How they Spend New Years in Valledupar, Colombia

I have spent New Years eve in a lot of crazy places.. Northern Alaska, Rural China, Mexico, Times Square, hell, even Key West, Ibiza, and in a broken down truck somewhere in Alabama, but somehow none has left me quite as equivocal as the one I just experienced in Valledupar, Colombia. Thanks to a drunken Moto Taxi Driver ( a 100-150 CC Chinese motorcycle driven as a taxi service) and some restless searching on foot, I can pretty much say I saw every flavor of celebration in this town of 400,000, and I won't be booking for next year here...
My dream, after I relented to spend another night here when my body resented the thought of taking a bus up to Pueblo Bello after a full day in the sun yesterday that had me passing out at sunset without dinner in my fortified hotel room at the Tativan (70 bucks a night seems to buy Car Bomb proof in Colombia, and a view and a pool of sorts to boot...), was that I would find some miracle of an outdoor concert of Vallenato, literally Valledupar's one true contribution to Culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vallenato .. that would prove a tall order..
I began around 9pm, walking to the hot spots I knew in town, having already ascertained that the town's main square was dedicated to young couples, attractive but with the lack of outward charm and emotion that comes standard in Colombia, watched their kids ride around on the type of car that a dad spends 200 bucks on to try to make his kid happy at a super store, plus 20 for batteries. I had passed a group of older men passing around some Johhny Walker Red Label nearby, and they seemed a dignified bunch, so I wondered if this might eventually turn into some measure of adult celebration, but I was wrong. I headed north from my hotel towards where I knew the Rico's lived, the rich ones, hoping they might be showing off somewhere, but all I heard was some live Vallenato coming out of a club that might as well have been Fort Knox. As I read this Wikipedia entry, I realize it was the club mentioned, where a few Landed Gentlemen once deigned to legitimize this musical expression. I usually like to give Latin Rich people shit, as they tend to be pretentious or absurd, but in Colombia the are less vulnerable, which almost makes them a little less likable and a little more frustrating.. they have been at war long enough to have learned a little better who they are, and to not make the obvious mistakes, but there is still a subtle air of, not so much superiority but of justification. subtle but there, and I watched as people pulled into the club through heavy but again subtle security, and I knew that was the party I might have wanted, but it wasn't being shared.. back to the main square I wandered, only to see more of the kid set with nary a nod to the wild side of New Years.. a cab driver tried to convince me that New Years was a family time, and having walked from rich neighborhoods through middle class neighborhoods, I began to believe.. I had seen family after family sitting in plastic chairs in front of their homes, listening to music and occasionally dancing, but doing nothing that would constitute celebrating as a community.. maybe that was to come, at Carnival, or passed at Christmas, some community event so ground shaking it didn't merit repeating for a while, but it left me short.. so all the sudden a Moto Taxi driver was giving me the shrug that challenged me to go where he might be able to take me.. a female crack head arrived to kind of make me uncomfortable enough to want to hop on, despite us both being in a very public place, nothing quite like a female crack head to shame a guy into getting out of there, the odd combo of repulsion and appealing vulnerability that they elicit so well.. anyhow, he went one block before I spotted, a few blocks down a road I had not ventured down, a party.. I asked about it and the driver flipped his helmet up to strongly dissuade me, spit flying into my face from his mouth as he throttled on at 40 miles an hour barely looking forward as the bike wobbled, that that party was in the ghetto for bad people, and that it was only good if I wanted coke or Marijuana.. he had that air of a drunk scrawny guy in charge, he would solve all my problems and I would never realize he was ginning up the price, the same gig from Tijuana to Tierra Del Fuego, but every one of them, like a dog under the dinner table, thinks he's the first to think of it (we'll avoid why kind of hate Latin America for now).. we roar off, occasionally stopping to talk to another bike or cab driver, but never anyone I want to talk to and never long enough for me to get off the bike, past the Cuban place I had eaten at one night( closed) past all the middle and upper class bars that I also knew would go bust but he insisted on showing me, all around town at 40, me holding on for dear life as he tried to explain to me in endless ways that tonight was a family night with his spit coating me to the point where I questioned that it could be raining with stars shining above me just to avoid confirming the obvious displeasing fact that he was drunk and had my life in his hands in addition to the indignity of this saliva shower... inside, outside, all around the town... I finally convinced him to take me back to the square we had left originally, so I could shake him and sneak off to the party I had seen since he obviously was giving me the run around. The usual Haggle occurred where the Colombian act's morally indignant that you wouldn't want to pay about two times the going price, a way in which Colombians lie that I have never seen so confidently anywhere else, and finally he rolls off with little my price or nothing with a shrug... and I make my way to the forbidden zone.. families still lingering like sheep at 11pm in the main square with kids sugared to the hilt on local hand ground ice slushies, but with that nonplus-sable Colombian air that all that is shall always be.. a 463 year old town center feeling like an un-invested in park in Riverside County.. and the music intensified.. I could tell it would be ok because kids, teenagers but not the malicious kind, were moving towards where I was heading.. well dressed, no edge or menace.. even though the street went from pavement to a rocky jumble in a matter of feet, I somehow could sense that tonight until midnight I could boldly go where no gringo should have gone before.. I don't know what it was that struck me first, the enormity of the sound systems I was confronted by, or the bolting horse about to mow me and a bunch of kids down, but this was an altogether different scene.. not the one I had dreamed of, some Colombian Version of Dave Chapelle's block party with the local flavor of Buena Vista Social Club thrown into an all night samba marathon (not a huge stretch, as I had had an experience that wouldn't make that seem too much the movie fantasy in Barranquilla just weeks before, a night that kept me from getting onto a plane having given up on Colombia entirely, a night where a hand band did inspire the neighborhood to dance in a circle around them for hours on end, with all manor of man woman, and in one case a man/woman with an outfit Carmen Miranda wouldn't turn down..), but what I came upon was something altogether different.. in this jumble of shacks with open sewers but somehow wealth I wouldn't assume, everyone had lights, fresh paint, and of all things no less than every other house a sound system worthy of the Nassau Coliseum for a Ratt show. stacked sometimes 3 high, cases, professional looking if not in quality... while the middle class homes had sounded out the same imploring Vallenato from appropriately sized home stereos, these guys had practically needed trucks and hoists to drag out 4 by 2 foot amplifiers into the dirt streets in front of every second house.. I hope this explains the bolting horse.. people just let him go, but there were moments as he veered towards kids going the other way and away from the light of the homes and occasional storefronts that you wondered if the night was about to turn bad, but out of sight became out of mind, and I took my opportunity to wander what was evidently the hood, but still seemed to have more social fabric that my vision of the hood would have imagined.. family after family, usually three generations represented.. the same plastic chairs (the ones your buddies bought in college for the back yard, or after they became bachelors but before they finally figured out how to pull chicks... rounded and shiny at first, kind of appealing looking shiny in the store, until you touch them for the first time... and the music pumping, house after house outdoing the last... only one or two houses in the hundreds I passed giving me the delight of the indignity I would expect from the lower classes, a girl no more than 14 getting a bit too jiggy with her beau, and occasionally a mom and pop that were more than just the seated dull roar like an American mechanic at a bar b q, but actually dancing in an embrace...I finally asked a guy what time it was after some wandering.. wondering how much time I would have to kill before midnight. My response came, 1130... left and right through alleys, enough rubble to make me look drunk but women on heels still navigated with ease... the sound pumping pumping pumping. the plaintive tragedies of Vallenato, with only one house confirming my worst fears by Dancing Gotham Style... when I knew it was close to midnight I knew I needed to find my way out.. like Cinderella, the spell would break at midnight, and I would be stuck as an honored guest somewhere, while bullets rang into the air.. maybe I should have indulged, but Latin America has me jaded after all these years..what a better story it might have been with the shots ringing into the air, Colombian tough guys who actually still looked like cops anywhere else (this is a conservative country, even the rebels look like soldiers!), but I took off the few blocks back to paved road territory, another sad new view into the world of the not so poor and the not so rich, enough to put Sally Struthers out of a job unless they would hide the sound systems from her, or unless there was a lower level yet for me to see besides those few who had stumbled into the pit of addiction.. New Years rang out with a house on the corner of the main square ceasing it's dancing and hugs being given, a radio announcer, subdued by the standards of, say, Mexico, wishing all a Feliz Nuevo Ano over and over again, but never with more passion.. as I walked back I noticed a family of perhaps 15 sitting in a huge circle again, this time eating soup, and I wondered of that might be another twist in the endless traditions of the Levittowns of the world, another underwhelming night spent in Colombia...