Totumo Volcano, etc

As I said, I went to Totumo Volcano after Spanish class. It took about 90 minutes to drive there from Cartagena on a rickety bus that I named Rolskin Harley (a play on words for Rolls-can-hardly) - Rolls DOWN the hills, can hardly make it up a hill, hehe.

Okay, that's corny, but I daze out on long road trips to absorb the scenary, and let me tell you, Colombia's like no other when it comes to breathtaking scenary - especially in the "suburbs". Here are a few pictures:







This last picture is a FARC checkpoint - a rebel group that kidnaps people and uses ransom to finance themselves. After convincing them we were all Canadian, they left us in peace.

I'm sooo kidding! Okay, not a good thing to kid about. In fact, it's nothing to worry about in northern Colombia. A different rebel group, the ELN, controls some areas around here, but they're also deteriorating in their power, as well as the FARC, according to many locals. The government and Colombian army are regaining their upper hand against rebel groups and drug cartels - which is great because the people of Colombia are now, for the first time in a long time, able to experience true liberty. This may be why Colombia shot up really high on the list of the world's happiest countries. I don't blame them, though I don't know what it would feel like to have been under such an instable country plagued by corruption.

Okay, enough for the history lesson: back to Totumo Volcano.

This place was just awesome. It's a volcano that's been dormant for hundreds of thousands of years, apparently. I didn't quite understand the numbers that were being used. It's the first picture posted. When you climb up to the top, you get an amazing view of a lake to the south. It's fresh water and it's very warm! Inside the volcano, there's mineral mud that is all natural!

Check it out:

The view from atop





Inside the volcano














Isn't that COOL?!?! It was a VERY interesting experience. Apparently, the pit is completely bottomless, but since your body is less dense than the mud, no matter what you do, you simply can't sink. Also, there are clumps of mud and clay that float around in the mud. When you're kicking your legs around, you feel these on your skin and it kind of freaks you out! Moreover, people can't see where they're putting their arms and legs under the mud. It goes without saying what you may and may not do in those circumstances, lol. You were able to stay in as long as you like, but you're over it in about 20 minutes. Considering it only cost 25,000 Colombian pesos (~$14 USD) to go on this trip, I'm not complaining. This is a total tourist trap, and $25,000 pesos is a lot of money to the locals here.

Real quick: you get bills in denominations of thousands: 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50. Pretty much like US dollars but they're in thousands. What you can get for 20,000 pesos is about what you can get for $20 USD in the States. However, since the cost of overall living expenses are considerably lower, you're money goes a lot further in Colombia, especially in the smaller cities, and Cartagena is the third largest city behind Bogotá and Medellín (me-duh-ZHEEN), respectively.

Now, I digress. Once you get out of the volcano and are completely covered in mud, you are walked over to a small lagoon to get washed off. I sat down, and got completely disrobed under the water in order to clean out my shorts. There were nice ladies that were helping everyone as they were getting cleaned off.

Then, what turned into a very good experience quickly turned sour.

The moment you get back to the cabanas, you get bombared, almost to the point of harrasment, from the workers there for "propina", which means Tip in Spanish. It wasn't "Propina, por favor", it was a flat out *Propina!*, in a firm voice, an wiggling their index finger as in "gimme!". Being in the service industry where I work for tips, I became rather agitated by this.

To me, you get tips for performing services that are requested by the guest. Then, if the guest sees fit, they tip you at their discretion, and it is NOT to be demanded at all by the one providing the service. That wasn't the case here.

The moment you get off the bus and get to the stairs, one person tells you to take off your sandals or shoes. Understandable, they'll get destroyed.

You get to the top of the volcano, a guy takes your camera away before you get in. Okay, that's understandable, too.

Then you get into the mud. There are complete strangers in there that start giving you massages, and to be honest, they sucked. You don't ask for the massages, they just give them to you - at one point, I told the guy to quit touching me, but of course, he acted like he didn't speak English. Ugh.

You get out and someone scrapes mud off of you. Even though you tell him not to f-ing touch you, he still does. I ran from him pretty much but he still followed me.

Finally, like I said, you go into the lagoon and women help clean you off. That was actually nice, but I still could have done it myself.

So, yeah. I got completely annoyed when I got back to the cabana and these people that forced services on me were straight up demanding a tip. There was about a total of five people tapping an my arm or shoulder. Just to get them away from me, I gave them each a 1,000 peso bill. That's about $0.55 so I figured it was worth it to get them out of my face. Furthermore, they didn't say anything, but I can tell by the look in their eyes that my tip "wasn't good enough".

It gets worse: I dropped a 10,000 peso bill. Right as it happened, Brian noticed some quickly go to the ground to pick something up. Brian, not knowing until after he saw me looking for it that I had dropped it, asked me what I was looking for. I told these people I was looking for a "10 mille billeta". They acted like nothing had happened.

I tried to talk and explain to them in Spanish what Brian and I think had happened, but they acted like my Spanish was so bad that they couldn't understand me. I started swearing in English along with raising my voice, and they quickly clammed up and left.

Luckily, we left quickly after that and I quickly detached myself from the situation, hence releasing all negativity about it.

On the bus ride home, I couldn't help but try to analyze it outside the box. At first, I was feeling "cultralcentric" meaning I was holding the standards of my culture against theirs. Then, I realized it wasn't even about that. It's not "Centric" in any respect. It's about respecting your fellow human beings and not allowing selfishness and greed to overpower that. We're all the same more than we are different.

Normally, I'd damn them with the cliché, Karma's a Bitch. However, I just learned that releasing yourself from a situation by wishing more negativity accomplishes nothing. Instead, I will continue to live my life faithfully trusting that people on this earth are generally well-intentioned.

Sorry for another deep epiphany and moment of self-discovery, but every day that I'm here in Colombia, I'm learning more ways on how to spread things in this world more positively and it pleases me to help others do the same.

Anyway, we're having dinner tonight with friends from Spanish school, and tomorrow is an all day trip to Santa Marta. It's a National Park and is FULL of rare species of birds and plants.

Hasta luego!