“Is anybody there?” I call, knocking on a moonlit door in a rural road in Antioquia. In a flash, I was transported back through the decades to a verse read in school from The Listeners. On a muddy road nearby, my car engine rumbles reassuringly and bats dart into the headlight beams casting giant winged shadows on the bamboo tunnel ahead, a detail I think Walter de La Mare might have appreciated when he penned his poem.
I knock again on the farmhouse door. “Which way to San Roque?” I call out, but no-one answers and nothing stirs, not a tinkle of carrilera from an old radio, not even a growling dog. I pick my way back to the car, feeling with my feet for the shadows not the puddles, and turn some music on to drive away the dark. The problem is I am lost, alone, late at night, in a remote part of Colombia, at the very point where the road divides.
I have a map showing the main towns and routes, but no junction is marked. I have no GPS and my plan to ask locals directions flounder on the fact there is no-one to ask – or if there is – they are not coming out at this hour. I sit in my car and watch the still house. No lights, no movement, no dogs. How strange is that? But I can feel that someone – or something – is inside. Listening.
How did I get here? I think back over the day’s journey which started with a sensible scheme to drive from Bogota? to the coast via Medelli?n. I somehow got subverted by my obsession for cutting corners to find a backwoods route that might detour the paisa capital and avoid hours of hairpin bends and lethal holiday traffic. “Look, if I take this small
road here I can avoid Medelli?n,” I explain to someone in my extended family. He looks doubtful. “It’s not really a road,” he comments.
“Well, it’s on the map, and it leads to a place called San Roque. From there, I can cut across the mountains to the coast,” I reply. “Maybe there is a road’, he says, “but no-one uses it […] or perhaps they do, but not kind of people you want to meet.”
That last statement does it for me. I will take the back-road to San Roque no matter what. So I leave the main Medelli?n highway at San Luis, a farming town in the lush skirts of the Andes just as they rise up from the sweaty Magdalena Valley. My detour is immediately rewarded with a fine waterfall, then the town itself, which is functional and not much used to outsiders, as I drive the wrong way around the main plaza.
I stop to ask for the road to San Carlos, the next town on my detour. “Road?” says the second man I ask. The first one had looked confused and walked away. “It’s not a road, but a trocha”. A trail. “How long to get there? “Two hours,” he says. Then, looking at my old car, “maybe three.”
The trocha turns out to be on old mule trail, common in these parts of Colombia and paved with large loose rocks allowing transit for small cars. A hardy Renault taxi is taking the same route, but the only vehicle I see in three hours. At least I have left the holiday traffic behind, I think, as I pick my way over the rocks in second gear.
At San Carlos, I join the Ruta de Los Embalses, a popular drive that connects to San Rafael and Guatape? and takes in several large hydro dam lakes set in otherwise wild scenery. On weekends visitors from Medelli?n throng to the jungle-clad hills and clear warm rivers. The road is tarmac now, and faster, winding between the dam lakes, but after an hour I turn off onto a dirt road at a sign to San Roque. Dusk is falling.
The night does strange things to our senses. Scenery closes in. Time condenses.Bad roads get worse.The past becomes present. Historically, the lush hills that brought hydro mega-projects to the zone also filtered the Colombian conflict. The Oriente Antioquen?o as the region is known was witness to some of the worst massacres and displacement perpetrated by guerrillas and paramilitaries. After the conflict subsided, the farmers did return, to work their fields now planted with land mines. Now, in theory, Colombia’s peace process is breathing new life into this punished land.
“But where are they all?” I think to myself arriving at the lonely farmhouse at the fork in the road. I walk back down the road in case I missed a sign, but nothing. Both roads leading from the fork are equally rutted and unused. There is nothing to hint which one leads to San Roque.
I curse the silent farmhouse and choose the right-hand track. The dark hills around the rutted route are equally devoid of any human life. Even the friendly cow would be welcome.
I plug on through the darkness feeling even more alone now that the road tops a ridge where a cold thick fog has formed. I stop and the check the map and the kilometres driven. Surely San Roque must be close, but another hour passes and no town, not even a village. Is there an end in sight?
At last I see a light. It comes from a small hut. I stop and an old man comes out with a lamp. “Good evening, is this the road to San Roque?” I ask. “Dear Beloved God” he says, or something to that effect, followed by the Colombian equivalent of “You don’t want to be going there from here.” Except I do. “Do you remember passing a farmhouse some while back?” he says. My heart sinks. That was two hours ago. You need to drive back there and take the other fork, he explains. He shines the light to help me turn on the narrow track. I drive back through the night.
At the junction, the moonlit farmhouse is waiting and a silent witness to foolishness. It is close to midnight. I stop and smoke a cigarette. My short-cut has turned into a marathon drive of 18 hours. There is no point rushing now. I shout goodnight to the phantom listeners and drive on to San Roque.
