Corruption and Smuggling

I took a bus to the bus station and found a guy who was driving a shared taxi to colombia. i had enough money for the taxi and nothing else, cutting it pretty close. after about half an hour of waiting he got a few more people and we all piled into the car. sweet sweet car. it was an old chevy malibu classic painted metallic blue with relfective blue tint on the windows, blue seats and street-racing style gauges (also blue) by the blue dash. it was--as they say--pimpin´. So off we go, and i have to say, i did feel safer being in this boat of a car rather than the little tiny hatchback we came in. the woman sitting next to me had a box with her with holes in it. it turned out she had 2 parrots in the box, one adult and one baby. i dont think your supposed to smuggle parrots from venezuela to colombia, but the driver didnt really seem to care. this woman--what was she thinking?--also didnt have identification with her. so everytime we stopped at the 5 or 6 checkpoints on the way to the border and the police asked to see our IDs she would slip the driver anywhere from $5 to $10 (in local currancy, converted to ease reading) to give to the cop, who would shake his hand let us go. she probably spent more on the bribes than the ride itself cost. at one point we were all made to get out of the car and pay about $15 to leave the country. i didnt have $15 so we got back in the car and kept going. when i got out to have my passport stamped the guy told me i had to pay so i went back to the car told the driver. we got into an argument that involved me saying i didnt have money, they didnt take cards, there was no ATM. he didnt seem to care. finally the woman with the birds gave me the money and i told her i would pay her back when we got to colombia. i paid got stamped out, stamped in to colombia (after a bit of an interogation about where ive been, how long i was here, if ive been sick--it had to do with swine flu). ive never been more realieved. just being out of venezuela where you never know what your gonna have to pay to do this or that or what the police will make you do. its like when you go through customs at the airport, maybe you have some trouble with nail clippers or something, you think your gonna miss your flight, you finally make through only to have more trouble at the ticketing counter, and then somehow you just end up on the plane at the last minute...that immense feeling of relief, thats what i felt.

so we got to the border town, i bought my ticket to cartagena (they say 8 hours, dont believe them, it was closer to 10) got lunch and was on my back to what i considered "home" at that point. 10 or so hours later found myself at the hostel, went to meet up with hannah at another hostel and who do i see sitting with her...? tatiana, a friend from taganga who we hadnt seen in a week or so, what luck. the 3 of us have been hanging out for the last few days. yesterday we went to a "mud volcanoe." you clime up the 30 stairs or so to the top of a big mound of dirt and inside is a 10´ by 10´ (more or less) area filled with mud that they say goes 2300 meters down into the earth. the mud is the perfect density--so you can sit in it and you dont sink, it comes up to your chest more or less. you can lie on your back or stomach and you dont sink, its wild. the pictures are great, i dont know when they´ll go up, it might be a while, but theyre cool. and afterwards you rinse off in a lagoon, which was only a little bit disgusting. it smelled terrible and the water was green with alge, im waiting for one of the 5 of us that went to end up with an infection.

tomorrow we are headed out to an island to chill our for a while, so if theres no post for a few days and nobody recieves emails, im not dead, im just lying on a beach.