After bidding the Colombian Navy boys adieu, we threaded our way through the reefs to the northern exit of the atoll. Which was easier said than done; rather than following a clear sand path out, finding the exit was a matter of crossing the deep reefs (20-30 feet) rather than the shallow ones, which is nerve-wracking in crystalline water that makes 30 feet look a lot like 3. It took a while, but finally we got into deep water.
San Andrés is about 30 miles to the northeast of the Cayos de Albuquerque -- this time of year, that means 30 miles directly to windward, with a west-setting current to contend with as well. Sailing would mean lengthening the route by tacking, which would mean a much longer day than we could afford, since we had to both leave Albuquerque and arrive at San Andrés with good light. Motoring directly into the wind and waves would be slow and uncomfortable, so we opted for "power-tacking". That is, motorsailing with the mainsail up at as close an angle to the wind on one side as we could manage (typically 30 degrees closer than what we can sail at), and then turning across our rhumb line to motorsail on the opposite side of the wind, again as close as we could go without causing the sail to luff and flutter uselessly. As we had chosen a good day to travel, with extremely light wind and small waves, it was a fairly comfortable ride, although the current slowed us considerably and our average speed was only a little more than 5 knots. We arrived at the anchorage in front of Club Nautico (a marina with the same name as the marina we stayed at in Cartagena, but apparently entirely unrelated) late Sunday afternoon. As everything is generally closed up tight on Sundays, we waited until Monday morning to handle the legalities.
The Colombian government requires all vessels, including yachts, to use an agent to clear in. The agent here is Rene Cardona, an affable man who also owns a small commercial conching boat. The procedure is that after we call Rene, he calls all the various officials and they come to Club Nautico to fill out the forms and stamp our passports and so on; he didn't actually do anything other than make phone calls and translate a little, but that's the way it's done here, so that's the way we did it. First came some special "migration control" men, then a bit later the standard immigration official, who stamped our passports. The Port Captain was delayed, so Rene called his wife and asked her to wait with us while he ran across the island to deliver exit papers to a cruise ship that was anchored on the other side -- coincidentally, it was the Caronia, the boat we'd locked through with on Namirda when transiting the Panama Canal.
Señora Cardona and I chatted in Spanish until Rene returned. She and Rene were both born in San Andrés; her father was born here, but her mother was from Bogotá. San Andrés has very strict migration laws, even for Colombians, and although a steady stream of big jets bring hundreds of visiting tourists daily, it's difficult to get permission to actually move here. The tourists come for the beaches, scuba diving, the island ambiance, and the duty-free shopping. Sra. Cardona likes her island because it is "muy tranquila." No big city stress, not much traffic, and most especially, "no violencia."
There are still the haves and have-nots, the occasional tourist scam or pickpocketing, and a few young punks on drugs. San Andrés is not a haven for the wealthy alone; actually, although we haven't seen much other than the tourist-oriented city center and beach areas, it looks more like a middle-class haven. Kind of like the neighborhood in the beach-hotel section of Cartagena, in fact, although because it requires a plane trip to get here, we suspect the tourists are slightly more affluent. And of course by its position, San Andrés is even more untouched than Cartagena by drug and civil war related violence.[*]
"The violence" is the way that most Colombians refer to the civil war, and from our discussions with Colombians, both here and in Cartagena, everybody just wishes it would go away and quit interfering in their lives. Sra. Cardona would like to take a vacation in the mountains -- the Colombian mountains are very beautiful, she says -- but she can't, because of the guerillas. The Colombian economy is having problems, and there are many unemployed Colombians who would like to try their luck elsewhere. Because of this sudden surge of emigration, other countries have begun making it more difficult for Colombians to travel. Costa Rica and Spain are two countries that have apparently recently started requiring visas for Colombian visitors.
The Cardonas' oldest child is two years from secondary-school graduation. Sra. Cardona told me that the good universities in Colombia are all in areas subject to "la violencia", and she would like to send her children to college in the United States, but getting student visas is difficult, more so after the September 11 terrorism attacks. A Canadian cruiser she met has offered to help her get her oldest into a Canadian university, and she plans on pursuing this, although she worries it will be too cold for people used to the tropics. (Later, Rene rolled his eyes and shook his head, as though he had heard her arguments many times before, which he probably has. "Where will we find the money?" The maritime agency is not particularly lucrative, and his conch fishing boat, after maintenance and crew expenses, barely turns a profit.)
This is really why I am so happy that I have learned a bit of Spanish. You can certainly get by in all the Spanish-speaking countries we've been in -- Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama -- without speaking a word of Spanish. Many cruisers manage just fine. Pointing and charades works pretty well in restaurants and hardware stores (and we still fall back on that sometimes; I know how to say "machine screw" in Spanish, and I can describe a tap as "thing to make threads in metal", but when I came up short for "cable ties", Britt mimed the motion used to tighten one, and the hardware store guy knew exactly what we wanted.) But we like to reach beyond the nuts and bolts of cruising, so to speak. We always try to talk to the ordinary people we meet, taxi drivers and laundresses and policemen, and get a feel for what life is like in these places. How is the economy, what is their opinion on the local politics, are there more or fewer tourists these days? Of course it's always easier, a lot less ambiguous, if they speak English, but we get to talk to a whole lot more people if we can do it in their language, too. Besides, being able to at least fumble through the local lingo just seems like the polite thing to do.
San Andrés is duty-free vacationland Colombia, filled with resorts and shops and beaches and restaurants. We walked around quite a bit, scoping out the place. The streets are all narrow and intersect at odd angles; we've gotten lost, or at least confused, several times, ending up on the beach when we are trying to get to the center of town, and vice versa. We haven't seen this many small motorcycles and scooters since the Dominican Republic -- there are easily three or four times as many motos as cars. We saw more than one dress-wearing prim-looking grandmotherly types astride shiny chopper-style bikes. Fortunately for our eardrums, however, the San Andreños, unlike the Dominicans, leave the mufflers on.
The liquor stores are alas not as extensively stocked, nor as cheap, as those in Margarita, the last place we stocked up. For some odd reason, there are many stores which sell both toiletries and liquor; shampoo on one side, champagne on the other. There are also a plethora of cheap electronics stores (boom boxes, clocks, cameras etc.) and about a bazillion T-shirt shops. We've been eating out every chance we get, which we justify on the grounds that for the last two weeks we've been in places with nowhere to spend money. Of course, when you can get comida corriente ("local food" -- meat, beans, rice, salad) for $2, or filet mignon and a glass of wine for $8, why bother cooking? The business which we were happiest to see was a Mimo's, the Colombian gourmet ice cream shop chain we developed an addiction to in Cartagena. Yum!
We went scuba diving with a local dive shop, us and three skinny tattooed Italians who all seemed to be named Marco. The seas were up, and the ride to the first dive site was definitely an E-ticket adventure, crashing and banging in the speedboat through huge breaking waves. The dives were fun but not particularly spectacular in terms of fish and coral, the legacy of extensive and intensive fishing over the years. We're looking forward to getting back out to the uninhabited reefs again.