after a 4 hour jeep ride we finally arrived in santa maria, deep into the countryside of colombia. the road was small, barely paved and extremely winding, as it followed the river inland through mountain passes. i saw lots of horses and lots of military checkpoints.
the power plant there is a hydro plant. hydro plants are always the most fun to photograph (well, besides the nuclears ones. just kidding, KIDDDING, jeez) bc they have the fewest employees (less amount of time taking silly portraits) and have the coolest locations. actually, gas turbine plants has the fewest employees, but they rarely have monster size iquanas waiting for you in the morning outside su casita in the compound. nor do they have roaring rivers, mile high damns and rarely are they located in the jungle. they also dont have bats that try to chew through the roof of your sweet little casita, to get inside at YOU. seriously, in the morning there was a whole in the ceiling of my room that bright sunlight was pouring through. and directly below it was a little pile of sawdust. ok, maybe it wasnt a bat. but at least i didnt have a huge spider lower itself down from the ceiling on to my bed, like david did!
this power plant in particular is so isolated, that the company built a compound to house all of the employees who refuse to make the 4 hour commute from bogota. understandable. this compound is pretty rad. they have every kind of sport imaginable, a pool, a theatre (pirates del caribean) and a bar complete with pool, billiard and snooker tables.
of the many new and exciting things that we did while in the country side, 2 were memorable, among the likes of sanduning in qatar (thought i was going to die, really), bathing with elephants in sri lanka (ok i actually didnt get into the river) or watching a kings tribe perform traditional dances for us in cameroon (i was offered a wife and a hillside if i stayed - i should have)
1) romancing the stone: every since we arrived in colombia, david had been insisting to the client that we go to these emerald mines outside of santa maria. they flat out refused. TOO DANGEROUS they learned to say in english bc they thought he didnt understand 'muy peligroso' since he kept asking.
a side note, i think i might browse through davids travels guides before he has a chance to read them and simply sensor out anything that might be potentially, life threating.
but the emerald mines! we must go, we must! and we did. it wasnt exactly like the gold mines that selgado photographed, actually, it was far from it, but it was amazing. the miners work an 12 hour shift deep deep deep into the mountain. the deal is, any fragments they find in the water, they can keep and sell after their shift. any large emeralds they chip out of the mine wall itself, is the property of the mining company.
all these miners, selling little chips of emerald. it was real sketch. that is the scene we happened upon when we pulled up in our jeep, like real gringos. david hops out and our body gaurd leaps out of the car after him to talk to the mine manager to make sure it is ok for us to take photos. the mine manager is one tough motherfucker. what he says, goes, and he liked david, so naturally, all the miners liked david. david settled in taking portraits. he was unrattled by the screaming repition of the only english word they knew. ¨whiskey` over and over again. then someone busted out with a ´chivas regal´. how they knew that, i dont know. the crowd got kinda silent and they looked at the chivas guy.
after that we actually headed down to the mouth of the mine, where there was a tremendous amount of money changing hands for emeralds. pretty amazing. our client, the cute and energetic paula suddenly became the recepient of several emeralds, and marriage proposals. she kept the stones, but declined the invitations. actually, she put all the emeralds into one of my discarded coke bottles, for safe keeping (they are quiet small, and my eyes ARE green) until she got back to the compound.
then, as if all of this wasnt enough, the miners decided they wanted to take us inside the mine. i was convinced we were gonna get robbed. our security did not come with us. we probably hiked in a good 30 minutes. the air got more and more stale, with each turn and the ceiling of the mine got lower and lower, until at some points, we basically had to crawl underneath huge beams supporting the mines roof. there was no photo op, but it was an amazing experience.
"tranquilo gringo, tranquilo"
finally, david convinced them we had to turn back. the miners were extremely dissapointed. this had been a lot of fun for them, i think. they kept laughing. to show their disdain, they refused to show us the way back and made us guess. impossible. good god. we had made so many turns and all the different tunnels looked well, the FUCKING SAME. it might have been my gentle sobbing, or david begging in really really bad spanish, but they decided to show us the correct way out. if they hadnt, i would probably still be there, eating my shoe strings and scraping my bloody fingers against the rock wall, looking for emeralds.
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2) chekpoint CHECKPOINT!!!
the only time i ever utter these words is when i am riding in an alley cat bike race. usually the checkpoint person is so drunk, or stupid, that they are at the wrong corner, bridge, location, what have you that you yell these words and try to locate said cp person.
this checkpoint was slightly different.
after returning from a morning boat ride up and down the river which supplies the hydro plant with water, we had to wait at a military checkpoint before entering a series of 15 tunnels that you must go through to get to the plant. since we had taken a boat, we arrived before our car, which would take us the rest of the way through our journey. i cant say i have become comfortable around machine guns, but i can say that i am used to seeing them. the road up to the cp, along the river had trenches dug all along it. apparently a few years back this was a hotly contested location and there were firefights.
so, the checkpoint. david and i are standing there with about a bakers dozen of heavily armed military. the eldest military guy contained no more than 26 years of life experience. i secretly think he had seen rambo one too many times. he was wearing 2 belts of bullets over his shoulders, forming an X. and in his hands he held, rather proudly, one of those huge machine guns that has a support for the end of it, so you can lay on the ground and still fire.
everytime a bus would pull up, the army guys would order everyone off the bus and search them at gun point. they didnt find much. a rooster, some guns, which, if you register, you can keep, etc. david and i had nothing better to do, so we started photographing the scene. at first we were cautious. ok, perhaps me crawling through the trenches on my belly lobbing rolls of film to david wasnt the smartest thing, but...
the army guys got used to us. i mean, they didnt let me hold their machine guns or shoot at the local wildlife across the valley, but they didnt stop us from photoing them either. by the 3rd bus, they even waited for david to change lenses. totaly unreal. totally crazy.
i love colombia.
the people here are very relaxed, and jovial. i find this amazing considering everything they have been through, and continue to live with. its much like el salvador, in terms of the overall kindness of everyone.
hope all is well
a
