There are not many remote places on the planet and I was given the impression that the extremity of the Colombian Caribbean coast that borders Venezuela was one of them. The guide books tell you to take a tour and the tour companies have extreme in their names, supporting the idea that it is a real, out of the way, adventure. On the first day heading to Cabo de la Vela this is not the experience, it is time consuming to move around despite there being many well paved busy roads, thanks to both the light and heavy industry that punctuates the area. However it is not until you move further north to the most extreme tip of South America, known as Punta Gallinas, that the true off-road adventure starts.
La Guajira is the home to the Wayuu people, like many other Colombian indigenous groups they live a semi-autonomous life. After you leave Riohahca the largest frontier city of Guajira you will immediately see “communities” that are no more than a handful of extended families living in mud and wooden structures; also common are tiny bungalow homes and out houses built of breeze block and concrete, collectively they are locally known as rancherias. The lines between a traditional lifestyle and the adoption of modern technologies, for ease of use, are heavily blurred. You will see cemeteries, Christian crosses and churches populating the area as you drive from sandy, unmade roads to more familiar concrete or asphalt ones. It’s striking the amount of plastic by the roadside, making you feel you are on the outskirts of an industrial refuse site where small plastic packages and bags can often seep out of a large dump and litter the surrounding environs. In this case they are mostly plastic bags, flapping in the heavy breeze, pinned to the thorns of shrubs or cacti. Not one community would win the best kept village badge, in fact, you feel like there is a total disregard for nature. The litter is coming from the Wayuu, there is nobody else there and no sign of any roadside dumping. It is odd to see such little pride and such a disconnect from the environment, but as you travel further along the road you find more and more dichotomies between the idea of a people in touch with the land and the industrial presence of an invasive developed society.
The first large settlement along the road from Riohahca is called Manuare. There you will find the artisan extraction of salt from sea water. Large pits or ponds with steep sides are filled with salt water that is pumped in and then left to evaporate, dried out by the sun. Once dry, men literally shovel the salt into wheelbarrows which are then carted off to the refineries in other parts of the country. It is a labour intensive job in the sheer heat and humidity of the almost all year round sunshine that this part of the coast experiences. The guide said the majority of Colombia’s salt comes from the area, other areas in Colombia have more rock salt, so perhaps he is referring to sea salt, but I did not press him to clarify. The size and scope of the operation seemed very small, a quick sweep of the head showed nothing more than a few hundred meters in the distance, with only a handful of current piles of unrefined sodium chloride. It is though noteworthy as one of the few towns where work is in abundance.
From Manaure you head up to Cabo de la Vela along a concrete road which runs alongside the railway track. The track only has one function, which is to carry the coal mined in Albania up to a specially designed port for the carbon product to be shipped out of Puerto Bolivar. For this reason it feels less like an off the beaten track adventure as you travel along a broad man made road, running for tens of kilometers north, wagons chortling past as you go, filled with coal on the way up and nothing on the way back. This part of the industrial landscape is not supporting the Wayuu; I saw a security guard peddling alongside the tracks and nothing more in terms of local workers. This project is high investment, resulting in highly damaging contamination to both the picturesque scenery and the planet in general. It is not sustainable for the local population as they are not involved in any part of the industry and it is not sustainable for the planet; the case in point that la Guajira is one of the most waterless places on earth for most of the year. Recent droughts which are really a way of life have been extended making it imposible for many to survive without heavy state intervention.
Cabo de la Vela is a nothing town, its modern function is to support the handful of daily tourists that stay no more than 1 or 2 nights. As you can arrive to this point with a normal vehicle, many Colombians come and hang their hammocks under wooden shacks dotted along the beach. We actually did the same but with some local families coming from further down the coast nobody could sleep well, as this far away paradise was turned into an open air Vallentato and Reggaeton dance hall. Apart from the landscape of undulating dunes and vast planes of dried out, flat bottomed lakes, you never escape the wind. Here in Cabo its an excellent place to kite surf as the waves are not more than a meter high and there is a constant strong breeze. There are a number of kite surfing schools, so if you like sleeping in a hammock to a lullaby of loud music then this is the ideal place to pass several days tugging on a your personalized sail that drags you at high rate of knots through the coastal water.
Despite not being too far from industrial centers, Cabo is not served with electricity; not from want of trying but it is because the lines and transistors have collapsed. The guides say its because they have been stolen and sold on, but it looks like there has been a lack of maintenance, everything is rusted, with the constant torrent of wind powered salt water being driven into every part of the apparatus; the bottom line is limited lighting hours as all electric supply comes from personal generators. The amusing scenario for those blasting out music through high amp outdoor speakers is that they also need to produce their own electric power to do so, dancing the night away surrouned by the odour of gasoline. The irony of all this is as you move further up the coast only a few kilometers there is a large wind farm, the first stop on the second day of the tour. It makes sense with the high winds, but also with the all year round sunshine bonanza solar could easily power local hamlets that are dotted across the whole of la Guajira. Sadly though instead of seeing technology that could transform the lives of those that live near any sparse underground water source, you see hamlet after hamlet of kids and mothers begging by the roadside.
The tracks made by previous vehicles guide the 4x4s across the dusty, sandy planes, but they always run past a group of rancherias associated with an extended family. Each family sends out children and women to block the road with everything from crude cobbled together string draped with colored pieces of cloth, to old motorbike chains, to tires, to dried out branches or heavy rubber chords. It's a constant stop-start to go further north, every few minutes the driver decides if he is going to play the repeated game of chicken where you don’t slow down and at the last minute the flimsy barricade is dropped to the floor. The wheels and hubs of all the cars are wound with bits of cloth and flimsy rope where the kid dropped the rope too late and the car took their makeshift toll booth with them. The toll is not usually for hard currency, but cookies wrapped in plastic bags, water and sometimes a lollipop. There are a few billy goat gruff type tolls, more like check points where serious heads of families (men) demand about 70 cents for the vehicle to pass. Here the drivers stop, hand over the money, wait a while and then move on. We also encountered a group of drunk Wayuu, who flagged down the car and positioned themselves on the bonnet until a fee was paid so that we could go on our way. For a tourist in their own private vehicle this system of begging for money with a little menace would feel like a shakedown, but it is the principal way that that Wayuu get hard currency or innutritious junk food into their diets. The government also provides significant handouts which according to our guide are rarely distributed evenly.
The kids grab at whatever you offer through the window to pass by each checkpoint, the women tend to snarl or grimace, sometimes muttering something aggressive as you pull off. The serious family heads argue for several minutes and talk about lack of respect. Whatever each experience is, the overall feeling is of a people with their hands out, a people that seem to do very little each and everyday but wait for the world to give them what they will as they pass by. It is hard to imagine what happened in the first months of the pandemic when no money, food or water was passing through these inhospitable lands. There is no electricity, there is very little drinking water, there is just sand and a few low hanging shrubs and trees that litter the landscape of cracked lake beds that fill for just a few months of the year. The coast there offers an abundance of fish, goats seem to survive without too much need of the planets resources and the two form the main protein element of the Wayuu diet. The fields of cacti are used to construct homes but also produce a fabric that is employed to make hammocks and bags. The colorful items are sold across la Guajira for a handful of dollars but can be exchanged for hundreds of dollars to an unsuspecting tourist in Cartagena, Medellin or Bogotá. These goods are the only visible product and livelihood for many Wayuu, the women doing all of the work.
The machismo lifestyle of the Wayuu does not stop with their minimal contribution to the income of the household, many spend a good deal of their time drunk. The Catholic church’s teachings have been bent out of shape as alongside what is deemed to be a christianized society, Wayuu men can take several wives. In a landscape that produces so little. where only the cactus produces an edible dragon fruit style consumable, the men are producing several children each without any real means to support them. The government interventions create a mixed up world, effectively by law the Wayuu live under their own rules in areas defined legally as resguardos by Colombian statute. For this reason bigomy is allowed and criminal justice is meted out by local leaders and not by the government apparatus that completely fails the rest of the country. The image of a child with their hand out, the image of a child chasing after a vehicle, banging the door when they receive nothing is the image mirrored across the recumbent vistas. Despite being on the cusp of so much industrialization, even with wind farms a few kilometers from towns, nothing seems more bleak than a child educated only to beg.
Putting the lack of social cohesion to one side, the journey north from Cabo de la Vela is nothing less than spectacular. Hour after hour you are struck with sweeping, uninterrupted views. Mountains mark the edge of the vista, but they do not limit the expanse that seems to be never ending. The real limits are the sea line, where high winds crash the climbing waves into the shore; in many places the wind is lifting the sand to form spectacularly high dunes. As you arrive to Punta Gallinas the dunes surrounding that area are high enough to board down into the ocean below. Crude light houses have been constructed on top of pylon towers with a simple solar power light. They seem like pointless structures for the 21st century and offer no real architectural brilliance that you see in many US and European light house constructions. There is no sense of history, there are no ancient or even old constructions that have not been made by mother nature. The wind that whips up a storm, the short but heavy rainy season has crafted every structure that you see, all is from nature’s hand not man’s.
The sheer remoteness and the pristine, impecable, sandy beaches rival anywhere in the Caribbean. It seems odd that this hasn’t been exploited, it maybe to do with local indigenous politics or more likely because of the high winds that never cease to blow. Even further south, a day away by car in Riohacha, most trips to the beach are accompanied by at least a zephyr if not a strong gust that will whip you with sand particles as you try and soak up any rays. In these most northern beaches, as picturesque as they are you would spend most of the day chasing down your hat. One amusing incident took place where a girl's hat was stolen by the wind, only for a young guy to set off with a full-on Usain Bolt action. He stamped, jumped and grappled with the hat, but like a scene in a cartoon whatever he did the wind would take it a few inches from his grasp, to the point that after 500 of meters of chasing he lay prostrate in the sand, beaten and unlauded for his partial efforts. Nature is definitely the winner and the starkness of the environment is a reminder that if humans do not come and tame a place then it is truly wild, the natural beauty of very little or nothing familiar to sustain human life, something dry, inhospitable and daunting is a wonderful contrast to the rich lush rainforests that are no more than a few hundred kilometers from this off beat corner of Colombia.
