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Taganga, Colombia
11° 15' N 74° 11' W
May 31, 2007 18:03
Distance 631km

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Other entries in Taganga

Moving around and dealing with poverty

Text written in: English

 On Saturday, after a heavy night of rain, we loaded the bikes with our muddy wet tent and made our way to Bucaramanga and Giron. After plenty of asking and few U-turns we got on the right road and arrived finally in the afternoon in Giron, another colonial village which is now but a suburb of Bucaramanga.

By this time we had made the decision to avoid getting into major towns with the bikes fully loaded because as soon as we stop it turns into a the usual circus, i.e. a big crowd of people all asking how much the bikes cost. It also gets very stressful as the homicidal lorry drivers, lunatic bus drivers and suicidal cars and bikers get concentrated in the overcrowded roads and streets!

Giron didn't have the feel of say Barichara or Villa de Leyva but was a pleasant place nonetheless.

Once in a small plaza, we parked the bikes and Alistair went to look for a hostel while I guarded the bikes, in the rain off course. He returned after touring the entire town centre, finding the only 2 hotels in town, one wanted 73000 pesos the night (he thought), the other was full. So Maria was sent out to investigate further with her better Spanish. There was some sort of information centre round the corner and for some reason there were lots of school kids in uniform in there. So it is with the girl at the counter and about 20 kids that I went to investigate a hostel off the plaza Mayor (the same one Alistair had been to). And with the same crowd that I returned to the bikes after agreeing a much reduced price for a room with a fan (the price Alistair had been given was with aircon) and agreement that we cold park both bikes in the lobby!

We took the panniers off the bikes before getting inside the hotel as the gate was narrow, all done under the scrutiny of the locals.

In the evening we went for a drink at the local shop/bar. While there a woman and her 2 young kids got in begging for few pesos. I always find it difficult to deal with real poverty and distress. I'm not talking about the London drug addicts that you can see in the tube, asking for spare change. There was shame in this woman gesture while she moved between the tables, and I felt shame and guilt myself.

I'm the 1st to moan at the ridiculous amount of tax I pay back in the UK. A huge amount of that used to subsidise the useless and the workshy, generation after generation of people who never lifted a finger in their life and simply keep breeding and milking the system. I've wished sometimes that the government stopped handing over so much to the lazy. However, that woman reminded me brutally that the alternative to state handouts is simply unbearable.

Maybe we should be grateful to pay high taxes so that no one back home can ever get in such desperate situation as we see in the 3rd world. In the end, as one of my ex-bosses told me once, maybe I should learn to shield myself from such sights and and ignore it. After all, there is not much I can do. I haven't learnt how to do that yet! I still cannot forget that old man, begging for some food, while we were having breakfast in a small town of Sri Lanka, or that little kiddy, barely 3 or 4 year old, crouched near a cash point, on a freezing night in Cuzco, begging for a coin... How do people deal with that sort of thing when coming from rich western countries? There is no easy answers I guess...

Stunning country

 

On Sunday we left Giron and we were aiming for Santa Marta, on the Caribbean sea. Unfortunately we picked the wrong road. When we realised that we were heading West rather than North, we stopped as usual now, to ask for directions. The old bloke in a vest that we asked told us to carry on and that we could join the "motorway" just after the next toll station. What he forgot to mention was that the next toll station was over 100 km away, in the wrong direction! In addition, this road appeared to have no petrol stations so after 200 miles on a tank we started to get a bit worried that we might run out of fuel. However, the road was stunning and took us through a beautiful cloud forest, going through thick fog before starting to descend toward the wide plains. I keep being amazed at how quickly the landscape changes. The day before we started from tropical vegetation and as we started going down a deep canyon it changed to desert with lots of cacti and grasses, and only few rare trees. And as we climbed again, we got back into tropical vegetation and thick jungle.

We finally managed to find the "motorway" (I use this term very loosely as this road would be barely a D road in Europe!) and a luckily a petrol station with unleaded fuel (most only sell leaded or diesel)!

We were now in cattle (and big pothole!) country. Big plains filled with ranches and lots of cattle. As we stopped for lunch the choice was grilled meat or err.. grilled meat! With the now usual boiled potato and yucca (and omnipresent concoction involving tripe). The huge strips of meat we just hanging there, next to the BBQ grill, with a fan to keep the majority of the flies off.