The best thing about Melgar was how easy it was to leave. They checked our cabin over to make sure we hadn’t stolen anything. Then we went to the front to pay for the sheets, towels and lighter we had made use of; then the lady gave me 2000 extra in change–which I returned. We ambled out to a waiting taxi in which we were delivered swiftly at the bus stop. No sooner had I handed over the 3200 to the driver than my luggage was in the hands of a hasty youth who was shoving it into the back of a bus out of town. We left Melgar in the dust, the Kat clocking the exit at exactly 20 minutes.

Our destination: Ibagué.

Unless I am sadly mistaken, and I have not bothered to fact-check what I am about to state as a fact, the whole modern insurgency in Colombia had its origins in the department of Tolima, the capital of which is Ibagué. They are hardy people there with determined ideas.

As you may remember from previous lectures I have delivered on this blog, the geography of Colombia is organized into the three ridges which spread out from the spinal column of South America which stretches from Argentina on to better things. These Andes in Colombia have an occidental ridge: the lowest; a central ridge, the highest; and the oriental ridge, the widest and the locus of our sojourning. Tolima straddles that central ridge, rising from the Madgalena valley–a considerable portion of which it owns–up an over. The great Nevado del Tolima lies close to Ibagué–though I never got a glimpse of it. I’ve seen them from the plane, the line of snowy peaks that stretch along the proud, aspiring central ridge.

Now you should keep this consideration in mind when thinking about snow-capped mountains here: we are in the tropics. The one in Huila–a bit further south–is the highest, but the one in Tolima is 5,216 meters above sea level, and that, my friend, according to my rough calculations is about 17,112.860 feet, which works out to a few miles. Bogotá is half as high as that sucker reaches into the air. Ibagué is nowhere near, being 1,285 m (4,216 ft).

Anyway, Tolima is one of those departments with characteristics. When you, for example, think of Kansas or Nebraska, you may not think of very much and I don’t blame you. Think of California or of Texas and you get a little more, if you see what I mean. Tolima is like these latter. Has traditions: has tamales named after it, has the famous lechona (stuffed pig), has Silva & Villalba for crying out loud, and hearty mountain men of which not a few presented themselves to my gaze in the capital. In Ibagué one would run across saddleries at odd intervals. Not that they don’t ride horses elsewhere–especially up along the Atlantic coast, but it just goes to show what a tough, mountaineering, horse riding, hard core type of chaps these Tolimenses tend to be.

And Ibagué is built on a hill, like Tunja or Manizales. It descends in ridges, so that the slope descends more or less evenly from west to east and from north to south you go up and down like on a washboard (my orientation depending entirely on the Cathedral facing west, which if it does not, then is all wrong). It is a center for transportation and a biggish city with half a million or so in the metropolitan area. Not large, but not small. It has the 70s and 80s climate, a great favorite with many persons of this planet, it appears.

We got there in a gentle rain, and walked in it, and stopped for lunch. It is no secret that the worst of Colombia, after Melgar, is Bogotá. Any of its other cities is likely to be better, especially if you get into the central ridge and the valley beyond it which is the coffee zone. Ibagué is no exception. A fine Colombian city, as far as Colombian cities go. Too much traffic and disorder, but the gentle chaos is like the gentle rain which the locals pay little attention to: nobody covers the outdoor stands, few umbrellas appear, the crowds are no wise dissipated.

And they are polite. Not a lot of foreigners in Ibagué, to judge from the people who wanted to stare but would politely look away. Very welcoming at the hotels, friendly like Paisas–the natives of the largest department generally gathered around Medellin, when not gathered into drug cartels. Yet not aggressive as the people tend to be in Cartagena, and not sulky or sarcastic.

It looks like the city was founded around 1550. They have a lot of churches, a lot of tall buildings, an amazing 14 story parking garage downtown (it is the capital of the department, but it blew me away that they’d have so much parking downtown. I do not think we have anything that size here in Bogotá, as far as parking lots go), and this happy new trend, a pedestrianized downtown stretch of road. More interesting restaurants than Melgar too, and more accessible than here in Bogotá. In a smaller town, things are more mingled, which is part of the charm.

Has its mean sections too, but on the whole seems a lot friendlier and wholesomer and generally well treed. The weirdest thing about Ibagué is Dunkin’ Donuts. I saw some six or so. Even at the bus station there were two, and let me tell you about bus stations: that is really high-class for such a place. It means the chain is wildly popular in Ibagué, though I will permit myself to observe that the bus station seemed a cut above the ordinary as well . . . it had several tiny cafeteria type places for lunch (unusual to see choices) and about six gambling dens.

We had an ample late lunch sitting on old-fashioned red chairs at a hotel restaurant, and then proceeded to survey hotels. Our ingenious plan here is just to walk around and enter boldly any hotel establishment and ask to be shown a room. I have found it helps if you enter with panache. Then, if it looks interesting and the amenities add up I ask, “Y en cuanto me lo puede dejar?” which is a secret code that we have for getting the best deal. We ended up in a pretty new and nice one, more expensive than we usually do, but the draw there was the sauna and jacuzzi, which we used the following day.

The service was of the quality which borders on the right side of obsequious, mostly. It is one thing I value greatly in hotels: the respectful setting down of dishes, the cloth napkins especially in this country, the yes sir we’ll turn on the sauna for you at 11AM even if it has never in the history of this hotel been done before. One of the waitresses seemed to be unable to take me very seriously at first, but that passed eventually as I conducted myself with more than usual aplomb.

And we explored the city a bit. Had good coffee there, but then, it is a coffee producing part if not the famous coffee zone. If I were a missionary of the old school, I would certainly walk away saying that I definitely felt the Lord calling me to Ibagué. Alas, I am neither a missionary or of the school that felt particularly led or perhaps you, my friend, could be funding my life there indefinitely. Another rain came later, and it gentled by the time we left, clearing completely as the bus backed out of the bay.

But no doubt someday I will go back. A quick flight perhaps. You see, that’s the drawback with the southern end of things: getting out of Bogotá via the south is the worst. You can spend two or three hours to Ibagué just stuck in traffic in the south of Bogotá. It looks like Avianca flies in with Fokker 50′s. That would be interesting–I’ve never been in one of those before.

The Resort

In Colombia anybody working with a legal contract (as opposed to the loophole contract–which is simply designed to avoid just about everything conceivable) is automatically joined to a compensation club. These entities are in some way a socialist institution, a sort of cooperative run by a private company with which one gets discounts. Some of them own theaters, are associated with grocery chains, and they tend to own resorts in the kinds of places people go for vacations.

We have Cafam, a big one, and they have a huge resort in Melgar.

Melgar is an hour-and-a-half, to two hours from Bogotá, all down the mountain. Melgar is all the way down too: down in the torrid Madgalena valley. The resort is well managed, well kempt and generally well arranged. They handle vacationers all year round and they handle great volumes and no doubt great problems. They are good. And they must spray for bugs because you don’t encounter them in the quantities you would expect.

So they have two hotels, and hundreds of little cabins scattered (but not widely, just in large quantities) over the acreage, with pools, a zoo, amusement park, etc. It is all concentrated in one compound in which they control all the pricing with the usual prices of convenient location and near-absolute monopoly.

If you have good neighbors, then you can stay in a cabin, cook your own food, read, swim, write, wander, and be in a very hot climate with all reasonable amenities excluding TV, internet and air-conditioning. Not a bad thing.

Orcs

What if you go to a cabin in Melgar and you have bad neighbors? They will turn on their stereo early and turn it off late. You can get the security guys to come after them, but only after midnight. They can party up till midnight, laughing raucously, screeching and doing whatever it is they came with a vague idea of doing.

The resort is geared to all classes, and you can pay much or little. We got our cabin for two nights for about $60. That’s a great price, but it means they get all kinds of people for those prices. Some people’s idea of a good time might be always having reggaeton blasting at them, and might not include consideration for people with slightly more delicate tastes. If they go to the pool, they will take their music there. If they are located in the cabin immediately behind you and close to the screens of your bedroom which do not have glass or any other kind of protection–not that you would be in there if the room were hermetically sealed–then there is little you can do to avoid being involved in their idea of a good time.

You can hope they’ll go to some blaring bar where people only talk to each other in shouts in a bewildering semidarkness with randomly flashing lights till 3AM, but they might not want to spend what that amenity requires. Colombians are not choosy about music, so long as it is neither intelligent or beautiful. Stupefied by drugs, alcohol, excessive fornication, sleep deprivation, heat stroke or just stupefied by not being too intelligent to begin with, some people on vacation in Melgar find they have to turn up the volume considerably. That surly modern attitude that you have a right to jackhammer at your sensibilities to drown out the lack of inner resources–the life of animals seeking physical stimulation to drown out the demands of the soul, however meager these latter–prevails in places like Melgar.

That is the big drawback. When you book a cabin in Melgar, you gamble with that unless you are the kind of party whose idea of a good time is to make a nuisance of yourself.

Melgar

The town itself is a trashy little hot-weather town glorified by hard partying into an uninterrupted string of bars, restaurants, hotels and shops–at least along the main drag an on the approach to this huge resort center from which the town derives its substantial life. It is the place to get a cheap vacation. If you cross the brown river you’ll find the shacks and tumble of any other village of its kind not endowed with a lucrative nexus and endless supply of cash from the capital. If you are a foreigner you are probably wise not to venture far along that way.

Melgar has the glory of vegetation. You plant something there, it will grow rampant. They have mangos in the Magdalena valley–various varieties of the tree with the mangos in clusters ripening in the sun and dropping as chance or the weather permit. In the resort, the mangos are abundant and people go about gathering the windfalls.

There is a sullen disorder to hot weather towns, a sort of sleepy, continual decay. You don’t need much to live: not a lot of clothes certainly, not a whole lot of possessions, hardly even walls or roof as the weather is probably never below 80. With the rains, especially at night, it can cool down, but not that much. (We had good long, hard rains during the nights. Pleasant that, watching it in the lamplight, the eaves dripping, the bats winging through it gleaming, the gurgle mingling with the sounds of insects. It has been raining and all the trees are hoary with moss and lichens now, the palms exuberant.) And so life shambles onward there, in flip-flops or, when it wants to go quickly, perched on a sputtering scooter.

The bus stop is no destination, a way-station of dust and squalor: cheap eateries under rickety awnings, food ripening variously in greasy glass cases, smarmy shouting conductors, taxis, buses, heat and the fat slobbing recumbent it in the shade. Safe and sordid, is what the bus stops tend to be. Any robbing there is done by way of commercial exchange-the ancient rite of overcharging: so you haggle with all the sly hagglers in the bustle of buses coming and going. The haggling is why I think they have to affect a rush, as if they went on timetables and worried about being on time. Time, like the river, flows at the pace it wishes there, and is neither wrong or very often right.

Melgar has a good place to get coffee. It also has a restaurant called MacDougal’s which is probably not as interesting as it sounds. A fast food type place, it seems: beware of Colombian imitations of fast food; they can do it well when they do it with their own cuisine, but when they branch out they add uningeniously. We looked at the restaurants, tried one, and ended up eating in our cabin all the rest of the time. The enigma of MacDougal’s is still with me.

Hot Weather

It is its own thing, hot weather. You take a lot of showers–there is no hot water and it is not missed. Living in the heat all the time, without going in and out of air conditioning you soon get used to the demands. You can spend the whole week wearing the same bathing suit and only changing your shirt, thus taking a vacation from laundry. The simplicity can be useful, especially if you want to concentrate on something and get it done.

Here is the thing about Colombia: it is equatorial and so the temperature mostly stays the same year round. The variation is not really at the place, it comes when you move from place to place. Bogotá, for example, is a 50-60s type of place, seldom warming up into the 70s on hot days. Medellin is a 70-80s type of place. There are places of 80-90s and hotter. You pick your altitude in the mountains, or not, and stick there. Colombians who have lived in places with seasons have complained to me about the problem of having to figure out what to wear. Americans living in places with seasons have been known to do this too, which to me speaks of the general lack of ingenuity and resourcefulness the human race is plagued by in its present conditions.

This also explains why people in Bogotá complain so much about the so-called cold. If you come from warmer weather (most of the rest of the country) you might have thought to buy a jacket for here, but the concept of dressing is layers is a bit foreign. The idea, for many, of the weather being at all on the chilly side is a bit strange. They come, it is never warm, they are not used to it, they dislike it.

There is a drawback to hot weather: a general lack of enterprise. It is no way to spend a life.