Dispatch Number 62 -Drunks

After the Children of Camarones camp we worked our way deeper into the Guijira Desert in northeastern Colombia near the border with Venezuela, an isolated region rife with gasoline and cocaine trafficking, known as a Smugglers Paradise. None of the roads are marked with signs, there are no highways or paved roads, only a collection of dirt tracks leading in every direction. The word "maze" best describes the road system out in these parts.

Travel is slow because of rough roads and stopping to ask directions so many times I lost count. The oddest things would happen when we'd stop to ask directions in this landscape of sand, wind, abandonment and one house settlements -slurring drunk men would come stumbling out of the houses or from nearby bushes offering help.

The drunks would rush headlong into tireless monologues and quickly weren't talking about directions anymore. They always asked for a handout and demand to be let into the truck to show the way. In Latin America the cheap alcohol of choice is aguardiente, a locally made white lightening derived from sugar, corn or rice depending on local crops.
We began to see so many drunks in the seemingly empty desert that I changed the name from Peninsula de la Guijira to Peninsula de la Aguardiente because of the surprising number of booze fueled inhabitants we met out in the bush.

After a sandstorm we could see again once the wind let up and the sheets of sand that filled the sky came back to earth. Two drunks appeared on the horizon of the empty desert like a mirage, smashed out of their heads on aguardiente babbling the way drunks do: breathless monologues delivered in machine gun bursts.
Feeling lost when I saw them I thought, I'll ask for directions. You never know they are drunk until the conversation starts.

They were an odd couple, one young the other old and leathery with a bottle of aguardiente tucked in his waistband. Indian skin turned black from a life working in the desert. Burning merciless sun. Their appearance in this landscape was surreal. The wrathlike trees gave no shade. It was Charles Bukowski who chronicled the American drunk so well meets Albert Camus in the Algerian deserts of North Africa.

They babble and plead for drink money saying, We'll show you the way, while pulling at the door handles of my nervous passengers.
The stream of consciousness may be clearly represented in the mind of the drunkard, but to the unwilling audience it is babble that almost sounds human. I tire of drunks quickly, they are like super glue when it gets on your fingers, they are very hard to get rid of. It has to be done delicately or your skin tears.

This pair slurs so badly Juan-Pablo the Colombian traveling with us can't understand them. Excited about something, they monologue like mad under merciless afternoon sun. Burning. Burning.
Just let us in! they holler.

David
Cartagena, Colombia