Tourists Not Allowed In This Colombian Jungle 🇨🇴

Harry is taken by motorbike into the hills outside Tayrona National Park to spend a day with an indigenous community that does not normally let outsiders in. He is told his visit is a special exception.

He sets off genuinely not knowing what the day is. He says so twice and means it: he has tried to ask the guide, and there isn’t enough shared language for an answer. That turns out to be the interesting thing about the arrangement — the guide’s function here is permission rather than interpretation, which is a different reason to use one than any other in the bundle. See travel with a local guide.

What he finds is cacao drying in the sun, coca being picked and processed, houses of mud and bamboo cool enough inside to be a relief, and a cleansing ceremony he is honest about only half following. He chews coca leaf for the back half of the video and describes the effect plainly.

His closing thought — that a simpler life may be a happier one — is delivered carefully; he checks himself mid-sentence about how to say it, and the page keeps that rather than the tidied version.

Key moments

• [00:00] Setting off without knowing what the day involves, because the guide can’t explain it.
• [01:01] The friend’s version of this trip, cancelled the day before in early January because the community was several days into a celebration.
• [02:07] Twenty minutes through the jungle on the back of a motorbike, no helmet, the last stretch off-road, then a short walk in.
• [03:39] Around 100 people, and the visit described as a special exception.
• [03:39] Cacao pods — grown here, dried, and sold on.
• [04:40] Coca leaf, and the guide’s account of how much of it a gram of cocaine takes. The subtitles render an implausible figure; see the Obs on the Tayrona page.
• [05:11] An area he is asked not to enter, described as holy. Filming elsewhere is allowed and he asks first.
• [06:48] Cacao drying in the sun; the community speaks Spanish.
• [07:22] Asked how long they have been here, the answer given is 21 years — against Harry’s own opening guess of thousands.
• [07:52] Eating the white pulp around a cacao seed: extremely sweet, nothing like chocolate, and you suck rather than chew or it turns bitter.
• [09:18] The ceremony, in a sacred area, and cotton explained as carrying what is in your mind.
• [11:28] His account of it afterwards: clear the thoughts, hold the hopes, bracelets for earth, water and nature — and he admits he found parts of it confusing.
• [11:59] Coca as medicine and for weddings rather than as a recreational drug; women pick the leaves, men dry and process them.
• [13:15] Processing with a heated stone in a gourd, and how used to the heat your hands have to be.
• [13:47] Contact with the outside: a supermarket run about once a month.
• [14:18] School — run for the tribe, and interrupted by the pandemic.
• [15:38] Chewing the leaf himself; not a good taste.
• [16:44] Another fruit eaten straight off the tree, sweet as sugar.
• [18:18] Inside a house — mud walls, bamboo, a wooden roof, bed, fireplace, hammock, and a real drop in temperature.
• [19:51] Built by the man who lives in it, in two weeks.
• [21:27] His read on the life: fewer things and different worries, and he is careful about how he phrases it.
• [22:27] This tribe takes no tourists; others in the area will, with enough notice, through the guide.
• [23:27] Monkeys live in this stretch of jungle but they arrive too late.
• [23:57] The coca noticeably helping on the walk.
• [24:28] A natural rock slide and clear pools; loose rock above one section that he decides against.

Extracted pages

• Colombia
• Tayrona National Park
• Travel with a local guide