Colombia doesn't thumb its nose at convention because it's got an opposable digit it feels obliged to use. It doesn't buck trends because it has traces of equine DNA. Colombia doesn't recognise or have time for soul-sapping nonsenses because there's too much living to be had, and only two hands to grab it all, and one soul each to gobble it all up with.

Colombia is a badly tuned two cylinder motorcycle with loose suspension that won't go terribly fast and doesn't care to.

Colombia is all the proof the world needs that texting whilst riding said motorcycle—helmet-less, one-handed, with baby on the tank, and grandma (carrying the family's worldly belongings) on the back—isn't dangerous, it just requires practice, like everything else.

Up here on the Caribbean:

Where the fruit is plentiful and the bottoms are round and high and can't help but wiggle when there's music playing, even if it's just a whiff of a beat—a kick drum skipping across the bay or rolling down from a shack.

Where music is as essential for healthy living as air, water, food and good loving. It comes thundering relentlessly, unrepentantly, out of countless clubs and bars and cars and homes and cafes, into streets where motorcycles tumble and weave and squeeze through the tiniest of gaps between bashed yellow taxis and buses stuffed full, piled high, pushed to the limits that bolts and brackets and pistons and cogs might endure.

Where sugar and white flour are the main ingredients in most of the food, and most of the food is fried.

Where the forest meets the sea. The sea is full of wonder. The forest is pure fantasy. And both are full of squishy things and a great many good things to eat.

The beasties in the forests and the seas are fewer, and farther between, than I'd thought they would be. I'd expected more creepy crawly things and things that howled at night, watching with glittering eyes and rumbling tummies as the few short strides from the tent, or the cabin, to the crapper were hurriedly, nervously crossed. I'd expected more drop-bears and monstrous serpents with fangs that glistened with organ-melting venom, more spiders the size of dinner plates, more ants the size of gerbils fit to carry off tents in the middle of the night (Surely sooner or later we'd wake to find our tent had been carted into a nest the size of Hobbiton where we'd have to plead for our lives with the merciless queen, her voice like silver, speaking straight into our minds, each word as clear as a bell and colder than Putin's heart.), more huge ferocious cats stalking us silently as we hiked for days, aware of... Something. Large. And. Resolute. Biding. It's. Time.

But no... Nothing much nasty of note...

As Australians we're raised to be blasé about brilligs and slithey toves and things with slavering jowls that gimble in wabes. We're raised amongst monstrous beasties, and when young and tender we learn to be afraid of nothing but running low on Baygon and shark repellent. Giant spiders, snakes that kill families stone dead from miles away with the power of thought, deadly octopuses and sharks as big as yachts, crocodiles bigger than canoes, massive, hideous insects that steal children if you're not lucky, and gnaw off arms and legs if you are. And though we don't have drop bears, we do have koala bears that are known to come tearing out of trees, like Scotsmen to a fight, if you're fool enough to be using a chain saw in the wrong place at the wrong time. Certain power tools sound like the territorial battle snarl of the male koala, a usually docile animal that, when provoked or riled, has been known to move at lightning speeds, racing up legs to tear backs and necks and shoulders to bloody tatters with long claws and sharp teeth. If you're operating a chain-saw when this happens there's the chance of toes or feet being excised in a manner most un-surgical.

Here in the jungles and rainforests there are some jolly interesting ants that carry well balanced, ridiculously-sized loads, whilst whistling happy (if monotonous) worker songs.

It's the butterflies, not the spiders, that are the size of dinner plates, more colourful than a three year old's masterpiece. Mariposa is the Spanish word for butterfly—a commanding, elegant word, it sounds like an ecstatic dance. And the mariposas know how to dance. It's a delight to swing in a hammock, as a giddy cascade of them, tumble and shimmer about you on the breeze.

As it is in most places the prime perpetrators of nastiness are the mozzies—the God-awful, miserable-bastard mosquitos, that make up for—in spades and by oodles—all the shortcomings of the rest of the not so murderous, nor terrifying, beasties.

Common wisdom (which tends to be an oxymoron) has it that the best way of dealing with a murder of mozzie bites is to leave them alone, try to forget about them. This is rubbish and torture. And anyway, it's not possible unless you smash your hand with a hammer every thirty seconds to create pain enough to blot out the mind-rending desolation of the all-consuming itch. Jedi mind tricks and unguents don't work. Nor does toothpaste. The only sensible way to relieve lower legs and feet covered in bites is to scratch them so ferociously, so hard and deeply and thoroughly that everything bleeds. Your extremities become a bloody welty mess. The pleasure to be had from this sort of uninhibited scratching is exquisite and delicious. Relief and reward at once. All the poison and the itch vanish, away under fingernails and in rivulets of blood. Apply disinfectant. Sleep and forget. It's probably best not to treat facial mozzie bites in this manner, as scarring can occur. Use toothpaste.

Freewheelin' Franklin would have loved Colombia. There's enough weed to afford him and Fat Freddy and Phineas a comfortably stupid retirement. A great many locals are stoned most of the time. The pungent, sweet reek comes wafting from all over. It's not a social smell. It never mingles with other odours. It overpowers them, batters them scentless. Food cooking, coffee brewing, goop and dead things in sewers and choking waterways rotting peacefully all have mighty pongs, yet all such pongs bow obsequiously before the olfactory might of marijuana.

Riohacha has a lovely big shopping mall: air-conditioned, coffee that's almost good, wi-fi, a couple of medium-paced food spots that sell things that those of us no longer afflicted by the dread curse of blood-lust can be happy to have smeared on chins and fingers.

We were in Riohacha for a couple of days before, and for a couple of days after, our trip to the top of the continent. On each of those days we hurried—harried by the horrible heat—to the mall for comfort and coffee.

Outside of big cities cinemas aren't common in South America, but the mall in Riohacha has one, with 3D facilities and aeroplane seats. We watched Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in spacesuits flirting with one another and with peril-most-grave, on a computer-generated twinkly expanse of infinity.

We laughed at ourselves for being in a resort town on the Caribbean spending hours at a time tucked away in a white-tiled expanse of cool cleanliness no different to malls anywhere. Sometimes all the novelty and oddness in the world can't hold a candle to the mollifying comfort of the not-in-the-least-bit challenging.

On an extended journey, as one exotic, alien landscape blurs into the next, perhaps it's inevitable that sooner or later one gets jaded, a bit distanced from it all. The excitement shrinks and everything seems to roll past like a movie in a language you don't understand. Like a book you're not invested in. You've digested nothing of the last dozen pages. You read them but none of it sank in.

The excitement will be back, galloping like a half-mad red setter with a lopsided, lunatic grin and a tail like a helicopter. Until then, there's coffee and shit-head.

We're in Riohacha because it's the first part of the Colombian Caribbean coast we hit after our escape from Venezuela. We could have taken a left turn and gone South to Santa Marta and Taganga and all the pretty places full of cool, sexy people with splendid haircuts, but we decided we had to get to the very top of South America, and to do so we've got to make a right hand turn.

In seven months we've come overland—with the exception of a couple of east-west flights on account of laziness and frustration—all the way from the very bottom of the continent, where the water's cold and the sea lions stink and bark, to the top, or ever so close to it. (In Spanish sea lions are sea wolves, which seems more appropriate.) How could we not make the effort and sacrifice a couple of days to heat and discomfort in a valiant charge to the top?

Lonely Planet tried to kybosh the idea, thus:

Quote...

"Cabo de Vela isn't for everybody. Really. Getting here by public transportation involves a bone-shaking ride in the back of a truck, possibly driven at lunatic speed by a man with no apparent fear of death or injury. He may spend much of the journey draining beer cans in a single slug. With luck, his assistant will be reasonably sober and will manage not to fall out of the truck at high speed. Fingers crossed.

The landscape is brutal scrub, and the local dish is viche, goat cooked in its own fat and served with its innards. Thankfully lobster is cheap, fresh, plentiful and exquisite."

... Unquote.

A man who lounged in the foyer of our hostel in Riohacha, drinking beer from the A.M. until the football finished on the telly, told us that the rain had been heavy, and the roads north, such as they were, were impassable.

"Stay here and watch the soap operas in the hotel lobby. We have air-conditioning!" The hands are wide and the grin is earnest. "Go to the mall and drink coffee."

His drinking partner offered to brave the mud and run us up to the top end in the shiny 4WD parked in the street outside. He wanted $1,600,000 COP (Colombian pesos) (the equivalent of $US400) to take us there and back; a three day round trip.

We opted for public transport: $100,000 COP (US$50).

The first leg was 90 minutes in a rickety taxi to Uribia, bang in the middle of nowhere:

The taxi turned off the highway and bumped across the long dead railway tracks. A large sign is hung across the road announcing proudly that Uribia is the indigenous centre for all of Northern Colombia. Uribia smells bad. The streets are awash with trash. Rats scuttle. The town (Is it big enough to be called a town? Outpost?) has a desolate, unloved, transitory feel similar to many Aboriginal townships in Central and Northern Australia. Though it's been here a long time and isn’t going anywhere it feels like Uribia blossomed overnight and will be gone by Tuesday. The exhausting heat is dry, unmitigated by ocean juices. Flies and squalor. Miserable dogs whose diets are worse than those of the people pedalling bicycles and playing pool and drinking soft drinks and beer, lolling in the gutter or sitting, heat-hammered, in broken plastic chairs. There are a handful of shops and restaurants and a man selling sandals made out of old car tyres. All the men wear them.

We squashed into the tray on the back of a 4WD with a dozen other people and their bags and boxes and chickens. Above us on a crudely welded canopy were supplies for the hostels and shops of Cabo de Vela. And on top of all the crates and cokes and styrofoam boxes full of perishables (things perish fast here) were two or three more passengers, young local men somehow impervious to the solar onslaught.

The road was tar for a while. We passed the twisted wreck of the last train to come this far, spilt either side of the rusty tracks. A dead locomotive and a dozen dead cars. Bubbles of paint. Bubbles of rust.

The road became gravel and soon we were bouncing along rutted dirt tracks and across mud flats, through a desert populated by goats and scrub. The man in the hostel was wrong about the amount it had rained. The ground was dry, cracks and blisters. Someone said that if it had been raining as much as it usually did at this time of year the trip would take ten hours rather than three.

We stopped occasionally to offload a crate or the occasional passenger who wandered off into the heat haze to God knows where.

We arrived in Cabo de Vela as the sun was settling into the sea. Scooting across the glorious gold in the howling off-shore wind were half a dozen kite surfers. Kite surfing is the only thing to do in Cabo de Vela besides mooching and eating and fucking and fishing and drinking and squishing bed bugs. We were offered four hours of kite surfing tutelage for the same money four days diving in Taganga would cost us a few days later. We decided kite surfing could wait and went for a swim, found an overpriced pineapple and a paw paw and a packet of crisps, then pulled out the cards and played shit-head. The local kids screamed and ran and splashed and whooped. Chocolate-brown skin, black hair, barefoot, laughing at us, demanding answers to rabbited questions we only half understood. It must be fun growing up in such a place. I guess it's good growing up anywhere, as long as your Dad doesn't bash you too often and you've got a full complement of limbs and senses. Life is invariably mostly wonder and mystery and endless tom-foolery until puberty pounces and turns it all skewiff. Kids bend the world to their whim and fancy. Teenagers are usually shocked to find the world bending back, with more muscle than seems fair.

The hostel we were shanghaied into is a litter of shacks built on sandy dirt a couple of hundred metres from the sea. The owner is a lonely, querulous figure, father of three kids that tumble across the beaches and litter the town with mischief and marbles. Their mother left a couple of years ago and hasn't been back. Dad owns and runs the hostel with his mu-mued mother who nags and faffs. He didn't attend the school down the coast. Not many do. His conversation is stilted. Like most of the men he wears only board-shorts, riding low, hips exposed, a tangle of scruff. He hangs his head and flaps his arms, uncomfortable making eye contact. The world's not a scary place, nor is it all that big, in spite of the vast amounts of it, but stuck in a place like this who's to know?

The hostel is horrid. The pretend-rasta-guy with his el crappo, hand-made, wire-and-bead jewellery on its cheap display boards suggested we stay here.

"A friend of mine has a great hostel," he shouted as we bounced through the desert in the tray of the 4WD. I would wonder later if he'd ever actually seen it. He had a little one speaker boom box that plays reggae. Nothing else. Ever. I've never much liked reggae, except for Bob Marley and King Tubby and Lee Perry and The Clash and a handful of other English bands with curious bass players and competent drummers. Which reminds me of a five year old I once overhead declaring proudly to a companion that he was a vegetarian. "I only eat chicken, and fish, and beef," he said earnestly. We're only 500kms from Jamaica so the reggae's excusable. Just.

"We don't like reggae. Oh no! It's rubbish."

Never take accommodation recommendations from taxi-drivers, or stoned rasta-hippies.

Never take up an offer, no matter what it's for or how tired you are, made when you step off a bus in a place you don't know.

Never book into the first hotel or hostel you see.

"It's a good place man," Pretend-rasta-guy promised. "Barato. Tranquilo."

Cheap, yes. Peaceful, no.

And he didn't mention whatever-the-fuck-it-was that lived in the mattresses and ate chunks of us as we slept. Not that we slept much. Tossing and turning and sweating on filthy beds, in a filthy room, in the filthy hostel, in the horrible town, with the stoned, sad man and his snaggle-toothed mother rabbiting all night long just outside the door that wouldn't close.

Kath got up early and went for a walk to a hill a couple of kilometres inland for a look-see. She passed oddly-dressed, dark-skinned people who might have been phantoms. They stared. A man sitting in the middle of nowhere was selling drinks and crisps. An hour after dawn! Who the fuck is out there to sell things to!?

Kath had a hat but she didn't take sun-screen. So when the sun came up and smashed the world she smeared mud all over the exposed parts of herself.

Sleep-starved, I staggered out of the hovel and down to the beach at the same time as Kath materialised on the horizon: a spectre, a witch-doctor or a high priestess in search of sacrifice, or chocolate biscuits. I got the giggles. Kath caught them. We fell into sea water as warm as tepid tea. It took a bit of scrubbing to get the mud off.

We went to the local shop and had ourselves a packet of crisps and ten litres of water for breakfast.

Out the front of the shop, shaded from the already maniac ten o'clock sun, dreaming of shopping centres and clean white sheets in air-conditioned rooms, we played shit-head, ever so slowly, speaking only when necessary, and then in grunts and mono-syllables. We were a good way through the second five litre bottle of water by the third hand.

In the sand and the dirt of the shop's front yard a threesome of fat, moustachioed Indians in cowboy hats, jeans, boots and heavy shirts, oblivious to the sun and the screaming heat, were drinking beer and changing a tyre on a jacked-up Toyota.

"You guys want a ride to Uribia?" one of them asked on his way to the counter for more beers. There appeared to be no sweat on his body.

The 4WD that brings the supplies from Uribia in the afternoon leaves Cabo de Vela at 5 A.M. every day. We had decided to stay another night and get the sparrow fart express tomorrow. Such plans—another night on a flea-infested mattress!—were abandoned in less time than it takes a synapse to fire.

"Yup." We told our re-stocked stocky saviour. Gladly. He chuckled and winked and stroked his moustache. Of course you'll take the ride.

We got our bags and got in the truck. Our three compañeros were drunk and cheerfully chatty. Thankfully the driver stayed relatively focused on the road (or lack of it) ahead. They spoke, mostly to each other, in low, gentle voices, and laughed a lot. Occasionally one of them quizzed us about kangaroos. When you tell someone you're from Australia the first thing they say is "Canguro?" To which I usually reply "Si. Si. Los ratones grandes." The big rats. The next questions are always: Do people eat them? and, What do they taste like?

All the way the Indians drank beer. We bounced through the dry mud, shielded from the dry heat by a hard-working air-conditioning system. The radio wasn't loud.

In a straight line Taganga is only a couple of hundred kilometres south-west of Cabo de Vela, but the temperature is lower by five or ten degrees. No more thick stickiness. Every afternoon and into the night the gods hurl bright mighty forks about the heavy dark sky. Most days the clouds roll in anytime after two. Thick, dark, fat, full of electricity that dazzles and thrills. There's rarely accompanying thunder. Silent spectaculars. The air is cool and sweet. Usually it's raining hard by five. Sometimes it rains all night. Sometimes it spits for five minutes at tea time.

We spent a few days diving in and around Taganga, off shore from the Tayrona national park, one of the better spots for rolling off a boat with a metal bottle on your back. 7.30 starts, roaring off around the headland. The water is warm and full of stuff to look at: fish of all sizes, shapes and colours, moray eels, the reef like a set from old TV sci-fi; huge, strange, waving fronds and giant bulbous squishy things, the misplaced massive brains of mergatroids, pulsing, puzzling ways to escape their watery prisons and get their eyes back. The odd turtle gets the local divers excited, but we've been to the Galapagos in the last couple of months where turtles the size of dinner tables, and old enough to have reefs growing on their backs, are common. It's easy to not let the blasé show when you're wearing a mask and have a respirator in your mouth.

We're staying in a house a few streets back from the manic thump and stoned, drunkey rumble of the main strip. A little two-storey semi that used to belong to a doctor who went wonky in the head and intentionally infected a number of local children with HIV. That was a long time ago, but in Taganga's collective unconscious there's still an odiousness connected to the house. The boogeyman's gone but his shadow still stains. The kids are too young to remember.

The house now belongs to friends of ours; a Colombian who spent half his life in Sydney and Melbourne, and his Australian girlfriend. By being of good cheer and high, clean spirits they've exorcised much of the murderous doctor's voodoo ju-ju, both from the house itself, and from the idea of the house as entertained by neighbours. They bought the bright white, tile and rendered breeze-block house for $40,000 and cheered it up. It's in her name. You don't have to jump through hoops to obtain property here. Anyone can have their name on a chunk of terra firma. Or terra softer, which is cheaper but harder to build on. In most of Asia and most of South America foreigners need to jump through hoops aplenty—marry a local, impress the council and remain behooved to grant favours of dubious sorts in perpetuity, build schools and roads, etc.

We took Maya down the road to meet Wanki.

Maya is our host's tiny Australian-born, pure-bred, well-behaved, immaculately-manicured, in-heat bitch. She bounced and jiggled and panted and wiggled excitedly on the way to meet her date. She would have bounced and jiggled and panted and wiggled excitedly had we been taking her to meet Death.

Wanki is a local dog, also tiny. We watched and applauded as Wanki threw the leg over and got a furious hump on.

Laughing hysterically and clapping and pointing, the two young girls who live with and pamper Wanki pointed out that his aim was out by a country mile. Maya got the shits and lay down, removing the target entirely. She's a middle-aged lounge bitch who doesn't get out much. Having come this far in life litterless, she seems non-plussed about the whole business. Every morning she bounces out the door and wafts her intent, but most of the locals can't get down low enough.

The street dogs in SA have been one of the highlights of this jaunt. Down south, especially up in the Andes, they're vibrant, exciting, friendly, canny, wise and independent, needing zilch from the humans they still fraternise with from an aloof distance. You see them on street corners and on hilltops, silhouetted against the sky, reading Jack London novels.

South of Colombia the undomesticated dogs make their domesticated brethren look retarded.

Being karma-sponges, as all dogs are, most domesticated canines are neurotic to some degree. They broadcast the emotional states of their "owners" for all the world to see.

The street dogs are free and happy. They don't look down their noses at you. They usually don't bother looking at you at all. They're in their own wondrous worlds, of which they are masters. Their coats are glossy. Their eyes shine. Their heads are high. Their gaits are proud. There's no begging, or fawning, or games with these pooches. They need nothing from humans. They share the same spaces but their destinies diverge.

As you cross the equator something changes for some reason. The street dogs start to look less attractive, less cheerful, less independent. By the time you get to Colombia they're haggard and drab and scabby. Street mutts North of Peru lack confidence and strength of character. The closer you get to the Caribbean the more mangy they become. Hang dog is an expression likely coined by a visitor to these parts. Their heads hang in shame for their patchy, dull fur, their scabs and scaly elbows, pustulous genitals and weeping eyes, which they turn on you dolefully, making you feel guilty for reasons you can't define. What makes them world weary and sad? The weather? Plagues of the soul?

Or is it because they've let things get out of hand with the Little Brother and Sister?

In the Creation story that the Apache of North America subscribe to, the Great Spirit created the heavens and the Earth and all the creatures therein and was chuffed. He created the dog last—His crowning glory. A being of great strength and loyalty, intelligence and courage. After a time Dog approached the Creator and told Him he was lonely. So God made Man to keep Dog company. Maybe in the eyes of Hang Dog, Man has gotten too big for his boots? In need of a collar and no one to put it on him?

A lot of the dogs and cats in Taganga have eyes and ears and bits of their genitals missing. A local nutter enjoyed inflicting such horrendous ouch. They clapped him in irons. Maybe they attached electrodes to his nipples and his willy and crowned him with an iron helmet and let a blinded doggie flick the switch? Maybe they didn't.

There's a beggar on the streets of Taganga who can't speak because his tongue was cut out by the gang who took it in turns to rape him when he was a boy. They didn't want him to rat on them. Like he couldn't point a finger!? He offers his fist for you to knock yours against; the way the cool kids greet one another. 

There are drug lords in the fancy houses on the hills at the back of Taganga. They keep to themselves mostly. Colombian Mafiosi don't go around shooting each other in public anymore. They leave such tawdriness to their Mexican counterparts.

As invariably happens the Mafiosi have gentrified. They're in the laborious process of becoming old money. Soon they'll be the rulers of the country via ballots rather than bullets. Old money is often dirty money that's had time to mature, wise up, and pay to have the stigma amputated. It's always worked for British and European royalty, no reason it can't work here. Kings and queens don't flaunt their criminal heritage, they splash out on the best spin money can buy—Hollywood and historians and the like—to make them feel better about great-great-uncle Ofsbakkün and his dreadful hammer.

The drug lords occasionally come into town, sometimes with the wife and kids, to drink beer and coffee and smoke cigarettes and laugh loudly at the jokes the cafe owners make. They try to not look menacing when they flex their tattooed calves whilst standing in the street.

There was a fancy boat moored just off shore for a few weeks. The owners came aboard and lounged and drank and danced. A week before we arrived they were imprisoned after police found a large amount of cocaine on their yacht. It was in all the papers. The word on the street has it they were dobbed in by whomever it was they purchased the big white bricks from. The word goes on to suggest the police and the drug lords divvied the loot for a resell.

In the beginning was the word, but after an eternity of Chinese Whispers no one recognised it. There were no streets for the word to be on because it was the beginning and there weren't any streets yet. The great but terrible joke which few ever laugh at is that the essence of the word is eternal. Eternity refutes beginnings and endings (though not streets) thereby making it obvious that Chinese Whispers are an excuse.

Plan: Buy a .com (not a .ve, as the Venezuelan military would have it down as quick-as-a-flash) with a name like limpiarvenezuela.com (cleanupvenezuela) and put up a one page website, in Spanish, that says something like:

"Dear People of Venezuela,

Your soldiers are the only ones making money in your beautiful (except for all the mountains of trash and ugly oil stained cities) country. Not only are these men well paid but they take what little money you have every time you use a road or fart something that's not the national anthem. Soldiers are the only people who can afford to eat properly. The majority of them are shamefully piggy. Exercise would be good for them. Something other than waddling along the roadsides stealing your belongings and your money, and making everything take oodles longer than it ought to. Are they not public servants? No, perhaps they’re not. Perhaps they should be. Venezuela needs the Venezuelan military to clean up the trash.

The Venezuelan people once had much to be proud of. Today they venerate the past to ignore the shame of a present too painful to embrace.

The people of Venezuela could contribute to the clean-up effort by not throwing bottles and cans and furniture out of cars and buses and front doors without a second thought."

I might sign it "A Concerned Citizen of the World", or "Tierré MontBlanc" or "Caractacus Tartuffé" and send the link to Venezuelan newspapers and bloggers. You never know; it might make a few people think; Venezuelan soldiers hopefully.

That was a joke.

The bit about Venezuelan soldiers thinking. And the other bits.

On the way in to Venezuela it went like this:

Cúcuta on the Colombian side of the border:

As per, like blow flies to fresh excrement, the buzzards and hawks arrived in less time than it takes to hum the opening 'da's' of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

"Taxi! Taxi!? Cambio! Amigo!? Cambio! Dolarés!?"

"Papas fritas!?"

They bark and they faff and they chatter and fuss the minute you fall out of the bus. I used to get annoyed. A loud 'No' is usually sufficient, then ignore them. Stare over their heads at something incredibly interesting. The relentless ones are like humourless shih tzus (Have you ever met a shih tzu that had a sense of humour?) head-butting your calves and nipping your ankles. They have to be barked at louder than they expect to be barked at, then they invariably scuttle away, perhaps affording a malevolent or pained stare and gnashing whatever teeth they've got.

We take it in turns when we arrive in a new place. One of us stays with the bags while the other sniffs out accommodation and/or transport. Neither of us is much inclined to learning about wherever it is we’re headed to before we get there. Who wants to know before you go? We’ll find out when we get there. ‘There’ this time was Venezuela. Being in Northern Colombia (see the previous post) it seemed like a good idea. Maybe we should have done some research. Maybe there was something in the relentless scaremongering of the Western While Kath sat on our bags I carved a path into the sweaty yammer of Cúcuta’s transport hub to learn that the best way across the border a few miles away is by taxi.

“At least we won’t have to get in one of those horrible buses,” Kath said, dragging her eyes from her book, peering up from under her floppy hat to cast a suspicious eye across the countless red and yellow rickety jalopies. Even empty with their engines still they seemed to shake and shudder nervously, which could have been the heat haze in air thick with gasoline. Few of the buses sat quiet. They hurried into the depot in a clamour of horn blasts and deafening music, bullied their way as close to the terminal as they could get, disgorged all manner of life and baggage, soaked up more, and raced off. We’d travelled in such things a number of times.

A car they'd be ashamed of in Port Moresby: bits missing, more rust than tin, driven by a rakish flyboy moreno with grease in his hair and a wolf in each eye who proved the vehicle he was driving was a taxi by showing us the bit of cardboard he kept on the floor in the passenger seat that had ‘TAXI’ and a licence plate number written on it. He waved it at us then tucked it under the piles of refuse on the dash, leaving just the top of the T visible. On the floor of the passenger seat was a plastic roof cone that also promised ‘TAXI’. He attached it with spit after we crossed the border.

‘Mi mujer,’ he apologised, bundling missus and baby girl into the passenger seat after throwing our worldlies in the boot. We asked if he'd mind stopping at Colombian customs for passport inking, something the locals don't bother to do. The customs offices were well hidden in tiny side streets. Our man knew where to find them.

As soon as we crossed the border the traffic jams and road blocks started. Weather-beaten grubby people wander between the crawling vehicles. Their streaky faces appear at windows as they try to flog stuff: ice creams that somehow stay half-frozen in polystyrene tubs, fruit, deep fried crackly things, newspapers, daughters.

Leering, fat bullies in green with AK-47s leaned in the window and demanded we take all our stuff into the roadside office for a once over.

"Dinero? Where's your money tonto?" asked Hot Dog. I think he was miffed that being half a foot shorter than me he couldn't use some of his copious heft to put the lean on. A big chap with a cold, rude, sharp-toothed smile who's been getting his way for such a long time that an alternative isn't likely to be considered. He likes a bit of slap and tickle, though more of the slap than the tickle, and given the chance, preferring the butt of his pistol to give the slap Oomph!

Aspertions? Assumptions? Me?

I smiled and shook my head; Money?! Ha ha! What money? How funny? Me!?"

"They call me Hot Dog because I like to eat hot dogs, and I'm hot," he grinned, ushering me into the private viewing room, for a more intimate inspection.

He got me to strip but didn't stick his fingers in my bum, not to preserve my dignity I imagine; perhaps the tarnish on the sheen of his machismo would have been greater than the pleasure to be had humiliating me. I was telling myself that if he did choose to give me a prostate massage, I'd let him think it was the best thing that had happened to me all day. That'd show him.

Hot Dog took me back to the main area where the rest of his merry bunch were snuffling and rooting through our stuff like pigs for truffles, which is a metaphor in need of a tombstone. I know I'm not the first to write it down but I'm sure I've never read it anywhere else, so I'll let it pass. Maybe anyone who's ever been tempted to write it has come across the faceless, nameless guy in the check shirt and the newsboy hat - the Guardian of The Permissible - who has shaken his head, and tutt-tutted, and spat a big gob of disdain into the keyboard, before getting out the big red felt-tipped pen and DRAWING THE LINE.

Outside our cabbie was waiting. I offered a silent apology; having paid him before we started the trip, I half expected him to do a bunk while we were at Hot Dog's behest.

We carried on to San Cristobal. The baby in the pink dress with the fabric flower bonnett got bored of our face pulling and left us for z'zzing.

A three and half hour, 180 kilometre ride for $20.

"And I was going to haggle before we started!" Kath said.

Venezuela is one of the cheapest, or one of the most expensive countries in the world, depending on how you manage, or don't manage, your money. When taking cash out of ATM's the foreign exchange rate and charges are rude: things end up costing more than they would in Sydney. Exchanging American dollars on the black market makes things 6 times cheaper and puts you back in the 3rd world. Hallelujah! We got stung at the ATM once, but we had a few dollars - more by accident than design; enough for a short jaunt through the country.

Another bus to Santa Ana de Coro, a stone's throw from the Caribbean, passed through more amazing scenery, which I'm glad to say I'm still finding it hard to be blasé about, though after seven months it's no longer QUITE as exciting. The mountains never fail to make my heart swell; my breath runs short; tears well up. Lots of not-quite-jungle, but fruitier-than-forest, greenery.

In some of the more Wild West-ish countries in SA, Venezuela being prince amongst them, it's easy to tell when you're approaching populated areas because the rubbish starts to pile up before the houses appear. Some countries have adopted education strategies to deter people from spreading garbage like it was confetti and everyday was D-Day. Argentina, Chile and Ecuador are mostly debris free, but Bolivia, Colombia, and especially Venezuela, are often shocking for their disregard. It's so thankless. A couple of weeks in boats on the Peruvian Amazon made me sad and angry (when I wasn't ecstatically happy, gobsmacked, boggled or becalmed); how easily throwing absolutely everything into the river comes to the locals. The river IS the garbage bin and the rubbish tip, and has been since before memory was invented.

There's a town in Bolivia called Uyuni that takes the cake for biscuit wrappers - more rubbish than people and houses and scabby dogs put together. It's a shock arriving in town, after the strange barren magnificence of the salt flats, to see garbage literally everywhere.

Venezuela is almost as bad as Uyuni; but whereas most of Bolivia was clean and tidy, in Venezuela it's the whole country. Anywhere populated is desecrated. Anywhere there are people they're outweighed by trash.

Venezuela has been living off oil since the '70's. Cities and towns are coated with a veneer of sticky black phlegm. There's a black mist in the air which could be my imagination. (My imagination materialises in odd guises.)

Venezuela is what Miller and Kennedy were dreaming about when they wrote Mad Max. Hulking, North American antique automobiles fill the roads. (When referring to North American cars made before 1990, one is obliged to use the word automobile. Car is a suitable word for vehicles made after 1990.) Bashed, near crippled Chevrolets, Fords, Dodges - unencumbered by environmental controls - rattle and clank, and burp and roar. Some bright-spark realised that though no amount of money in bribes could keep such vehicles on the road in the US, you don't have to drive, or ship them too far, before they're worth a lot to somebody.

There's an awful lot of money been made in this country from oil. None of it went to Joe Regular. A couple of roads got built, otherwise everything man-made is decrepit.

Chavez didn't change anything. Another smooth talking hegemon with good propagandistas, who managed to keep everyone focussed on being angry at Uncle Sam, while the croney autocracy took all the cookies in the jar. Ever more for the piggy-wiggies; Ever less for the yucky poor people who should work harder if they want mansions and yachts.

It all looked good on paper when it started: a new constitution, milk and cookies for everyone, but—except for all the large leery posters of Chavez trying to be cool—on the street it looked the same. The milk was sour and the cookies were stale.

Chavez has been dead for yonks but his ghost is everywhere. From huge billboards the man with the slightly phoney, slightly forced, gap-toothed smile is pointing his finger at YOU. His expression is strained, like he's trying to poo. Often he's got someone clasped in a cardboardly ferocious embrace, a happy poor person, or a fat general overly-fond of sausages, with a chestful of medals. You might wonder how the medals is visible, in light of the ferocious embrace. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s implied.

On 15 December 1999, after weeks of heavy rain, mudslides across the country killed an estimated 30,000 people.

Fascinating..

It's hairy on the streets after dark. No one smiles. Everyone looks bored. Big slabs of men stare at you with expressions easily read as "Fuck off whitey, or I'll hit you with a hammer.", which could have been mis-interpreted, but in general the vibe is menace. Cars slow down to crawl past for a look at us. Cheery waves aren't returned. Perhaps we're mistaken for North Americans?

Bullets sprayed from machine guns decorate the plaza in the middle of town.

Back to the hotel to enjoy the hostage vibe.

Lonely Plant advises not to go to Maracaibo unless you're in the oil industry, but it was the biggest town nearby and would have a bus terminal that might get us back to Colombia.

We weren't long in Venezuela, and admittedly we didn't give it a chance. The south-east is said to be marvellous.

And on the way out it went like this:

We paid too much to share the back seat of a rickety colectivo with a basketful of chickens and three cheery sisters going to Bogotá. The too much we paid was still peanuts. The packed bus was commandeered by two vivacious, bossy, flamboyantly dressed, middle aged women - sisters too? - who sat up front behind the driver and shouted orders; where to sit, what to think, where to put luggage. In bold, clear voice and clear Spanish they told ribald jokes.

When it came to the bribes, the jokes stopped and they got narky. Every fifteen minutes in a three hour journey to the border they sent young Mario round the bus to collect money.

It was hard to believe how often the bus was stopped by sweaty fat soldiers. And every time: the same stupid play. The sisters got flirty or motherly with them to try to keep them off the bus. The soldiers took it good naturedly but insisted, none the less. Up they came, nosed around, prodded disinterestedly at a few bits of cargo, inspected a few identity cards, took the bribe with a smile or a scowl, and left.

Once or twice, when one of the slobs demanded too much, one of the women got abusive and screamed colourful insults into his chubby chops. But they always got what they asked for, stepping blasé away from the bus to cries of "Ladron! Chancho!" Thief! Pig!

The whole country takes this shit from these slobs, over and over again; day in, day out, year in, year out, generation after generation. Nothing to be done about it? Maybe.

For all the attention we got, we could have had twenty bricks of cocaine in our bags; which might make us the first fools to try to smuggle cocaine into Colombia. Not one of the seven or eight road blocks would have found such booty, for no-one bothered to look. The piggies want bribes. No-one's got anything worth nicking. Everyone KNOWS who the thieves and drug runners are. We seemed to be invisible for some reason. Not once did we have to show our passports or open our bags. None of the soldiers did more than glance at us. We weren't asked to contribute to the bribes. Perhaps having paid twenty times as much as the rest of the passengers our bribe contribution had been made.

We had to pull over for half an hour when one of the passengers plastic bottles full of petrol burst and flooded the bus, incapacitating chickens. The driver did his best with buckets of water and soap. We were a bit light headed for the rest of the trip.