Part III - South American Rivers

From Buenaventura, on the steamy coast, Ladd negotiated a series of pickup truck rides across the Andes Mountains, to the upper Meta River, in the hot, dry plains of Eastern Colombia. He descended that river's entire six hundred miles at night with flashlights to avoid the sandstorms that raged by day, and the leftist guerrillas controlling the region. Pink dolphins provided escort service. Then he descended the majestic Orinoco, beating constantly into fierce headwinds, and wormed through a swamp as big as New Jersey to enter the Atlantic Ocean near Trinidad.

From "Three Years in a 12-Foot Boat":

It was New Year's Eve, 1991. I had resigned myself to celebrating it alone. But as I descended a small side channel, anxiously feeling for depth with my oartips, I heard music. It was like the vallenato I had enjoyed in Chocó, but more intricate and impassioned. I saw a light, and maneuvered toward the steep bank. I tied, climbed up, and saw an open-air cafe/bar. The kitchen's stucco walls were painted in a simple, white and sky-blue pattern. Under a bare light bulb, a dozen people were drinking beer at little tables. The men wore cowboy hats of straw or felt, the women wore festive dresses. I stepped among them, and they fixed on me.

"Is a stranger welcome here?" I asked.

There was a brief silence, athen a small man with bronze skin, long eyelashes, and sharp features said, "Sí!"

"What is this village called?"

La Poyata." I bought him a beer, and gained a friend. His name was Alvaro.

Only that and one other structure were visible. I went to the other, the "discoteca." Under its thatched, conical roof were a twenty-foot-diameter dirt dance floor, and tables at which sat some thirty people of all ages. Other stood outside a whitewashed lattice railing, in the extremities of the escaping light. Few paid me any attention until Alvaro came over and drank with me. He was a beautiful man, proud and intense as a finely plumed bird. He introduced his children, from toddlers to a son attending the university in Bogotá.

The people lost their shyness toward me. Cowboys bought me beers. Even those who became drunk maintained a certain formality, a respect for space so lacking among the people of the coast. Theirs was not the closeness of the huddled village. Rather, their faces revealed years of squinting, scanning horizons, coping with the dry blankness of the plains, which forces men to spread out to find sustenance. All wore their finest, whatever that might be, and most danced. Dust rose from their twirling, staccato steps. They embraced at forearm's length, eyes at each others feet, engrossed in the intricacy of the dance. I located myself among the prettiest girls in anticipation of the stroke of midnight, but no one kissed.

Back to Part 2: Pacific Coast of Panama and Colombia

To Part 4: The Caribbean