just opened. He had to step on it to make it on time to Palmaseca and I almost missed the plane, they were taking the ladder away when I was running on that glass-walled corridor and the police there yelled at the personnel down there to wait for the señorita. When the señorita got on the plane the only seat available was up front right next to the pilot. Of course I sat there, he wasn't intimidating in any way, a young caleño about my age, looked friendly enough. I had a pretty pleasant flight chatting with the flirty captain until he asked me if I knew where Ipiales was located.

Well, he found Ipiales, right next to a frightful chasm and an airstrip that stopped abdruptly at a mouintainside. I said goodbye and thanks no sweat, took a taxi to town and checked in a hostal downtown, my appointment at the consulate was for the next day. I guess it must've been for the scare I had or something but I got my period right there in Ipiales and I was not prepared. So, I went out to buy a tampax. I walked in a drugstore and asked the employee since I saw no tampax or tampons anywhere....he had no idea what I was talking about. No luck in the three or four other drugstores I found, so finally I gave up and bought a package of old-fashioned sanitary pads, thick and unconfortable. Back at the hotel I ran into A Swedish guy and spent the rest of the evening in his room talking about lingonberry jam and meatballs...nice guy.

The next day I took a taxi over the Rumichaca bridge, stopped at the immigration and customs to get a stamp, went into town and into the Colombian consulate, on time. The lady looked at me and shook her head....”Sorry, we have no stamps”. ”Oh no, not again!” ”Did you get the telegram?” ”Yes, we did, but we are out of stamps for resident visas, you'll have to come back another time.” She was flipping pages in my passport and suddenly she looked up at me. ”But you are not a Norteamericana?”No, Ma'am”, I'm from Finland, Europe”. She told me to sit down and wait. I walked out of that Consulate with an Official Visa, no fee. She had a chip on her shoulder against gringos.

I made it back to the airstrip and this time the plane was slightly larger but the pilot was the same. I sat up in the front again (he invited me to the tiny cockpit) and had a lovely albeit bumpy flight back with turbulences, talking with the pilot and with a magnificent view of the Maciso Colombiano, the place where the three Cordilleras meet in the south.

Cali Before The Rise Of The Cartels

Cali Before The Rise Of The Cartels

Cali before the rise of the culture of drugs and raunch was a rather pleasant city; quite provincial, quite parrochial and proud of a lot things; its climate, its women, its sugar cane fields and and the still rather new industrial zone in Yumbo producing cement and paper and other stuff for all Colombia, its proximity to the Pacific coast and the main port of exportation of the country, Buenaventura, its fertile valley where you could throw a clothes pin of wood and a tree would grow, its afternoon breeze that cooled the homes and streets after the past noon heat peaking at about 2 p.m.; the festival of the kites inthe Panamerican park in breezy August days, the new sports installations built for the Panamerican Games held in Cali in 1971; this event gave the city a total facelift and made everybody very proud of their lovely city.

Cali was founded early on, in 1536 by a Spanish conquistador Sebastian de Belalázar coming from the south, the viceroyalty of Peru traveling along the Andes and founding cities and towns. There's a statue of the Spaniard on a hilltop, in the western suburb of Santa Teresita, on the Avenida de Circunvalación where the iron-clad soldier is pointing towards the Pacific. People in Cali used to joke about the statue saying Don Seba is asking where is his gold and pointing to the statue of Cristo Rey (indicating the monks), Cristo Rey says I dunno ask my mum, the Virgin of Yanaconas whose statue is behind him, further away on a mountaintop.

This is agricultural zone, early on planted in sugarcane in the true colonial monocultivation fashion and the wealth of Cali was produced in these ingenios(sugar mills). The town itself languished in provincial stupor until in the turn of the century (1900) it started slowly growing and finally its growth was vastly accelerated with the period of internal conflict called La Violencia in the fifties, when there was a massive migration from the countryside and especially from the coffee-growing area in the north of the Valle to relative safety of the city.

Coming Out Of The Mountain Cold

into the deepening dusk, shadows lengthening and the sky turning into shades of violet contrasting with the greenery of the valley and the sloping foothills of the western cordillera, the mountainside turning into a twinkling wall of yellow lights, coming back home to Cali from any destiny on the cold mountain was sheer pleasure. Especially ay nightfall, when the contrasting play of the artist's palette created the most exquisite nuances all tinted with homecoming and warmth.