Provided I got to the flight, I could still make it to Lucas’ wedding in Medellin at 6PM. I politely made my way through the poorly lit Customs and Immigration area, full of black uniform wearing DAS officers and their grave expressions. I found the Avianca desk that Connie had told me to visit, and got a boarding pass for the flight to Medellin. I boarded bus between Bogota’s international and domestic terminals, and raced across the tarmac between planes and cargo vehicles. A tall girl with honey-coloured skin in her early twenties stood in front of me, wearing tight fitting jeans and a low cut top showing a depth of cleavage that had to be cosmetically enhanced. The stunned expression on my face must have looked like a smile, because she smiled back at me as she patted her wavy dark hair. The vehicle screeched to a halt as I collected my jaw from the floor of the bus: the doors opened, and she was gone. In front of me, a large building of unmemorable colour waited.
‘Habla usted ingles, Senora?’ I asked a middle aged fellow- passenger as we climbed down the bus steps.
‘Si – yes. This is the domestic terminal. Where are you flying to?’ she said, smiling at me with her dark brown eyes.
‘Medellin,’ I replied.
‘Ah – Meda-jin. Will this be your first time to the city – yes? Oh, you will like it – very friendly there.’
‘Do you live there?’
‘No, I live in Boston – I’m flying back there tomorrow. But welcome to Colombia and I hope you will enjoy it very much. If you walk through the building and turn right, your boarding gate should be along near the end.’
I walked through the building past a long avenue of mobile phone stores, newsagents and flower stalls. I looked for a public phone and walked up to all metal boxes hopefully, because I couldn’t read any Spanish. I stopped short when my phone beeped into life. It was about twenty minutes since I’d turned it on. ‘Please call me. I’m OK, but please call,’ read the first message. It was from my wife, Kerryn, who had stayed in New York because she was pregnant and unable to have the recommended vaccinations for people travelling to Colombia.
‘Where are you? Can you please call,’ read the second message.
‘Don’t worry, they’ve postponed the wedding until another day. Please call,’ asked the third message, also from Kerryn.
‘Hi, where are you?’ asked Kerryn after I hurriedly dialled three times to get through to her.
‘I’m in Bogota. I had to change flights to get down here – I should be in Medellin by four.’
‘You’d better call Lucas and Angela. They’ve been trying to reach you all day. They’ve postponed the wedding until Wednesday.’
‘They’re crazy – why would they do that?’ I said, feeling racked with guilt as I imagined their cancellation phone calls to guests, priests and goodness knows who else. ‘I’ll do my best, but the phone is unreliable here. Can you call them while I get through security at the boarding gate? I don’t want to miss this plane or I definitely won’t make it there today. ’
‘OK, but you need to call them too! I’ve been taking calls all day from them – it’s been very stressful. There’s been so much drama.’
After being patted down and passing through the metal detector, I dialled Angela’s mobile phone, which she’d brought over from Australia, using the Australian country code at the start. ‘Boop Boop Boop,’ replied my phone negatively. I replaced the Australian code with the Colombian +57. ‘Boop Boop Boop.’
I tried the number of Angela’s brother, who advisedly spoke English. ‘Hola, éste es Luis Parra. Por favor, deje un mensaje después del tono,’ answered a rapid phone message at the other end. I left a message hopefully, without knowing if I’d even called the right person. Last chance - I keyed in the number of Angela’s mother. I knew that she didn’t speak any English, but I hoped someone else would be able to.
‘Hola, éste es Angela. ¿Quién habla por favor? Hola?’
I tried furiously to think of the few Spanish words I’d crammed into my brain during the last week, but nothing came. ‘Ah – it’s Chris,’ I said optimistically.
‘Chreees – it’s you! Where have you been? This is Angela here. I will put Lucas onto the phone.’ There was a short delay and then my phone’s speaker rumbled as the receiver at the other end was picked up.
‘Hello. I’ve heard you’ve had a bit of an adventure. So you’re getting here at 4PM? We might still go ahead, then,’ said Lucas, with a calming tone.
‘Yeah, my original flight to Medellin got delayed as you obviously found out. I had a choice – grab the flight to Bogota which was leaving straight away and then transfer across, or call you and wait six or seven hours for the original flight – and I definitely wouldn’t have made it in time. It’s up to you and Ange whether you go ahead with the ceremony or not, but I’ll be there by four PM.’
‘OK, I’ll meet you at the airport. We’ll have decided by then.’
_______________________________________________________________________
The Fokker 100 jet that took off from Bogota seemed a bit more aged than the Airbus that had got me here. It had two jet engines on the tail. The interior was clean, but faded.
It alarmed me to know that the Fokker Company had become insolvent in 1996. ‘How well can a jet plane be maintained when the company that built it no longer exists? Where do the spare parts come from?’ I wondered to myself.
I was fascinated but more than a bit paranoid about flight. The approach of my own industry, structural engineering, was to build extra factors of safety into our designs to compensate for the errors we repeatedly saw made within the construction industry. And to put the issues in perspective, structural engineers didn’t need their designs to fly through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, with the metal structure contracting in length through sub zero air temperatures and then expanding again when they landed in sun parched equatorial temperatures at Dubai or somewhere.
The pilot didn’t make me feel any more comfortable about the flight to Medellin. On my left, I could see mountains soaring up to the level we were flying at. They looked a bit like the Swiss Alps in spring and were partly covered by clouds. The alarming thing was that the pilot kept throttling the engines up and down, so the plane would sink into the clouds and rise up again. I wondered how high the cloud-obscured mountains were between Bogota and Medellin. These were the northern outposts of the Andes, the mighty mountain range that bounded the entire west side of South America, a distance of 7000 kilometres. The highest mountain in the Andes was 6962 metres (22,840 ft) above sea level, which was considerably higher than the highest of the Swiss Alps (4,545 metres or 14,911 ft) and more than three times higher than 2228 metres for Mount Kosciusko, the highest mountain in Australia. Bogota itself was located at 2640 metres above sea level; and the highest mountain in Colombia was 5365 metres above sea level. I wasn’t sure if that meant the mountains we had to pass were just below us… or just above. I hoped my pilot had plenty of Colombian flying hours on his log, because navigating here must be extremely challenging. But apart from the constant winding up and down of the engines, the trip was uneventful.
It was raining lightly when we landed at Medellin’s Jose Marie Cordova international airport. Like many airports around the world, there was extension and renovation work going on, so I had to make my way through arrival corridors framed by scaffolding. Fortunately for me, I had already been through immigration at Bogota, so I could walk straight out into the arrivals foyer.
The foyer was dimly lit and looked well used, but it was clean. I walked outside, where I suspected Lucas might be waiting, but I couldn’t see him. A woman selling flowers and other items waved some at me. ‘Senor?’
‘No, gracias Senora,’ I replied - some Spanish words had finally come to me. Beyond the overhead concrete of the departures level, I could see it was still raining, and the trees and grasses around the airport were very green. The temperature was very pleasant, probably in the low twenties (Celcius, not Fahrenheit); and despite the rain, the humidity level was more than comfortable. Given the fact that Medellin was just north of the Equator, this was a relief. Angela had told me the climate was exceptional, because of elevation: the airport is 2142 metres above sea level, and the city itself is at an altitude of 1500 metres. I’d been watching the city’s temperature hovering between 15 and 28 degrees Celcius on my work computer for weeks, but I hadn’t really believed it until now. Medellin’s climate is so fantastic that it is known as the “City of Eternal Spring”.
In comparison, the Australian city I live near, Brisbane, can reach the high thirties (in degrees Celcius) during summer, with humidity of 70-90% at the same time. It is nowhere near the equator – in fact it is 2800 kilometres south – but it can get bloody uncomfortable for a few weeks in late December through to February. During the past week, I’d received messages from friends at home suggesting they could fry an egg simply by putting the pan outside on the road. I cannot describe how happy I was to be in Medellin away from such weather.
I walked back inside, and stood to the side to allow the stream of fellow passengers exit the door. Then I noticed Lucas just in front of me. Like me, he looked pale and extremely Caucasian beside the Latin locals. His slightly receded straight dark hair contrasted with the flowing hair of the women I’d passed on the way out.
‘There you are,’ he beamed. ‘This is Angela’s Uncle Gustavo,’ he added, gesturing at the slender elderly man next to him.
‘Ah, Buenos dias, Senor,’ I said, shaking his hand.
‘Hello, how are you,’ he replied with a U.S sounding accent, smiling with his brown eyes under slightly unkempt grey hair.
‘I’m good – now I’ve made it here.’
‘Yes, it must have been a big day for you so far. Gustavo teaches English, by the way,’ said Lucas.
‘I’m a professor of English at one of the universities. I teach and translate,’ added Gustavo, with a smile. ‘I’m old enough to retire, but it’s expensive to live here and I figure I may as well keep myself active.’
‘Yes, it’s a good idea for everyone to keep themselves active somehow,’ I agreed.
‘We’d better get to the car and get going. We have to get you fitted for the suit and then take it with us,’ said Lucas.
‘So you’re going ahead with the wedding today, then?’ I asked.
‘Yes, but we’ve shifted it to eight PM.’
Lucas introduced me to the driver, who turned out to Angela’s auntie. Her shortish grey hair and careworn expression suggested she was in her late fifties or early sixties. She spoke Spanish and I only spoke English, so I beamed at her and shook her hand, saying what I could. ‘Buenos dias, Senora.’
We climbed into the little car, which looked like a weather-beaten Daihatsu Charade, but was actually a Chevrolet. As we rolled away from the terminal, I could tell it didn’t have the features that I (and other male Australians) associate with Chevrolets – the motor in this car could have faced serious competition from a child’s wind-up toy. I piled my gear onto my knees in front of me as no-one had offered the boot (trunk) for it.
Auntie didn’t let a small engine stop her. She put her foot down and wound up and down through the gears to maximise the noise in the cabin. After travelling up and down through some rolling green hills, we got caught behind an old minivan, pouring out smoke as it struggled up the next slope. Auntie swerved left across the continuous yellow dividing line to the other side of the road, and pressed down the accelerator further. Our car’s engine responded and steadily poured on another two or three kilometres an hour of speed. I looked ahead at the long line of traffic coming head-on towards us, and then looked at the van now beside us. At the rate we were passing, the oncoming traffic would smash us to blithereens before we passed. We would have to hit the brakes and go in behind the junk-heap of a van.
‘By the way, we had a small accident on the way to the airport,’ Lucas mentioned, in the midst of this.
‘Oh, really?’ I asked.
I wasn’t able to hear his reply because my eyes were glued to the drama in front of me. Just before the leading car hit us, two things happened. Auntie managed to get the rear bumper of our car to a position about one inch in front of the van. She swerved back to the right, as the oncoming line of traffic swerved to our left in a wide curving S manoeuvre onto the outside edge of the road to avoid us.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and then opened my eyes again. ‘After driving in Ireland, I thought I’d seen most forms of scary driving,’ I thought to myself.
The funny thing was, none of the drivers in the oncoming vehicles had beeped their horns or flashed their lights. If we’d done that in Australia, some of the drivers would definitely have shaken their fists and squealed the brakes on - one or two might have even turned around to pursue us. It was almost like this sort of driving in Colombia was normal.
‘I heard you had a good metro system here?’ I asked Gustavo, thinking public transport might be a safer mode of transport for my well-being.
‘Yes, but it only runs through the flat parts of the city. The middle class and the rich who live on the hills do not use it. The city has tried to provide access for them to the metro with buses, but who wants to ride a bus! Everyone prefers to drive a car if they can,’ said Gustavo. ‘We are taking you back by the older road – it’s windier, but it’s free. There is a new motorway out to the airport, but it is a tollway. It is very expensive to build motorways here. You see, all the steep hills have landslides. We have to build expensive structures like that.’
He pointed to a half-built suspended concrete motorway on the side of the hill that ran up to each side of a house and stopped. ‘That guy doesn’t want to leave, so he’s hanging on. He has a great location – look at the view.’
An enormous valley spread out in front of us. I took a breath. It was striking, not because of its natural beauty, but because a city had been built in it. The city extended as far as I could see, stretching around the corners in the valley. It sat there in quiet majesty, with tiny cars moving silently along the roads and streets. Multi-storey buildings apartments across and up the slopes above the centre, and were a beautiful terracotta colour that I’d never seen on high-rise buildings before. There was a feeling, a sense of the place that reached out and tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Look, this is what you’ve travelled to the other side of the world to see.’
‘It’s stunning,’ I said.
Comments