Taganga, Colombia

Any Alaskans out there will understand when I say Taganga has been the most “Talkeetna-like" place I´ve stayed thus far in my travels.  Descriptions of Taganga I found online before hand ranged from “quaint fishing village” to “backpacker ghetto.”  Indeed, and Talkeetna is at once a “rustic trapping outpost” as well as a “tourist mecca and climbing hub,” neither one is quite fair.

Taganga
Here in Taganga one may be accosted by herds of cantankerous goats occupying the streets.  Old men in wicker rocking chairs pass the afternoon sipping coffee and casting a scornful eye at pedestrians from the shade of their front porches, fishermen pull in their nets by hand to reveal a flopping of silver. Starving dogs prowl the alleys.  The town has a feel suggesting it never completely recovered from the last hurricane.  Genuine enough, for sure.  But Taganga, a town of about 3,000 is also home to no less than six scuba-dive shops, a reliable whisper of “Hay-lo friend have I weed” from the long-hairs, and a plethora of various enterprises offering “Extreme Adven-tours” from mountain bike rentals to jungle treks to archaeological ruins.  There are plenty of stories of travelers being mugged in dark corners on the way back to their hostels after nights of revelry, which makes me consider the kinds of stories I imagine Japaneese tourists are sharing back in the Princess lodge in Talkeetna.  Did you know that a guy got shot not long ago at the bar where we had lunch today?  Yeah- and I heard that someone got mauled by a bear near here recently too.  And there’s guys with machine guns guarding huge greenhouses full of marijuana just up the road.  All true stories, so I hear.

Met some local guys out harpoon-fishing (recreationally).

After an afternoon of hiking around gravelly trash strewn beaches and chatting with local fishermen I have a sensation uncommon to me as a usually happy-to-be-anywhere traveler: I either need to do something or get out of here.  Just as climbing is the distant-yet-mainstream activity to do in Talkeetna, so is scuba diving here.  A fellow paraglider-traveler I met in Bucaramanga who also has worked as a dive instructor told me that the only dive shop to go to was Poseidon, so I take a deep breath and walk inside their office.  Inside a big German shepard trots up and nuzzles my hand, the surest sign that I have just left Latin America.  Gerd, a friendly German guy who has been married to a Colombian woman here for the last seven years will be my instructor.

I was more intimidated by the idea of scuba diving than paragliding.  Humans obviously weren´t designed to fly nor breathe underwater, but something about breathing underwater has always seemed so much more alien to me.  The idea of my eardrums imploding from sinus pressure underwater I find more terrifying than the idea of launching myself off a mountain.  In the pool behind the shop, my first ear-popping experience or “equalization” is not nearly as bad as I had braced myself for- just pinch your nostrils and blow.  Ensconced in lycra and weighted down on the bottom of the pool, Gerd and I use a sort of sign language to go through a series of exercises. We practice removing and replacing the regulator (i.e. mouthpiece, where your air comes from), removing and then replacing and clearing the mask, and using equipment to find “neutral buoyancy” wherein one can hover like an astronaut without sinking or floating.  Over the next several days we spend the mornings a short boat ride away in Parque Nacional Tayrona continuing with more exercises and exploring reefs.  Scuba diving has much to do with visibility as paragliding does with air conditions, and the visibility was rather low for the several days I went out.  So, no huge manta rays or herds of sharks to report, but several very intimidating moray eels and countless fish and sponges and corals and many other things I have no idea what they were.  I am now PADI certified to dive anywhere in the world.

In learning to breathe underwater I was overwhelmed by the immediacy of my own respiration.  On land breathing happens thoughtlessly, hardwired in to the deepest and most reptilian part of our brains.  Underwater there is no consideration more immediate than breathing, the distractions of sight are secondary.  The loud whooshing and sucking of my own air is the only thing that exists, all that matters.  I hear the voice of my yoga teacher who I haven’t seen for years: “Inhale...exhale...inhale...exhale.”  The Zen master Shunryu Suzuki writes of a visualization technique that one may use in mediation: envision a door swinging on a hinge, picture a specific door somewhere.  The door I see is always a battered screen door in a dusty farm house on a scorching afternoon, swinging in and out with each gust of wind.  The wind becomes your breath, with each inhalation the door swings in, each exhalation it swings out.  After a time the house the falls away and only the door remains, then the door too ceases to exist. Only your breath remains.  Learning to dive has been an intense sort of mediation for me.

Tomorrow I will head Southeast towards Mérida, Venezuela where I have some paragliding acquaintances I met briefly in Bucaramanga that offered to let me stay in their home.   They live near the LZ of another famous fly site there, Tierra Negra, which I find enticing.  One of them is teaching a three-day SIV course (emergency maneauvers, practiced over a lake) that I’ve signed up for.  I´m told by fellow travelers that the best way to change money from Colombian Pesos to Venezuelan Bolivares is to do business with the slightly sketchy men that roam border town bus stops flashing wads of cash.  As unappealing as this sounds, the black market exchange rate of Bolivares is twice the official rate, as the Venezuelan government has instituted a currency freeze to ensure they can continue exporting oil cheaply.  In other words, exchanging money through official channels would mean everything in Venezuela is twice as expensive.

Ciao for now.  We’ll see what I’ve got myself in to.