Serious Outback Gives a Serious Reality Check.
And There I Was, another season of Guajira desert tours …
… standing in the middle of nowhere -literally nowhere- in the dark night without knowing who was coming towards us making signals with a torch.
Allow me to define nowhere: Nowhere was the middle of the Guajira desert in the northernmost tip of Colombia and South America, a huge finger-shaped landmass pointing north bordering to the east with Venezuela and with the Caribbean Ocean everywhere else.
There is nothing out there, at least not much.
The Guajira is a huge expansive barren outback territory the size and looks of Mars. It has huge patches of scraggly desert forest amongst expansive salt flats where you really should have a damn good reason to be romping around, and my damn good reason to be romping around was the cute German girl I had hiding (she didn’t know this was her status) in the Toyota Land Cruiser 80 series in the brush some thirty meters away.
Currently, I was trying to distance myself as far and as quickly as I could in the impenetrable darkness and desert brush with plans of diverting the attention of whoever was heading our way in the dark.
Puta mierda how did I get into this.
I was quite worried, to be honest.
The wobbly sweeping flashlight kept coming closer in our general direction but perhaps a bit off-kilter, as if the person or persons did not have us precisely pinpointed. The light was sweeping left, and right. It was obvious they were on foot and also that we had been spotted earlier and that we were being searched for.
The light would go off for a few seconds or so, then suddenly appear again closer to our position. I noticed it seemed to be heading more towards the other side of the Land Cruiser from where I had taken off to. I decided to better position myself in that area instead of where I stood at the moment to avoid the chance that before we intercepted each other (as was the plan) the light might cross paths with the Land Cruiser first.
Run.
Run in the dry crackly low hanging mazy desert forest towards the Land Cruiser scratching the hell out of every exposed part of my body. Fortunately, I found the vehicle easily. I peeked into the driver’s side window and mustering all the casualness I could, said “Hey, they’re getting closer, they’ll help us get out, be right back.” We had first noticed the light about an hour ago as we were parked.
Cheerily Simone said “Oh, okay, cool!” with not the least sense of urgency or concern, damn I was good.
Good in the sense that as an adventure tour guide one of the top priorities is to deal with all the risks and situations without ever letting on to the clients that there might be a situation at hand and just handle it. Here, now, there was a situation, to what degree still uncertain, but boy was the fact that Simone was German make a huge difference.
Any other human being inside that Land Cruiser would have been a situation in itself to deal with on top of this situation. And if it had been a Colombian then this would have been a crap sandwich drama on top of a code red scenario, but Germans were always cool cucumbers.
Each Guajira desert tour is a unique adventure, not one is ever like another.
“I still have to go out and get them, they’re a bit far off, so remember, if I get lost and don’t show up in thirty minutes or if anything else remember to activate the GPS rescue as I showed you, then hang tight, someone will come, but always keep it with you and don’t leave the car,” very casually. This was the closest I got to telling her this was a situation and I could feel in the dark she was not oblivious but still light years away from my true sense of threat level.
The Land Cruiser had water and food in it for over a week plus four six-gallon jerry cans of Venezuelan contraband petrol on the roof rack -it could reach Tokyo- so no worries there. It was also in perfectly good running condition, including a blasting AC for the day time, the only problem we had was that we had gotten lost and caught by the dark, lost in the dark in the Guajira desert, and all due to my being an idiot and infatuated with Simone.
Simone was not a client of the tour operator business I worked for. I had met her in a town touristic colonial town called Villa de Leyva close to Bogotá (a parsec or two away from the Guajira desert), two and a half weeks before in a hostel while I was on tour, and we had hit it off. We stayed in touch via WhatsApp, she was backpacking Colombia, and the Guajira is one of the must-see spots of Colombia, and I had told her that I was scheduled to do two Guajira tours in the next couple of weeks and that after I finished we could hook up and go explore the Guajira on my downtime if she happened to be in the area, so be in the area.
It all worked out fine. After I finished my two Guajira desert tours (four days each) Simone was in Riohacha and I picked her up. Guajira desert expeditions are tough, really tough, they’re no joke, and my two previous runs were no exception and I was drained, and it was standard for the company to give guides a few days of rest before a reassignment so while they thought I was recharging my batteries with a company car parked in Riohacha just hanging out at Nina Kites hostel kitesurfing I had actually decided to go AWOL with Simone and show her the Guajira desert.
It was supposed to be a quick in-and-out, a touristic quickie if you will (please forgive).
From Riohacha the capital of the state of Guajira to Punta Gallinas the northernmost tip of South America there are six hours of driving like a total maniac racing against all the other Land Cruisers from the other tour operators. Visit the dunes of Taroa, spend the night sleeping in wide colorful hammocks handwoven by the local Wayuu indigenous called chinchorros at a Wayuu ranchería bed (or chinchorro rather) and breakfast called “Luzmila” that catered to dozens upon dozens of foreign tourists weekly, next day back. Easy.
The Guajira desert has fast grown into a major international tourist attraction despite its murky history for being a drug and contraband runner’s haven. Maybe a bit old school, but some still think of it as a true wild wild west, a spaghetti western meets Mad Max no-man’s-land stage.
But tourists don’t know this or think of it this way, only Colombians and they will constantly be reminding you every chance they get. Hence my level of concernment for being lost in the desert come night time in a vehicle flashing lights in circles in the sand then forward and backward trying to navigate itself out of ditches and bush blocks signaling for kilometers around that there is a vehicle off the path completely lost and in distress, a godsend for any possible berserkers in a fifteen-mile radius that would immediately know a baby giraffe had run astray and lost itself from the protection of its mother and herd. Any Javas in the area would be sure to take notice and come sniffing around so I decided to cut the lights and hunker down for the night.
I had actually mentioned this possibility to Simone before starting this trip, things can always happen out in the desert and we must be prepared and this is standard operating procedure, hence the overkill with supplies, but on company business, we were always at least two vehicles and had local Wayuu natives with us as guides … but this time I had gone rogue on this Guajira tour, was flying solo, and felt it. Simone took it in stride, it was “all part of the adventure” (as we guides always say during expeditions, especially when we screw up).
Run.
Run again to draw it, them, away from the Land Cruiser.
Run, but this time towards the other side, weaving and bumbling and stumbling through the desert brush for about three minutes, until finally I stopped, took a breath, and flashed my torch towards the incoming light -it was time to pay the piper. It, they, from about five hundred feet out immediately locked on my torch and flashed back, heading my way
.
The first question that understandably might come to mind is “didn’t you have a GPS?”
Of course, I did, I’ve been GPSing my ass off all over the world on land, air, and sea for years, am an expert with all things Garmin, literally. But the Guajira desert is a very different story, GPSs are literally useless here. They work and acquire signal, but will not get you anywhere because there aren’t any roads, just a lot of uneven, ravine prone, dry forest never-ending terrain.
The only thing that works out here is Wayuu native guides, or WayuúPS as I call them. Yet trying to navigate a Guajira desert tour in the dark, even with WayuúPS forget it, crazy.
The light in the desert is twenty meters away.
