Two Fridays back, the day before I left Australia, the phone rang as I was lunching on roast chook at The Paddington. It was the Colombian chief executive of Orica, Alberto Calderon. "I hear you are travelling to my country?" He had heard correctly, I assured him. "Well then, there's this little cevicheria just off the square near the cathedral – the owner went to university with my cousin María…" I motioned furiously at the waiter for pen and paper.
The following Friday and my feet dangle over Cartagena's city wall. This section of it, compiled 450 years ago of coral slabs sawn and hauled from the reefs by wretched natives enslaved by the Spanish, fronts the compound long occupied by the late Gabriel García Márquez. And a local man stands sentry at his foam station, full of ice and cerveza ($1.35 each). There is no security fence, no signage proscribing this or that, just my mate ShaneO and me drinking ice cold tinnies of Aguila, watching a sunset of astonishing loveliness over the Caribbean Sea. The breeze belies the temperature, 33º Celsius.
Silhouetted on the reclaimed foreshore are the labourers and service workers commuting home on their belching buses and rickety scooters. Congestion is so pernicious the government enforces Pico y Placa, banning every car from driving on one day of each week, the day determined by the last digit of its licence plate. My next novel: Love in the Time of Dioxide Poisoning.
ShaneO, a lifelong sailor, stopped here to refuel his boat four years ago and never left. For a relative pittance, he bought a marvellous little house in the old town (the producers of Narcos, its third season currently filming around Cartagena, scouted his Juliet balcony for a scene), and he makes a decent living chartering rich American tourists around the surrounding islands. To my tremendous amusement, he deploys his rudimentary Spanish in the broad burr of the South Australian plains as we pass his acquaintances in the neighbourhood.
There's a troupe of us down here together – Paul, Kevin, the infamous Barry and Graham. We march down towards the port, through the Plaza de la Aduana, where in the 17th Century the European slavers first marketed their human cargo (indeed Robert De Niro filmed scenes here for The Mission).
We have everything we need – beer, corn chips and sunscreen – as we board ShaneO's handsome vessel, the Jessica (named for heroine of the seas, Jessica Watson), whose skipper Alvaro is a certified speed demon with 900 horsepower at his fingertips. We power out of the inner harbour at 42 knots, cranking Shakira, past narco transport submarines on dry docks, confiscated by the navy, and a barren plinth rising out of the water on which the Virgin of Mount Carmel once stood, before she was obliterated 18 months ago by a freak bolt of lightning.
Chalon is an inlet and lagoon system – one of the largest of the Rosario Islands – straight out of a Beach Boys music video. Something like 25 speedboats are tied together to form a makeshift marina among the mangroves and palms. A flotilla of kayakers hawk freshly-shucked oysters. Barbecued lobster is devoured with cocktails in coconut shells. Revellers encircle the floating camp on feral jetskis. When the wind picks up, ShaneO gives the wrap-up signal and we hurtle back to the port.
Alberto's recommendations, unsurprisingly, are off the chain. At El Boliche, we eat the most delicious empanadas I've ever tasted – crispy, neither oily nor dry and stuffed with succulent crab meat. And the ceviche! At La Vitrola, where it's said Colombia's ruling class comes to carve up her spoils – the same can be said of the mojito, while fresh grouper is served a dozen ways. There I meet a stringer fresh out of the Amazon, having interviewed leader of the FARC guerillas, Timochenko, whose peace deal with President Juan Manuel Santos the nation rejected at last year's referendum. La Vitrola is owned by the Santo Domingo family, whose stake in global brewer AB InBev alone is worth nearly €30 billion. And there's plenty more tourism capital coming to town – a Four Seasons and a Viceroy are both under construction; new, direct flights from Amsterdam and Madrid, in addition to existing ones out of New York and Florida, have been announced.
That night, Barry brings out his guitar and we all sit around drinking cerveza and chorusing to Australian Crawl. Except Errol has been superseded; Errol has nada on ShaneO.
He left for the islands
To fish and hunt
He take a punt
Woh, ShaneO
I would give everything
Just to be like him
He had to go, the Sirocco
He's sailin' the high seas…
