Underneath the Stairs

(Dubious Disclaimer)

The following is a sincere firsthand account of the events that transpired the evening of 18 July, 2006, though some of the more unsightly knots may have been slightly straightened with a prudent censor's comb. A shamelessness that sometimes takes me by surprise and a noted tendency to trip and fall into situations that some might call ridiculous came together in epic form...



"Do you really want to see dinosaur fossils tomorrow", David deviously asked me around 11pm as we poured over yet another pressing decision - another beer?

We had arrived in Villa de Leyva, a sleepy village perched in the mountains a few hours north of Bogotá, a few hours earlier, lethargic from the two winding bus rides involving frequent frisks from Colombian highway police with guns and suspicious looks. Ready to relax a bit, we wandered about the area of the mail plaza looking for lodging, finding that our first-choice hostal did not, in fact, exist, and then misreading the directions to our second choice. Finally finding Hostal Villa, we peeked in every empty room of the little hotel with two Colombian girls who were also looking for a place to lay their heads, finding an employee only after 15 minutes of bewilderment. After brief bargaining, during which I attested that we were only going to use the room for some 10 hours, given that we were checking in around 8 pm and we planned on heading out early (not that early, but I was exaggerating for haggling's sake...), we agreed to pay 25,000 Colombian pesos for the night, about 11 dollars for the two of us.

Hungry, I asked a local loitering about the plaza where I might find some affordable but decent food, and he directed us to the La Casa Blanca ("The White House"), a couple of blocks off the plaza. A beautiful little walk over colonial cobblestone streets, we entered the restaurant to some intense stares from about half of the tables (nothing new really). The waitress told us we could sit wherever we wanted, and David commented on her good looks as we took a spot near the door. She served us a spectacular soup and a hearty plate with plantains, salad, rice, potatoes, and juicy stake with soft drink for 5,800 pesos, (about $2.50). We asked her for a recommendation on a relaxed (but open) bar in which to pass a couple hours on a lazy Tuesday night. She sent us to a place across the street from our hostal, but after standing outside and hearing POD or Lifehouse or some other unfortunate combination of sounds streaming from that particular bar, we decided on a Spanish bar on the other side of the plaza called "Los Caracoles" (The Snails). We inquired about their house wine, and the owner was nice enough to show us the BOX from which she would decant the Chilean red into a nicer looking glass pitcher. We were satisfied enough paying 7 bucks for a liter of wine in a restaurant, despite its having come from a box, though I think we would have preferred to imagine it coming from a classier container.

David and I passed an hour or so speaking in Spanish, discussing friends and life and selecting our favorite of the nude pencil drawings that adorned the brick walls. We were relaxing right near the door, reclining in big old wooden chairs, right up until we felt the eyes of the owner asking us to leave so she could shut down. We paid up, ready to go home, but decided to go for one more drink at the place the waitress had originally recommended. No wine at this place, so we opted for a canelazo, which is a hot drink made from aguardiente (traditional andean firewater) and agua de panela, essentially a tea with crude cane sugar. While we waited for the drink, David noticed that our waitress from earlier was at the bar - and was working there. The recommendation made a bit more sense now.

We finished our canelazos and decided on a beer to follow up, Aguila (Eagle), the people's Colombian brew. At this point we did not have enough money for anything else, and David posed the question which opened this narrative. We had planned on a hike the following morning to see a 120 million year old kronosaurus and El Infiernito ("little hell"), a curious old observatory of phallic stones. How much did we really care about those things? Well, Destiny would decide.

I opted to go back to the hostal to get a bit more cash for a couple more beers, as we were relaxing, chatting in Spanish, and generally enjoying ourselves. At the hostal, I waited about 5 minutes ringing the doorbell until the girl who had checked us in earlier came to answer the door. Sleepy eyed, she asked where my friend was (David), clearly not wanting to get out of bed again to let him in. I didn't have the heart to tell her I was only coming back to get money and I would be leaving. However, after retrieving a couple thousand pesos (very little money), I found that I could not leave the hostal without the employee's keys. Or rather, I couldn't leave the hostal and leave the door locked. The large wooden door to the hostal had a bolt latch that could be locked from the inside, and also contained a smaller door with a key lock, the door the employee opened and closed for me. I decided against waking her and opened the large door's bolt, leaving the door open for anyone to come in (this was safe, as there was not a soul in the streets and the door appeared to be locked to any passerby).

Returning to the bar, David was chatting with the waitress, whose name we learned was Sonia, and a very energetic fellow at the next table, Jorge. He informed me that he had taken two shots of aguardiente in the meantime and had two fresh beers on the table. We chatted for a bit, learning that Sonia was simply helping out at this bar, which her friend owned (this is one of those picture-book-everybody-knows-everybody villages). Checking out the little bar, I recognized the two girls who were also staying at our hostal sitting at a table a few feet away. I got up to tell them to simply push the hostal door in when they arrived, so that they wouldn't ring the doorbell and wake the receptionist (and so she wouldn't find that I'd just left the door open). I had a 60 second conversation with the two of them and two guys who were sitting with them, one of whom was clearly interested in the girl sitting across from me. The other girl, sitting to my left(and marginally cuter), offered me a little whiskey and a friendly thigh-stroke, neither of which I was particularly interested in, but I accepted the whiskey to be polite.

A moment later, David said to me, in English, "Zack, you need to get away from that table right now, this guy thinks you are hitting on these girls and wants to fight you." Having no interest in the girls or getting my face bashed in, I did as I was told. Standing up and turning around, unaware even of what "guy" David was referring to, I found my neck squashed between the huge hairy hands of the big Brazilian that was hitting on the girl sitting across from me during our extremely brief interaction. Mumbling through the pressure of his thumb on my throat, I calmly attempted to explain to him that I simply wanted to let them know how to get into the hostal. For whatever reason, he moved his hand from my throat to bend back the thumb of my left hand, which I realize in retrospect was very painful. At the time, I was mostly concerned with a decent explanation of the situation, as everyone in the bar was now standing up telling this drunken maniac to calm down. He insisted that I had somehow done him some grave injustice and that I must be punished. Perhaps reason passed his macho mentality for a second and he allowed my thumb to return to its normal resting place. I let my body do the same and sat back down with David, Sonia, and Jorge, to avoid any contact whatsoever with that absurdly drunken and worked up machista, whose Spanish and behavior were both severely deficient.

We talked about anything but the insanity that had just ensued for about five minutes, until the Brazilian returned to demand that David, me, and Jorge (who was now somehow implicated) go with him outside. Everyone in the bar wanted this guy to leave alone at this point (including his own friend, I think, who was reasonable, friendly, and not completely wasted), and nobody moved. The Brazilian left with the girls from my hostal, for whom he had been buying drinks all night, but returned by himself to wait for us to leave. Fortunately, he must have gotten tired, because when the bar closed and the owner put us out on the street, he was nowhere to be found.

The logical next step at this point would have been to go home. However, at Sonia's request, the owner dropped a bottle of aguardiente in her hands, a few plastic cups perched upside down on the cap. (Everywhere, they serve aguardiente with little thimble-like plastic cups reminiscent of the containers used in dentists’ offices for fluoride swishing. I have to imagine aguardiente kills some bacteria in the mouth, but instead of coating the teeth, it forms a film on the liver.) David, Sonia, and I sat on a bench in the well-lit plaza with the following crowd:

"Finche" (or something like that): The bar owner, sporting three shades of blue and a scout-leader mustache, happily gave Sonia the booze as she promised to pay up the next morning.

Jose Louis: A string bean Colombian studying in nearby Tunja, he invited me to his house and warned me to be careful in Colombia (both very common sentiments in this friendly country)

Colombo: Literally. Colombo. Jose Louis's husky counterpart, with a shiny leather coat and matching shoes (and even shinier gelled hair, smelling of vanity), he pumped up the volume on his red VW golf as he boasted about his job as a petroleum engineer in very bad English. The police visited on multiple occasions to tell him to turn down the tunes, an idea that David expressed to Colombo several times.

Jorge: David was subjected to the nearly unintelligible rants of Jorge, a skinny hotel employee who was into movies and cocaine. The former not being available in the plaza, he briefly entertained himself with the latter down the street.

Chocolate, called "Choco" for short: An old friend of Sonia's, he had entered the scene at some point with a friend of his, whose name I never quite caught. A 30-something with a Corduroy jacket and baseball cap, his hard facial gestures and intense gesticulation made him at the very least an interesting person with whom to converse at 2am in a sleepy little mountain village.


All of these characters, including David and myself, were swallowing little shots of aguardiente until the bottle was finished. Again, the logical next thing to do would be to go across the street to our hostal and hit the sack.

David made a move to do so. When I asked him what he was doing, indicating that Choco, his friend, and Sonia, were headed to some bar about three doors down, he responded "Nah, I was just checking to make sure the hostal door was open." New chapters were unfolding.

Choco kneeled down to turn his key in the heavy lock under a sign for "Tipico's Bar", explaining that he was the bar owner. We sat in the back room as he presented us with a couple of beers ("Poker" Brand), and turned on some music. David and I were wide-eyed at having opened a bar at 3am in Villa de Leyva. Perhaps a bit intoxicated but not without our wits about us. The bizarre events that had just transpired were beginning to settle into our brains.

One of the things I realized is that I'd smoked my first cigarette. 22 years old, I'd always felt that when I smoked my first cigarette, it should be at the top of a mountain, with a supermodel or Jimmy Hoffa, something epic. Perhaps I thought this evening qualified. Or maybe it was just that Sonia shoved a Kool Lite into my mouth. I somehow found it appropriate to comment, shamelessly and ridiculously, that "her beauty had fooled me", and David followed suit, commenting that she was "beautiful but dangerous".

Choco showed us pictures of his 3 year old son and discussed his divorce as David and I felt mildly uncomfortable, Sonia and Choco obviously being old friends. Choco's friend put his head on the table and slept for a couple of hours while we consumed a couple of Pokers and Choco continued to refuse to let in random passers-by, Jorge included. Perhaps it was the thin mountain air (a more likely culprit might be the wine, aguardiente, beer, aguardiente, and beer), but David decided at this point that trading his Wisconsin hooded sweatshirt for Choco's reversible corduroy jacket would lend proper sentiment to that drunken middle-of-the-night moment. As they switched outerwear, Choco put on a face as if he were a gangsta in the hoody, and David gave him his handkerchief to complete the part with a do-rag. Choco seemed to want to keep the do-rag, as well, but David made a compromise, ridiculously. This absurd situation somehow left David feeling as if we were all sharing a beautiful moment together, and he explained that his father had given him that handkerchief (as if it were a dying father's last gift to his favorite son. In reality, it held minimal sentimental value) He ripped two strips off of the hanky, presenting one to Choco and one to Sonia, with the delicate hands and serene expression of a bishop passing out communion wafers. I was floored with this absolutely absurd gesture, realizing its ridiculosity (it deserves its own word), but at the same time I was aware that this was not reality. Anything goes in the Villa de Leyva surreality.

Sonia suggested that I trade my University of Granada sweatshirt for her shirt, which was tempting, not because I thought her pink blouse would look good on me, but rather that there was nothing under it; but, I decided that the UGR sweatshirt, with two years of history (drops from friendly wines in three continents, paint splats from Malingua Pamba, dirt sweat and tears from some 14 countries), was not to be bartered with, under any circumstances...


Somehow we wrapped up the night and tiptoed into the hostal as the sun came up over the mountains... We awoke around 11am, the time we had promised to meet Sonia at some spa in town, without any real concept of the insanity that had been the previous evening, but with a good deal of that insanity pounding loudly in our temples. I attempted to open my eyes wide enough to see any rational reason for me to have smoked my first cigarette menthol at that). Rolling over, David groaned in surprise, finding a smelly corduroy jacket where his sweatshirt had been before. We both knew there was a healthy gap where our dignity had been before. We both knew that we weren't going to see any fossils.

From my bed nearest the entrance, I opened the door to our room to let the breeze roll in as we shamelessly lied in bed until well after noon, hostal employees passing by and trying not to look at the hungover Americans nailed to their beds. Around 2 o'clock, after showering and madly rehydrating, we moved to leave the hostal, aware that the sign in the room showed checkout at 11am, and that we'd been granted a good price on the argument that we'd be out early. The receptionist from the previous night attempted to make us pay, but David bravely (or shamelessly... the word of the trip) refused, arguing that she hadn't told us about the checkout time, and then moving into a narration of some of the previous night's antics, until he realized that there was no reason whatsoever to continue talking to this woman. We searched for cheap pizza, and failing that, found a big soup/plate/juice combo place for a $1.50, attempting to soak up some of the previous night's booze as we attempted to put the pieces together. We boarded a minibus for the first leg of our trip back to Bogotá as we got our first and last glimpses of the amazing landscape surrounding the city. We almost wanted to stick around for the fossils, but shame pushed us back to the Bogotá.

David made a heroic effort not to vomit as we wound our way to Tunja. The girl in the row behind us asked for a barfbag, prompting both him and me to turn our headphones up high and avoid breathing barf fumes or hearing her retching. Next to the window, I was in better shape physically, though still wondering what kind of reality I was actually living. We caught our breath in Tunja, recovering briefly before taking a plush bus for the 3 hours to Bogotá, trying not to tear up at a movie with talking animals called "Racing Stripes" whose main character was a zebra who won the Kentucky Derby. Seemed Real Enough.