The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America Read Online Free

impressive number of whorehouses.
    “So all of this out here,” I asked, gesturing at the tiredpalm trees and mausoleum-like office buildings, “this is not typical of a Colombian metro?”
    “Man, not at all.” Sky shook his head. “Much more drab than Medellín or Cartagena. Colombians are actually super-passionate about their architecture. Art Deco is big. There’s a ton of colonial preservation. But this place?” He shrugged. “I don’t know, dude.”
    Sky gave a quick side-nod toward an adjacent table, and I looked over to where a trio of cute uniformed nurses sat, chatting over their cocktails in clipped Caribbean Spanish. He leaned over his place mat conspiratorially.
    “On the other hand,” he said, “there are things that don’t change no matter where you go in Colombia.” He sat back in his chair and grinned slightly, raising his bottle in a mock toast. “At least the women of Barranquilla are still beautiful.” Then he took a long swig and exhaled in satisfaction. “Hey, did you know this is Shakira’s hometown?”
    Sky was a tall, tanned thirty-year-old with a goatee and the kind of nondescript, close-cropped haircut that’s justifiably popular in equatorial climates. More often than not, he wore a camera around his neck and a leather satchel over one shoulder, heavy with lenses and other tools of his trade. Over beers that afternoon, he regaled me with stories of his time on the continent, waxing romantic about his fondness for Colombia, which in large part seemed to stem from his fondness for Colombian women. Sky was clearly a bit of a playboy, a good-natured soldier-of-fortune type who could segue onto the subject of women from seemingly any unrelated topic. He also kept up with my beer consumption, which I admired, and he seemed just as passionate about South American politics and social movements as he was about the Shakira look-alikes coming in and out of the bar. I liked him instantly.
    “So our first stop is Guajira, then?” Sky asked as the bartender brought another round.
    “La Guajira,” I confirmed. “The land of the Wayuu, where Thompson first touched down in May of ’62.”
    I had mailed Sky photocopies of Thompson’s
Observer
stories, including his first article from the continent, entitled “A Footloose American in a Smugglers’ Den.” The piece opens on Thompson as he disembarks from the bootlegger’s boat in a tiny village at the tip of the peninsula. He had managed to hitch the ride there from the Dutch island of Aruba, about ninety miles out to sea, where he’d stopped en route to the continent after visiting friends in Puerto Rico. From the
Observer
story, Sky and I had gleaned what little we knew about Guajira: (a) that it was a desert, and (b) that it consisted largely of reservation land for Colombia’s indigenous Wayuu tribe. Some cursory Internet searching hadn’t revealed much more. Like many Latin American countries, the Colombia of the Internet reflects mostly those areas of interest to visiting tourists, and Guajira isn’t a region that sees a lot of gringo traffic—or any kind of traffic, really, since the whole peninsula is largely without roads.
    “The problem is,” Sky said, “I don’t know any smugglers with boats. So how are you supposing we get out there?”
    I unfolded a map that, thankfully, I’d been using as a bookmark. “We can take a bus as far as Riohacha,” I said, pointing to a town some 125 miles east of Barranquilla. Riohacha is the capital of the La Guajira department (the Colombian equivalent of a state) and effectively the gateway to the peninsula. Near it on the map was a small blue icon of a beach umbrella, indicating
la playa
. Where there was
la playa
, I figured, there would be some kind of tourism infrastructure. From Riohacha, then, I hoped we could rent a truck or some other sort of off-road conveyance.
    Sky laughed. “That simple, huh? Then we just tear off into the desert, full speed ahead?”
    I nodded.
    “And