Revolcado! Dancing in the forest and my alternative future in Colombia

“Universal Heritage site of Enjoyment”

Shoes have become an obstacle. They quickly get thrown under a palm tree. Another shot of aguardiente and we resume. “Se sufra pero se goza!” shouts one of our newly made friends. “We suffer it but we enjoy it!” Hips in perfect synchronisation, turning, turning, vibrating knees, feverish foot work, cool grass beneath, a perfect star filled sky above.

I am in Colombia in Tayrona National Park on the Caribbean coast. It is New Years Eve 1am and the party is just getting started. Speakers have been brought outside onto the grass. Salsa and reggaeton filtering out into the forest. We are surrounded by palm trees, thousands of years old stretching up to share the sky with the glittering stars. Most tourists have left the park to spend new years eve in the city nearby. I am with Ivana from Buenos Aires who I am travelling with, Luciana and Mariel from Peru and John and his 10 year old son from Bogota. And the locals who work in the park, some who have lived here all their lives, this forest dance floor almost the only one they know.

It is a moment of intense happiness, dancing with carefree abandon amidst palm trees and shooting stars, the Caribbean sea just metres away. Saying goodbye to 2011, sure that in 2012 things will be different, fresher, desires realised, gone, finished, those grey moments, the clumsiness of the year just past.

It occurs to me that we rarely write about joy.

About moments of happiness such as this one.

A place of intense beauty, a rush of energy, a stimulation of senses so powerful that the memory of it can ignite us again once back in our daily routine, the grind of work and cities and habits that seem to never change.

In Colombia, a country known more for violence and suffering, joy is also omnipresent. A topography of constantly changing landscapes – one of the most diverse in the world – a 2 hour drive can bring you through an alpine valley, grey and rainy, up into a luscious steamy forest, a snow peaked mountain in the background; drive a few more hours and you might come across a dry desert dotted with cactus.

But no matter the landscape, music is always present. In every small town along the road, salsa, vallenato, reggaeton blare from speakers out into the street, amidst the ubiquitous colorful fruit stalls, vendors or passersby ready to break into dance at any moment.

We spend time in the now infamous traffic jams - poorly made roads collapsed under the torrential 2011 rains . Everyone talks about the 2011 Rain. Everything is Revolcado. As we wait for the one passable land to open, vendors are at the ready with salsa CDs, fruit and shots of coffee. The perfect journey companions.

It is much more pleasant to travel by canoe. To an Afro-Colombian community in another Caribbean national park “Los Flamencos.” The flamingos did not come this year, uninspired by the torrential rains. Revolcado, again. As we sleep in our little cabin on the island, music can be heard in the distance. The young people crossed by canoe to the nearby village and spend the night dancing. They are back by dawn. I wonder what its like to be drunk in charge of a canoe.

Another night is spent in a hammock, outside, metres from the beach. Twenty or thirty of us lying in sleepy rows. It is romantic, at first. The sound of the sea, the gentle breeze rustling through palm trees, the starry sky above and an almost full moon illuminating the rows of hammocks. Someone is snoring. The gentle breeze isn’t that gentle – it begins to invade my hammock and I haven’t brought warm clothes (it’s the Carribean and I’m Irish). The trick, I’ve been told, is to lie diagonally so your back is straight. But I need to wrap myself up from the cold, I become a sagging ball, with a sore back and frozen toes, a crab scuttles past, and I wonder if crabs can climb? A brief glimpse of sunrise against soaring palm trees restores some romance… until morning finally comes.

We had arrived in Tayrona by boat. The sea is Revolcado . We cling to the edges of the boat for dear life, tipping over vast waves, showered with foam and Carribean sea. It is another moment of intense joy. The forested hills of the park jutting out into the ocean, white sand beaches stretching along the edges, the wild blue sea and a rollercoaster through it, to arrive at the calmness of Cabo de San Juan, as if on a postcard, perfect white sand, leaning palm trees, soft but giant rock formations, toucans and parrots. This was once the great city of the Tayrona indigenous peoples. Macchu Pichu, Tulum, Tikal. Indigenous people in Latin America, it seems, created cities in places for their intense and powerful beauty, not for their strategic importance like the Spanish colonisers did. There are very few Tayrona left.

There is a sad side to Colombia too.

I encounter it in the ironically named Hotel Paraíso where I wake at 5am my leg stuck to plastic. It is stiflingly hot. The once elasticated sheet has drooped away from the corners of the mattress, exposing the plastic covering beneath. I extract my sweat covered leg from it and fight the sheet back to its corner. The fan puffs out hot air. Music. Suddenly very loud and very near accompanied by laughing voices. A party from elsewhere has suddenly turned up at the motel outside my door – or is the start of the day, breakfast being prepared to the sound of Mexican ranchero music?

It is still dark. There is no air. It turns out it is not ranchero music at all but corridas. The music of narcos, songs about heroes smuggling drugs to the U.S, wiping out enemies.

Daylight reveals a fleet of shining silver SUVs, corridas blaring from one of the speakers, a table littered with bottles of aguardiente, a group of men half collapsed ordering breakfast. It is 24 December. If they are heading somewhere to spend Christmas with their family, it is doubtful they will make it.

We are in Magdalena Medio, The heart of paramilitary territory, a place that has seen appalling levels of violence. Hotel Paraiso is set amidst immense palm tree plantations. Once the land of small farming families who never knew hunger, using the fertile land to grow all they needed, it is now Palm trees as far as the eye can see. There are no people here, just palm trees managed by former paramilitaries, to produce oil for biofuel. The families now live in shanty towns on the edges of Bogota and Medellin where they now know about hunger. Displaced. That is what they are called. A euphemism for being violently evicted from your land so it can be taken over by paramilitaries and their buddies.

The conflict in Colombia is complicated, but not that much. Like all conflicts it is about resources and power.

The FARC and other Guerrilla groups– which began as left wing movements demanding land reform and more equitable distribution of resources in this country of immense inequality - soon became corrupted by narco-trafficking and extreme violence and have subsequently been pushed out to the borderlands near Ecuador and Venezuela.

The Paramilitaries who pushed them to the borderlands – who have been proven to have received full State backing (a State in turn fully backed by the United States) committed some of the worst atrocities of the conflict. They have now supposedly demilitarised and their crimes, the massacres of thousands of men, women and children and targeted killing of human rights defenders – “pardoned” in a farcical process of reconciliation.

And the objective of the rich landowning classes who created the paramilitiares in the first place has been achieved. Get rid of poor people, and gain control of more land, plant palm trees so people can not live on it.

Land distribution in Colombia is now even more unequal than before.

And the violence that enabled this, the hundreds and thousands of men, women and children murdered, the millions of “displaced” has not been resolved, there has not been justice and until there is justice, there can not be reconciliation, or stability.

There is one objective the rich landowning class did not achieve. They tried to silence human rights defenders – the people who spoke out and condemned the violence, journalists who exposed the State’s backing of paramilitaries, parents who lost their sons and daughters, children who lost their parents and demand justice. The paramilitary killed thousands of human rights defenders but they have not managed to silenced their voices. In Colombia there is a strong movement of people who refuse to accept silence, who refuse to have the past brushed under the carpet. It is they who will continue to build a more just country.

The Government, on the other hand, thinks that by sending the army out on to the streets to wave at passers it will help Colombians believe the conflict is over and clean up the image of the military. Now 18 year old boys spend the whole day on the side of the motorways waving and doing the thumbs up sign to passing cars.

A potent contrast between what the people want – justice and reconciliation, and what the Government thinks is enough – friendly soldiers waving by the side of the road.

The trip has come to and end and I remember the tourist board poster which had welcomed me 3 weeks earlier at El Dorado Airport in Bogota. “Now the only problem you will find in Colombia,” it said, “is that you won’t want to leave”

It is cheesy but true. I don’t want to leave. The taxi driver tells me all the places I have yet to visit.

“What? You didn’t go to the coffee growing region?

Or Medellin or Piedra del Penol either ?

No, I am turning the taxi around right now. I refuse to bring you to the airport! You have to stay at least another month, and then it will be carnival and you will end your holiday dancing salsa for 1 week in Baranquilla. An

d there you’ll meet a negrito and fall in love, and end up staying forever…”

An alternative future laid out before me.

We arrive at the airport and I heave my rucksack out of the car.

“I’m letting you off this time but only because I know you’ll be back,” he says.

And he is right.