I didn’t have that much on my list of things to do in Colombia besides the usual short vacation things like hike, swim, speak Spanish with locals, read, eat lots of spicy food, buy coffee, buy hot sauce, and jump into a volcano.
Trust me, that’s not even close to as weird as some of my other to-do lists, but I won’t get into that here, because I really want to write about the bizarre mud bath I took with a buncha strangers. It was the only thing I actually planned to do and it almost didn’t happen!
I left Minca in the late morning on Friday to enjoy a few more hours in the mountains (i.e., reading my book and swinging in my hammock) before traveling 5 or 6 hours back to hot, sweaty Cartagena. I tried not to spend whole days traveling, but didn’t mind the long haul if I could spend my last two full days volcano-dipping and visiting one or more of the islands in the Islas de Rosario archipelago. I figured I’d have a nice late dinner on Friday, grab some more varieties of coffee and hot sauce in Cartagena on Saturday morning, and then head to the volcano in the afternoon, and peace out and snorkel on a pretty reef island on Sunday.
The apartment I stayed in wasn’t available for the weekend so I stayed at a boutique hotel called Santo Toribio, in the Magico Lucho room, which was cute, but I was already missing my jungalows, Minca EcoHabs and Villa Maria Parque Tayrona. Rolled into Cartagena around 7pm and couldn’t wait to hit the town, I was soooo hungry, didn’t eat since breakfast but it took me a while to find my new hotel. I did find my old hotel. Now, mind you, I’m pretty sure there were was already a parasite party happening somewhere in my digestive system, but they forgot to tell my appetite. I felt like having some Asian food and really like eating Chinese food in other countries. I saw one somewhere but couldn’t find it so I headed to a Japanese place in the Plaza de San Diego. I passed on the sushi, just in case, and ordered some seafood Pad Thai (geez, maybe I should have had the sushi!) I should have known something was up then because I couldn’t finish it and took the rest back with me because I hate wasting food. Went to the KGB bar, got annoyed, left, then went to the clock tower to check out some street nightlife, but I was just wrecked. Oh yeah, I also got kind of bit up by mosquitoes or spiders somewhere so the heat wasn’t helping. So headed back to Magico Lucho, turned on CNN and treated my mosquito-bitten legs with tea tree oil and Snoopy bandaids. I like Snoopy.
Slept well, ate a nice breakfast at the hotel restaurant, and made a reservation for transportation to El Totumo, El Volcan de Lodo!…there was a bus at 2pm and I was psyched! Also made a reservation to take a boat to one of the Islas the following day. After breakfast, I figured I’d wander around a bit, have some iced coffee, buy a bunch of the most incredible hot sauce I’ve ever had from La Cevicheria, (no full bottles left…bummer). Thought I might have to eat there after the volcano just for the salsa picante, that’s how good it is. And that’s probably around the time la fiesta de los parasitos started, and once it got started, it just kept going! Now, I got really lost for about 2 hours in that little tiny area of an old city and in hindsight, I must have been delirious from dehydration or heat-stroke. Some of the symptoms I was reading during my self-diagnosis included confusion and disorientation. When I finally got back to my hotel, disoriented, confused and not feeling great, the receptionist told me the bus to El Totumo broke down or something and my transport was cancelled for the afternoon. What a blessing, because I definitely would have went.
So, in the throes of whatever was happening…food poisoning, love in the time of cholera, dysentery, the fevers (dengue, yellow AND typhoid), hep A, malaria, leprosy, Chagas, chikungunya disease or tea tree oil poisoning, I actually ate my Pad Thai leftovers. Yup. I did. You know what they say, waste not, throw up. I mean, what the frig is wrong with me? And yes, I looked up the symptoms to every single one of those diseases, and then some. The tsetse fly seems to still only inhabit countries in Africa, in case you want to know. It’s really hard to google when there is a protozoan knife jabbing your abdomen. I’m still not really sure if it was the ninja arepa, the Pad Thai, the heat, the stealth mosquito attack or an OD of topical tea tree oil, but I booked El Totumo for the next morning anyway. Because that’s how I roll.
El Totumo
How do I begin to describe this? I saw pictures of it when I was researching a few years back. I always look for volcanoes to visit or climb and remember that this one looked like something I made for my 7th grade science fair. There were about 40 of us from all over the place, mostly South America (Paraguay and Uruguay), also France, England and some estadounidenses, from Chicago, Miami and LA, and we were all about to jump into the mud crater of a volcano. The ayudante, Vanessa, only spoke Spanish and gave us a rundown of what was going to happen in the next couple of hours. I wrote down and translated the info as she was giving it:
- We have to remove our clothes and shoes and leave them on the bus.
- We have to leave our passports and money on the bus.
- The bus will be locked and very safe.
- There will be a kiosk with food and drinks and tables where we can leave any non-valuable stuff, like towels or sandals. No sneakers.
- If we want pictures, we have to give our cameras to some guy at the site, don’t worry, very trustworthy, and we have to pay him 3000 pesos if we want pictures of us in the volcano.
- We have the option of paying another 3000 pesos to get massaged by one of the “chicos” in the mud. “No chicas, solo chicos“. If we don’t want a massage we just have to say “no masaje“.
- It’s recommended to spend at least 40 minutes in the mud, which is supposed to have healing properties and after we will look 10 years younger (mostly everyone on bus laughs).
- We are not allowed to put our heads under the mud.
- After we are done we have to walk down to the lagoon and clean off. For another 3000 pesos, we have the option of being cleaned by one of the “chicas“. This time, “No chicos, solo chicas“.
- After we are all cleaned up, we can get our money from the bus and pay for services and any drinks or food we order from the kiosk.
- We can get dressed on the bus or in the kiosk or not at all (inferred).
- After we are finished, we are going to La Boquilla for lunch, a fishing village 5 minutes from Cartagena, to eat fried fish, mojarra frita.
- 3000 pesos is currently less than $1.00 (she didn’t say that, but it is)
So let the awkwardness begin! First we had to introduce ourselves to everyone else on the bus. I was sitting in the front, of course, and not because I wanted to be in the front of the class as usual, it’s ‘cuz Patricia Carsick still can’t sit much further back than the third seat on a school bus. “Soy Pa-tree-see-ya, de Nueva York“, I said after the guy sitting next to me introduced himself as Steve from Miami. He seemed really happy. “Oh, you must speak English then, I was trying to figure out where you were from”. I mean, not necessarily, I could be from New York AND only speak Spanish. Next, we all stripped down to our bathing suits inside the bus, with the door closed, which was a wee bit awkward, even if we did know each others names and nationalities. There wasn’t a lot of space to begin with and there were like 40 of us pulling our clothes off at the same time. I kept bumping into Steve from Miami and Pablo from Paraguay, and who knows how the hell he ended up next to me.
Once we were all appropriately disrobed, we were let off the bus and ready to climb the baby volcano. There were two rickety wooden staircases that led up to the crater. I read somewhere that it’s about all of 50 feet high, which is about 10 shoulder-stacked, headless mes. I bet my 4 floor walkup in the city was higher. All of a sudden a guy named Luis pops up and introduces himself and we’re told he’s the trustworthy one we should hand over our cameras and phones so he can snap shots of us bobbing and floating and soaking. I wish this guy worked for me, he remembered everyone’s camera and phone and juggled 40 different devices and pass codes. And he was able to use my SLR without me explaining anything, got some really great shots and snapped a bunch with my phone as well.
Vanessa urged me go up before the masses started ascending, so I quickly climbed barefoot up the ominously crooked mud-caked stairs to the lip of the crater and when I peeked down inside the caldera, it was already about a quarter-filled with buoyant muddy bodies. I remember seeing some pictures years ago where the mud was almost up to the rim, but the mud was a lot lower and now there were some dodgy-looking ladders climbing down into the depths of creamy, milk-chocolatey mud. I have seen Totumo described as a mud volcano, and I need to learn a little more about this classification. We were told it was bottomless, but I would like some geological confirmation of this bullshit please. We were also told that this oversized anthill was once a super active, lava-spewing, satanic force to be reckoned with until a priest vanquished it with holy water and transformed the fiery ash and devil-lava to cool, healing mud. Highly doubtful, but love the story. I haven’t been able to really find any reliable source of information that this science-project-on-acid in the middle of a surreal, post-apocalyptic, Mad Max landscape is an actual volcano and not some mound of mud that some brilliant Cartagenan built into a thriving tourist attraction. Not sure which story I like better.
I patiently waited my turn to descend into the gloop and as soon as I was in up to my knees, someone’s hands deftly took me from vertical and cautious to horizontal and on my back in a nanosecond. I looked over at what seemed to be a pre-teen Colombian boy, with strategic mud streaks on his face and little hands. Very Mad Max, Beyond Cartagena. Parts of me were still floating above the surface…it’s very cool, the mud is so dense it’s really hard to maneuver or submerge without grabbing something for leverage. Which, of course, I used my child masseuse and some guy on the other side of me to propel myself forward. Even if I didn’t want a massage, I was getting one. And I wouldn’t really call it a massage. The kid rubbed my shoulders and neck and my legs a little before he flipped me over (I have some VERY comical shots of that) for a kind of wimpy back rub before he pushed me to the other side where I was told to stand up. Impossible. It was like muddy body bumper cars. I finally bobbed my way over to the side where I grabbed onto a wooden stake and somehow got one of my legs around it long enough to pull myself upright. And I settled there for about 45 minutes. There were two very funny guys on the stakes next to me who weren’t budging either. At this point every inch of me including my head and hair was covered in mud. Every once in a while, someone would bob over and use me as leverage and then bounce off the two guys in an effort move around the pit. As bizarre as bathing in mud with strangers just is, I was actually very relaxed and the mud was soothing.
It was getting really crowded, and I think I was in there for at least 40 minutes, maybe more, so I got a lot of bang for my buck. Now it was time to get out and I tried unsuccessfully to swim to the ladder but ended up getting passed along like a hot potato. On cue Luis was ready with my camera to make sure he captured my graceful ascent from the muddy depths of El Totumo. What a pro! At the top, some guy came over and wiped me down and then Luis took a bunch of cheesy posed shots of me.
Now, I really do want to share the pics that Luis took, but just can’t post most of these absolutely hilarious pics on the interwebs. And they are freakin’ funny. I was showing them to my friend Rayleen last week and we were hysterical. There’s several that he shot in a row as I was set off like a ship by my teenage masseuse to float to the other side of the mud bath that I know I can make into a quick little video. If my body type were a little different, a little less MAD magazine, I would have posted a few more here. I’m just going to have to show them to any of you in person if you’re interested, only because I do have a professional day job and pictures of me as a de facto female mud wrestler are best laughed at over dinner and drinks. And hey, I might want to run for president one day. On second thought, that might actually boost my chances for candidacy nowadays.
After the mud bath, we all had to walk down to the lagoon to get cleaned off. A few people were ahead of me and they looked like mud zombies so I’m sure I did too. As soon as I got to the lagoon I was accosted by a woman with a bucket who was tugging on my bathing suit top and trying to bucket me even though I was insisting on cleaning myself. I mean, the mud does gets everywhere and they are very persistent. I prefer bathing myself in public, thank you. I was very nice at first, but as I moved away she chased me and then grabbed hold of one of the ties on the bottom of my bathing suit. Look lady, I’ll give you a dollar to NOT take my bathing suit off, okay? I had to run away from another one before they finally got the message that I’m going to scrub the mud off myself. One guy had no idea what was going on and she pantsed him and furiously doused him with buckets of water before he could get away. It was like a twisted, naked episode of the Little Rascals.
After we paid everyone to touch us, we got back on the bus and went to La Boquilla for lunch. It could have been anywhere and wasn’t particularly pretty or fishing village-like. I skipped the fried fish and picked on some fried chicken and coconut rice and patacones instead. I couldn’t believe I had an appetite at all. Back in Cartagena, I relaxed in the jacuzzi on the roof of my hotel and even though I showered and changed to a clean bathing suit, I still left little mud bubbles. I don’t know about looking 10 years younger, but my skin was definitely a little softer, and my hair was A LOT softer. My curls even had a bit of a different texture. Maybe there’s something to that priest story after all!
Muchas gracias por leer mi blog! Thank you so much everyone for reading and sharing this short but fun trip with me, hope it was as fun and interesting for you as it was for me!
