CORRUPT, CAPTIVATING COLOMBIA
This story is so messed up I don’t know where to begin. How about the part when I was flying down an unlit highway at night, inexplicably lost the “right of way” and came within a whisker of getting T-boned by an oncoming truck? Or the part when my top case came open while I was riding and I lost most of my clothes, toiletries and toolkit — more than $1000 worth of stuff? Or should I start at the part where Jack and I stepped out for a nightcap to discuss the final leg of our ride to the Amazon? Why not? It’s as good a place as any.
“…CALI IS STILL CALI, A HOTBED OF SALSA AND FORNICATION…”
We’re in Cali. Not Cali as in California, but the Colombian city of Cali, birthplace of the Rodriguez brothers, the narcotraffickers who monopolised the world’s cocaine supply in the 1990s and ran their business — the Cali Cartel — like a Fortune 500 company. One-time billionaires, the cartel’s founders are now all dead or in jail. But Cali is still Cali, a hotbed of salsa and fornication, and it doesn’t take long for trouble to find us.
At 6am we stumble out of a mansion on a ridge overlooking the city — the scene of a mad pool party we ended up at last night. We’ve got no idea how to get to
