Life on the Rails

[Savonarola]

Airport

Colombia has four seasons, but unlike in temperate zones the seasons don't come to you, you have to go to them.  There are the fire lands, which is where our project was located.  It's always summer there; it can be windy, wet or dry; but the heat is relentless.  There's perpetual winter high in the mountains.  In the hills lie the temperate lands.  Even though the fire lands compose the largest part of the country; most of the population lives in the temperate region.  Some parts of these are always spring; this is where Colombia's large flower growing industry is located.  Bogota is always in autumn.

Bogota is located at 8000 feet above mean sea level; it's usually cool and quite frequently rainy.  This came as a shock to some of our engineers coming down for the first time.  The one who had it worst was WD, who spent an evening in Bogota in order to get his visa.  He dressed in the height of Florida fashion, shorts, flip flops and a t-shirt; only to arrive and find that it was 50 degrees Fahrenheit.  He had his baggage shipped on to Santa Marta so he had nothing else to wear.  Traffic is so awful in Bogota that it's necessary to leave early in the morning (when it is even colder) in order to make it to the government offices.  He froze throughout the morning as he was driven through the city and waited outside offices.

Sofia, our project den mother, lived in Bogota for several years.  She explained that dress in Bogota is usually conservative, while it is informal in the rest of the country.  Anyone dressed casually is assumed to be either a gringo or a bumpkin from the provinces.  WD took it much further than most, but he is Chinese, so no one would have thought he was a native.

Even going from international to domestic in the El Dorado Airport requires some time out of doors.  The international airport looks amazing; it's a large steel, glass and marble structure.  As you exit passport control you pass through an enormous glass atrium with the baggage terminals.  It's all very sleek, shiny and modern.  Then you turn towards domestic, which takes you down a dingy cinder block corridor to a set of steel emergency exit doors with a bench bolted to the wall.  There you must wait for the bus, which comes every five minutes, or ten, or fifteen.  Eventually the bus will arrive, with the sort of Latin American clockwork regularity you'll come to expect if you spend any amount of time there.

The bus takes you across the tarmac to the run down domestic airport.  There aren't gates there; instead the planes are lined up next to a covered walkway outside the terminal.  You're supposed to go into the airport, through security, and wait in a large room until they announce your flight.  Then you march back out and go past the place the bus dropped you off and to your boarding staircase.  It's quite possible to simply walk from the bus to your staircase.  There no one checks IDs; you could be anybody with a ticket.  I had to do that a couple times when my connecting flight was late.

If you make a wrong turn going to domestic you'll end up in the main part of the international terminal.  Our lead network engineer, Ken, did this.  Once you've entered the international you can't simply go back into the domestic terminal; they're regarded as separate airports.  You can take a public bus from the international to domestic terminal; but GE has hired a private security firm for us and they won't allow us to engage to go into unsecured areas like public buses.  Ken had to call the head of security and wait to be driven two blocks to the domestic airport.

Flying out internationally is considerably more secure.  You have to go through civil aviation to make sure your tariffs are paid.  Then you have to show tickets and passport to get into the security zone.  Then the military pats you down as you enter the line for passport control.  Then you go through passport control.  Then you go through the x-ray scanner and get wanded.  Then they select a number of people at "Random" to be further searched.  (I must look suspicious since I got selected on two different trips.)  They go so far as to remove the inside lining of your shoes.

Even with so much security there's still the danger of petty theft.  Our original project manager, Jason, placed his iPad on the ticket counter as he bent down to get his passport out of his bags.  By the time he had gotten back up it was gone, and no one had seen anything.

Simon Bolivar Airport in Santa Marta is a world away from either terminal of the El Dorado airport.  The people there aren't usually frequent fliers.  For them this is an exhilarating experience, one to be commemorated.  They take pictures of themselves with the airplane.  They take pictures of their children with the stewardesses.  They take pictures of the inside of the airplane.  Everyone crosses themselves on takeoff and applauds on landing. 

Sofia, our project den mother, said that she's seen much worse.  On one flight an older woman, a complete stranger, who gripped onto Sofia tightly as they were boarding the plane.  The woman was terrified and they were still on the ground.  She wanted Sofia to switch seats so they could be next to each other.  Sofia said that she couldn't because she was traveling with her daughter.

(Simon Bolivar died in Santa Marta; hence the airport name.  He had planned to leave South America for Europe, but died while in the process of packing.  He was buried in the Cathedral at Santa Marta, but his remains were eventually moved to Caracas.  This proved to be fortunate for everybody's favorite caudillo, Hugo Chavez.  Chavez accused the Colombians of poisoning Bolivar, and had him exhumed to perform an autopsy on him.  There was no evidence of poisoning.)

[KRonn]

Interesting time there Sav.  Cool story.   

[Savonarola]

Interesting time there Sav.  Cool story. 

Thanks, Kronn   

[Savonarola]

SIMS

We're met by our security detail when we get past the baggage claim in Santa Marta.  GE contracts with a company called "SIMS" (which I like to think stands for Seguridad del Primero Mundo, but probably doesn't.)  Every time we go anywhere outside a secure facility (such as a port or the hotel) we have to have our security detail with us.  We're not allowed to drive ourselves (though, given the rules of the road in Colombia are... flexible... that's for the best) so our security and drivers are one and the same.

GE classifies Colombia as a dangerous country due to the ongoing war between FARC and the Colombian government.  There were a number of cease-fires while I was in Colombia, but they never lasted for long.  Santa Marta and the area near the Venezuelan border was at one time a hot spot for violence.  With the death of Chavez and the collapse of oil prices, Venezuela is no longer the safe haven for FARC that it once was.  Instead most of the fighting is centered near the Ecuadorian border.  As of late the government has been cracking down hard on FARC; so FeNoCo is worried that FARC will start targeting infrastructure again.  About five years ago they blew up the tracks on our line.

Javier, a Spaniard, who is one of our supplier's engineers, was here in more violent times.  He said that he was told if he was captured by FARC to say that he was a working on contracts and just here for meetings.  If the rebels learned that you had experience with radio they'd draft you.  Javier speculated that, if they did, "You'd probably get paid more, in the white money."

Even without FARC there's plenty of trouble.  We had a guy chain himself and a Colombian flag to the tracks in Bosconia (one of the larger cities on the line.)  FeNoCo asked the mayor to remove him; he refused since the last time he helped FeNoCo townspeople kidnapped his son. 

There are still some remnants of the violent days in Santa Marta.  The military is everywhere; there's always some sort of exercise going on.  You can tell you've found a really good restaurant when you find officers in uniform there.  The army isn't the best funded, frequently they ride motorcycles usually in tandem.  It's odd seeing a man brandishing an M-16 while riding bitch.

The other notable remnant is that in the city of Santa Marta it's illegal for two (civilian) men to ride on the same motor bike.  In the old days FARC did their drive-bys that way.  While it seems that there would be an obvious work around to this; FARC would be laughed out of the international brotherhood of Latin American Revolutionaries if they used either women drivers or women gunmen.  I found it amusing that the medieval theocrats that make up ISIS are more open minded about the role of women in their cause than the godless progressives.  Motorcycles serve as taxis in this part of the world; so this law has given many women a career opportunity as taxi drivers for men.

SIMS is led by Ricardo; who is a successful man by the standards of Latin American in that he has fifty four children.  He keeps nine phones on him at all times; one for work, one for his wife and seven for his various mistresses and baby-mommas.  He flips from phone to phone with amazing agility.  He's still on the prowl for the mother of number fifty-five.  I once went to the mall with him, I thought he was going to give himself whiplash from checking out every single women in the place.

When I first got to Santa Marta we had drivers who were sub-contracted through SIMS (this practice ended after the Gerhard incident.)  One of the subcontractors, Cristoban, owned his own fleet of cars.  Most of his business, he explained, was shuttling children from affluent families to and from the university.  The SIMS drivers were mostly ex-military or ex-police officers.  The sub-contractors were obviously not; one of them was Cristoban's son, who didn't look to be yet eighteen.  What he possibly could have done if there had been trouble was a mystery.

Other contract drivers had side jobs as well.  When Jeff, our lead wayside engineer and project drama queen, was arriving in Santa Marta once the driver asked him if he liked women.  Jeff, perplexed by the question from a total stranger, said, yes he was heterosexual.  The driver then asked him if he would like them for a two hour shift or for all night.  We got rid of that driver quickly.

Javier was the favorite driver; our project manager, Bill, always requested him.  He was from Bogota, and found the quaint ways of the locals amusing.  One time, for instance, we came upon a man standing by a stream with a bucket of rocks.  Javier asked him what he was doing; he explained that he was picking up stones for construction.  The best ones come from streams.  Javier thought that was the greatest joke.  Some of the sub-contractors took offense at this behavior, and called him a "City-boy."  He'd call them "Coastal Donkeys."

Most of the other drivers would be cycled through.  We didn't always coordinate well with SIMS.  The ports require an in depth training before you can drive in them.  We sent one driver to that training, and the very next day he was cycled through and sent to Bogota.  It took us weeks to get another driver certified for the port.

[Admiral Yi]

Do you get any kind of danger pay?

[Savonarola]

Do you get any kind of danger pay?

No, none of the GE employees got hazard pay.  Originally contractors like Glen were supposed to get hazard pay.  Our leadership balked at sending them to Colombia due to the higher rate.  Since we didn't have enough people to do the job they offered Glen a "Deal."  They would provide GE security for him instead of him getting hazard pay.  That was one reason why Glen refused to bring the pelican case into Colombia in my first story; since GE was in effect forcing him to pay for his own security he assumed they would not have bailed him out.

[katmai]

I thought the meat for these stories was his danger pay?

[Savonarola]

I thought the meat for these stories was his danger pay?

Pretty much; come work for GE, it's not just an adventure, it's a job.   

[Savonarola]

German

Our most memorable driver was German.  He was an enormous man with many passions.  He loved his sports.  He asked me if we had cock fighting in Florida.  "Not legally," I told him, but it goes on in Miami.  His eyes lit up at that for Miami is the Emerald City for South America.  When I tried to explain where I lived to the Colombians, they had never heard of Orlando, Cape Canaveral or Disneyworld, but they knew exactly where Miami was.  He followed baseball, soccer, bull fighting, luchadoring, but he had a special passion for cock fighting.

Often as we would leave our hotel, he would stop after a few miles on the main road, run across the street and hand a kid on a bicycle some money.  The kid would peddle off and he would run back.  He insisted that it was for his wife, but we all suspected he was paying off his bookie.

He also loved music.  He asked me what sort of music did I listen to, Reggaeton, Salsa or Champeta.  I told him I didn't think I could tell the difference between those styles if my life depended on it.  He played some samples of the different genres; and I still couldn't hear the difference.  He could, though, and could tell if the song was more typical of Cartagena or Baranquilla or Bogota.  I was with Javier (our supplier's project manger and a Spaniard), and asked him if any of this music ever made it back to Spain.

"No," he said, "This is the reason why we left.

Then I came back after the Christmas break and found out that he was gone.  What happened to him was a matter of some speculation.  He had started to bum cell phone calls off of the GE employees; this had upset some people.  He had a collection of girlfriends and had their pictures on their phone; some more déshabillé than others.  He showed them to Glen, our network field technician, while Sofia, our project den mother was nearby.  Then he told Alejandra, Sofia's daughter and an engineer on the project, that he and his wife had an open marriage.  That is what I think did him in; for Alejandra tells everything to her mother.  We were told that he was on vacation; but how much of a vacation could you take when you have to bum cell phone minutes?  He never returned to the project.

[Syt]

He doesn't sound like a typical German.

[Legbiter]

He doesn't sound like a typical German.

Translatin, obviously.

[Savonarola]

That wasn't the strangest name I heard down there.  One of our drivers was named William, (not Guillermo, William) and he pronounced it just like the English name (Will-yam, not Weel-yam.)  He spoke absolutely no English.  His father adored the English and gave his children English names and used the English pronunciations.   

[Admiral Yi]

How many people have you met with Commie names?

[Savonarola]

How many people have you met with Commie names?

The closest I came to that was an Ivan.  Almost every man seemed to be named Jorge, Javier or Jose.

[Syt]

That wasn't the strangest name I heard down there.  One of our drivers was named William, (not Guillermo, William) and he pronounced it just like the English name (Will-yam, not Weel-yam.)  He spoke absolutely no English.  His father adored the English and gave his children English names and used the English pronunciations.   

Well, the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo had his second name picked after his Dad's favorite actor, Ronald Reagan.