A POINTLESS EXCURSION
The follies of an amateur tomb-robber
CINTO BAY
I caught my first sight of the bay from a high pasture, arid and windy, well above the potholed Trunk road –that ill-famed conduit for marijuana and coal dust which, following the shores of the Caribbean, runs from Santa Marta to the desert of La Guajira. The place was called Calabazo, some twenty kilometers from the former. A little towards the east, nestled in the same little cordillera facing the sea, lies Pueblito, the first pre-Columbian “city” discovered in Colombia and that was the reason why I was there, clambering through the wilderness in Calabazo. I had traveled from Bogotá to the coast a little while before, with the illusion of finding relics of the Tairona Indians who built Pueblito, along with hundreds of similar settlements in the region, and I was hunting for clues about one of its satellites now. Not as a professional, needless to say, but an arqueólogo salvaje. A freelance journalist then, I vaguely hoped to write some articles about it to justify the time and money I was wasting. Just then, however, struggling against the strong wind and intermittently trapped by the dense, high grass, I wondered what the hell I was doing there.
Whenever I turned around and looked back, I could see, well below, the gray ribbon of the Trunk road and bits of the farm where I was staying. It lay alongside the highway and the majordomo, a friend of mine, had let me put up my tent in a field behind the house. I confess that a tent wasn´t always a comfortable home but I had always liked camping out and I was used to it. The setting was beautiful, one of the best I´d ever roughed it in, rich in coconut and other palms, trees laden with fruit and after wet, chilly Ireland, the climate even better: hot, sunny and tropical. Then there were the the wild creatures, big and small, I spent a lot of time observing: butterflies, iguanas, centipedes, frogs, rodents, armadillos, birds of all colors, among many more. Since it was dry, the mosquitoes didn´t bother me much and the odd snake usually kept its distance. The only nuisance was a pig from the farm who kept invading my tent. On Sundays, the bourgeois friends of the owners of the farm, who didn´t live there, would pass by my camp, astonished to see a (presumably privileged) gringo chopping wood or perched over a smokey fire.
In the adjoining farm, I met a friendly and talkative guy named Gilberto and accidently learned that he had been the owner of the land where Pueblito lies before it was bought by the government and incorporated into the Tairona National Natural Park, a 150 square kilometers tract of land which runs up from the coast to the forests of the foothills of the Sierra. Since he knew the region like the palm of his hand, he had worked with the archaeologists who´d excavated Pueblito, and while he told me that there were some nearby ruins which they had never explored, he said that it wouldn´t be easy to find them because of the dense vegetation which covered them but the hill I was now climbing would be a promising start. That inflamed the Indiana Jones in me
Even better, the terrain was private property, the owners didn´t live there (as I just noted) and Gilberto would square it with the mayordomo of the property where the hill was.
That meant I wouldn´t be bothered by the park rangers of Pueblito and other pre-Colombian ruins in the Park, who´d kick me out or even arrest me if I were seen “excavating”, even if I knew how to do it. What made the idea even more plausible was that I´d already pocketed some modest artefacts in the surroundings of Pueblito: potsherds: some, little handles in the shape of animals or mythological creatures.
Early one morning, I went to look for that caretaker, expecting that he, as most were, would be a canny veteran of that troubled region and thus on the alert for any menace, from a neighbor´s stray cattle to thieves or the guerrilla. Instead, I met up with a kid of about eighteen, who was struggling with a crossword puzzle. The caretaker´s son, I guessed: in fact, he, Wilson, was the mayordomo. When I started to explain that I knew Gilberto, he cut me short.
“Yeah, you must be one of the hippies who live over there”.
Since he wasn´t exactly friendly, that seemed to be the end of it, then, a sudden inspiration led me to help him complete the crossword puzzle he was struggling with and he thawed, if only a little. His mother then appeared with his breakfast: a simple and warm-hearted campesina, she served me a black coffee and a bread roll and asked what I was doing there.
I´d already learned that everything on the coast happens in slow motion. I explained that I wasn´t a tourist but had lived in Colombia with my wife and children for a number of years and, taking my time to make it simple, I was a journalist and translator. Little by little, I won her over, but Wilson was still doubtful, saying there was nothing of interest up there and he didn´t want to waste his time. Meanwhile, the kindly woman urged him to help me but it was only after pondering it for a long while that he half-heartedly agreed, though I guessed it was less due to her than the possibility that an excursion with a loco gringo would be a welcome break in the boring, stay-at-home routine of a caretaker.
He changed from his shorts into jeans, sprayed them with a home-made pesticide from a bottle, and gestured to me to do the same, saying that there would be a lot of ticks in the grass.
As though I´d hadn´t already learned, the hard way, that living close to Nature wasn´t that idyllic. To start with, the ticks didn´t bother me much, since there didn´t seem to be that many in the clearing where I camped and I felt more comfortable in shorts. A fatal mistake: within a week, their infected bites swelled into hard, pus-filled bubbles on my lower legs and worse, my feet, so even a short walk became painful. By now, with much squeezing and disinfecting, the sores were bearable, just about, and I reckoned that I could cope with any along the way.
After climbing up a relatively bare sector, Wilson suddenly stopped, unsheathed his machete and, for no apparent reason, hacked off the stalk of a weed along the path and handed it to me. At first sight, the silky, red thing looked like a pod, a dense cluster of seeds. In fact, it was a pullulating mass of tiny ticks, thousands and thousands impossible to count. Thank God for my jeans! And his disinfectant? Well, I was beginning to take him more seriously. At first, he had struck me as an aimless teenager with his idiotic grin and idle questions about me which he paid little attention to. Now, watching him effortlessly cut the grass and leap over the clumps in our way, I realized that he was at least strong and good at woodsmanship.
We continued to climb and reached some steep, conical hillocks. Although we weren´t that high, the wind, funneled through a gap in the mountains above us, was very strong. There practically no trees there, which was rare in that region and I thought it was strange that the Taironas had chosen this site instead of one in the dense jungles of the Sierra. Still, Wilson said that he´d seen remains of the circular stone foundations on the top of the conical hills and we soon noticed what looked like fragments of the chiseled stones they paved their footpaths with and then, even better, he pointed to a big hole I hadn´t noticed and said that “some people” had been digging for grave goods there. It occurred to me that he might have been one of them.
We finally arrived at the flat top of one of the cones, where the remains of the circular foundations of their houses were visible. Though they weren´t very impressive, some vaguely curved lines of dozens of rough, unhewn stones. On the left, there was a higher, broader cone, which looked more promising. It was a job to get there through the pathless, chest-high grass and I was just imagining that I was the first White man to tread there when a barbed wire fence disillusioned me. The foundation stones were much the same as the ones on the other, but looser but when Wilson tried to unearth some, it was clear that a machete wasn´t the right tool. Nevertheless, the panorama was spectacular: the sea, of a dark blue I´d never seen before, pouring into a big, circular bay and behind and above, ridge after ridge of tropical forest climbing to a summit lost in the mist. Knowing that there were ruins on the cones, I was very excited! And Wilson was also enthusiastic about returning to the dig, properly equipped the next time. But the wind stung more and more, and I decided to leave it for a calmer day. As we descended, I asked Wilson for the name of the bay. Cinto, he told me.
The following morning, it started to rain hard, so the next outing had to be postponed but just when I resigned myself to an idle and uncomfortable day in the tent, things changed. I wasn´t the only wanderer who was welcomed at the farm. The caretaker was an old friend of some of the dropouts who´d moved from Bogotá to the hot and more relaxed coast. The ones who were going to spend a night there before shopping for their bare necessities in Santa Marta (even those who live the simple life need batteries for their flashlight or a dentist for their cavities) were known as the “hippie Kogis”, because, wanting to live closer to Nature, they´d not only settled on the lands of the Kogis, the descendants of the Taironas, they´d adopted their way of life: they built their own thatched huts, grew the same crops, wore their outfit of homespun trousers and tunic, festooned with shoulder bags and chewed coca leaves as they did, with the accompanying gourd and a pouch for the coca. I felt a sardonic satisfaction when I learned that some even spoke the Kogis´ language, which almost none of anthropologist/archaeologists who´d treated this amateur with disdain did whenever I consulted them.
At the dinner I was invited to, I asked them about that bay, which I planned to visit. First, they told me, I´d probably need a guide to reach it because I might get lost on the faint trail to it which ran through a tract of wild jungle. And when you get to shore, they went on, wear flip-flops: otherwise, my feet would be scorched by the burning sands. Above all, I wasn´t to swim more than a few meters from the beach. The waters which raged through the breach in the cliffs were a veritable, ceaseless tidal wave that created a tremendous undertow which had drowned many tourists.
“Yeah,” another added, “to give you an idea, they only find their bodies weeks later, kilometers down the coast, with their heads ripped off”.
“Thanks, I´ve still got to see it, up close. That circle the bay forms, well, I´ve never heard of anything like that in the rest of the world”.
“Because it´s not natural or so the elders of the Kogis say. It was originally a dense outcrop of rocks along the shore whey they carved into that circle”.
“But how?”
“According to them, in the olden days, before the Spanish nearly exterminated them, looking for gold, their mamos . . .you know who they are?”
Now, they were patronizing me, like the anthropologists!
Quick as a flash, I replied:
“Sure, their spiritual guides cum caciques/ astrologists/ soothsayers and medicine men”.
“Those mamos carved the bay out of rocks with magic! Then, when it was done, they called on their thunder gods, who split it open with lightning”.
Why not, I thought, since they certainly couldn´t have done it with their stone axes, some of which I´d picked up myself. With their curved edges which resembled the prow of ship, they were the pride of my so-called collection. Not that I believed it, it was just that Tairona-land was so mysterious that the border between legend and fact was never clear and that was precisely the reason why I was enchanted by it.
Granted, the tale had a certain poetical truth. As was well known by then, the Taironas had exploited every thermal level, ever ecological niche, of a territory which stretched from the sea to the high mountains which ended in snow-covered summits: its seafood and tropical and semi-tropical foodstuffs and wild game. Plus, the ingenious (and laborious) way that they had molded their stone trails, agricultural terraces and embankments for their temples and dwellings to the steep terrain spoke for itself. Thus, it was plausible at least that they had tampered a little with a natural bay and turned it into a fish farm.
The weed I was smoking with them may have made me more susceptible to their tall tales than I normally would have been. Cinto fascinated me more and more, but it didn´t alter my conviction that it had to be first things, first. Going back to the cones with Wilson and some adequate digging tools was the absolute priority.
I rose at dawn. the next day and the auguries were good. The sky was clear and, so far as I could tell from my camp, which was sheltered by trees, the wind off the sea was mild. It was still early when I reached his home but he wasn´t there. A few days after that, I met up with him at a little store on the highway, where, apparently with not a care in the world, he was sipping at a soft drink, his ear glued to the transistor he proudly told me he´d just bought. It was obvious that he had completely forgotten about his promise to help me to excavate the cones. I was more angry at myself than him, knowing that in general the costeños were not great at keeping their word. In a way, that was enviable because they lived much more in the here and now than I ever would, but only up to a point, because what might have been alright for them, wasn´t when I was involved and, damn it, I had every right to be pissed off.
Forcing myself to be polite, I suggested that we do it another day but this time wasn´t fooled when he vaguely agreed. Later, running him into now and again, I realized that he wasn´t a bad kid, just a run of the mill teenager, interested in little more than soccer, girls and pop music but not at all in probing into the mysteries of the past and had only accompanied me out of boredom on what proved, in the end, to be an utterly pointless excursion.
[Notes:
In Colombia, so far as I know, there is no formal distinction between anthropology and archaeology. Those who obtain a university degree in the former are qualified to undertake the latter and often practice both disciplines, like the Austrian-born Reichel-Dolmatoff (briefly a Nazi in his youth), one of the founding fathers of academic anthropology in Colombia and the first to do an in-depth study of the Kogis and affiliated groups in the Sierra Nevada.
The Kogis have been one of the groups who have most suffered from the assaults of different armed groups in Colombia during the past two or three decades, exacerbated by the seizure of their lands by colonizers and narcotics cartels. A number of their spiritual and political leaders have been murdered, many have been forcibly displaced from their homes and their environment has been harmed by deforestation and the contamination of their waters, among other abuses, including the Colombian armed forces´ indiscriminate bombing of cocaine laboratories in the region.
The hippie Kogis were affected by all this as well. At time of this story, the situation was relatively tranquil. Later, they too were displaced and some moved to a house I visited on Buritaca beach, about 45 kilometers from Santa Marta, where the Buritaca river debouches into the Caribbean. Surrounded, as they were, by tourist cabañas, it struck me as a somewhat weird refuge. Since I only returned the coast twice after that, years later, for brief visits, I am not sure of what has happened since. But it seems that at least some of them have returned to their homes alongside the Kogis and been joined by a younger generation of drop-outs from the cities. If you want to know more about hippy Kogis, there is a documentary on YouTube (in Spanish, with English subtitles):
However, I feel that it is a somewhat romanticized version of their life there, because the breach between two radically opposed cultures is not so easily closed and the Kogis themselves have been prone to all sorts of internal conflicts. My own attitude towards them is a mixture of admiration, an occasionally squirmy identification with them and skepticism about the artificiality of the way of life of “pretendians”.
Still, I´d say this for them. Some of the children they home-schooled who left the community for the opportunities of an urban life won scholarships for a higher education (a few abroad) and have become successful professionals.