Kindle Edition
Amazon
Category:
Travel
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN-10: 1469771675
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 365
Copyright: Aug 3 2012
ISBN-13: 978146977167
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
Travel through Cordillera mountain ranges, mysterious jungles and deserts, and endure the travails of life on the road through one of South America’s most exciting countries with Conversations on La Playa.
As a young American university exchange student in the early 1970s, author Robert Hodum found himself in the exotic and mystifying South American country of Colombia. The time he spent there left an indelible imprint upon his life and led him to a career in Latin American history.
Journey back to a country torn by poverty and civil unrest, and travel through some of Colombia’s most perilous and magical settings in conversations on La Playa. With candor and a good dose of humor, Hodum recreates all the sights, smells, and sounds of Colombia. He recounts the subterranean, dangerous world of the city of Medellín, its mist-enshrouded Cordillera neighborhoods, and the haunting characters of its urban landscape.
In addition to his account of this personal journey, Hodum includes an extensive glossary of important people, places, and things as well as cultural and historical information that are indispensable for any traveler to the country. He also gives a complete listing of survival vocabulary and expressions in Spanish that off a deeper appreciation of Colombia, its people, and their language.
Travel through Cordillera mountain ranges, mysterious jungles and deserts, and endure the travails of life on the road through one of South America’s most exciting countries with Conversations on La Playa.
Excerpt
The mornings were the best time to catch the tales of the curandero, Medellín’s witchdoctor. This gaunt, dark-skinned, storyteller claimed lineage from a long line of healers from the Llanos Orientales, Colombia’s southeastern plains and savannah region. He interrupted the flow of commuter traffic with a suitcase full of boa constrictor.
This llanero witchdoctor set up his sideshow at the corner of the same alley every day. An ad hock author who had no knowledge of punctuation or paragraphs nor even owned a pen, the curandero would construct about us the canopy of jungle trees, the thatched huts of a settlement founded by criminal colonists and runaway slaves, where he captured this beast. He regaled us with the deaths of his compatriots and the many tribulations incurred, the flight from curare tipped arrows of the locals and his harrowing journey back over the Eastern Cordillera and the Savana de Bogotá to bring us his chilling accounts.
With a wave of his hand, the pavement, concrete buildings, and impatient, honking taxis disappeared. The jungle vines and brown muddy waters of far-off Amazonian rivers would come alive. We traveled with him through the clouds of rainforest mist, heard the squawks of macaws and screeching cannibalistic monkeys and swatted away foot-long jungle mosquitoes.
His arm was ripped and stitched, and painted with Mercurochrome. He warned us all that in the dark recesses of his satchel waited the most vicious killer in the jungle, besides man. In his valise coiled the crafty boa, which he wrestled from the body of a strangled caiman. He bagged this specimen on the banks of the Río Caquetá by prying open the snake’s jaws and pulling it off of the carcass of the reptile.
We all expected to see a forty-foot long snake pounce out at us, but this one measured out at not much longer than five feet. Yet, it was still an impressive sight as he strained at the coiling of the mottled constrictor that reluctantly abandoned its safe haven inside the leather suitcase. He dared anyone to touch and hold his writhing captive. No one ever did.
The curandero’s contortions and sudden movements, thrusting the boa’s head and open mouth in our direction, always drew nervous laughter from the crowd. When the show was over he would bow to the applause, snake in one hand, and nimbly pass his hat with the other. Few refused to contribute with that snake poised so menacingly close to our faces. His tales were always gripping; the curandero unquestionably earned the pile of coins and the infrequent peso bill that wound up in his oily, crumpled fedora.
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