Blame Canada

Monday 3 May
Cali

I was woken up in the morning by the other people in my room arriving home from the club. So I killed them. Killed them all to death. No I didn’t. I was just mildly annoyed and tried to sleep some more.

Come the morning I hung out with them and went to breakfast with some of them. The breakfast was OK. I didn’t do much during the day. Cali’s not exactly a city of beauty. Its culture comes from it apparently being the world capital of salsa, but they haven’t bothered with anything visual like architecture. It has a similar brash, commercial, uninspiring look of some of the more slapdash, American-style towns in Ecuador and Brazil. I had a bit of a walk around town but there wasn’t much to be said for it. In the evening I made some pasta.

I was in two minds whether to go out that night as I was still a bit tired. But in the end I decided to go anyway. We caught a taxi to some salsa place. The girl from the hostel told them where to go. Then we set off. There was a torrential rainstorm taking place and the roads were soaked with water. Of course that didn’t stop our driver racing as fast as he could down the roads like some crazy, possessed rally driver (though still no patch on that driver from Salvador). The roads weren’t exactly in the best condition. There were potholes everywhere and badly surfaced tarmac. We seemed to be travelling at about 100 miles an hour and then suddenly jerking back and forth as though the steering was faulty – which it probably was – past invisible obstacles in the road. The car’s movement combined with the road surface meant that it felt like we were in an extremely fast washing machine, that hadn’t been secured properly to the floor. Another way to describe it would be like being driven at high speed by an epileptic, during a fit, in a typhoon. Which we probably were.

We arrived at some nightclub, but it wasn’t the one that we had asked for. We didn’t have much Spanish between us in our car, but there was another cab with us that had someone who did. They seemed to be waiting for a while which was confusing, as we should have been going to the correct place. I left the car and went and asked what was going on. After a bit of back and forth we were on our way to the correct place.

Another life-threatening taxi journey later and we had arrived. On the way it seemed like the taxi driver was trying to charge us more than the pre-arranged fee, but we weren’t sure because of the lack of language skills. So we paid him the original fare and went in.

Once inside we realised that after a while, only half of the other cab were in the club. I asked why they weren’t here. It seems they had decided to wait in the other cab, until we had paid what the cab driver was asking. This was complete madness. Firstly, they were trying to rip us off, secondly, it wasn’t their cab. These people were idiots. They were also Canadian. I guess they were being nice to the point of stupidity. I went outside and told them to come in, which they did. Someone’s got to tell them what to do. Very strange.

Inside the club we experienced how the capital of salsa works. Of course all the guys and girls have been dancing salsa since they were conceived (in fact, that’s probably how they were conceived) so they were pretty good at it. What was unusual was that as each song ended, the entire dance floor cleared and everyone sat down again. And then ten seconds later, when the next song started, everybody took to the floor once again. How on earth were you supposed to hit on the girls when you only had one song to do it? They were really making it hard for themselves. Or rather, they were making it hard for us uncoordinated gringos that couldn’t dance.

As anyone who’s watched X Factor knows, lack of talent is no reason not to try, so we had a go. Back in London in beginner salsa classes I look quite good – I can pick it up pretty quickly. Here in Colombia in the capital of salsa I’m as sexy and fluid as a can of baked beans. It didn’t help that my dancing partner was a Kiwi girl with even less fluidity than me.

Then, a couple of hours in, our taxi driver returned and asked for the extra money once again. I of course brushed him off but he had spied a weak point and exploited it mercilessly. He started hassling our Canadian cousins again. Eventually for some crazy reason – probably to make him go away – they paid up, which was plainly ridiculous. They had now let themselves be ripped off for someone else’s cab, which, to be fair, takes some doing. What were they thinking? Anyway I gave them a bit of cash because I felt sorry for them, but the other people in my cab were on a tight budget and weren’t going to pay. They shouldn’t have paid in the first place.

Anyway once we had made the most of it we headed back home.