Byline: by Ivo Dawnay
WHAT do you do with a woman for whom social interaction is an obsession? Someone who suffers from chronic mention-itis? Who, before one's very eyes, is turning into a brand? You take her on holiday -- a long, long way from Britain.
My wife Rachel, who, if you did not know, is editor of The Lady magazine, happens to be a 'Johnson' -- not so much a name as a condition.
Members of this clan, of which Stanley Johnson is chief of staff, supported by his son Boris, are hugely talented, but their greatest attribute of all is for attracting attention. Several Johnsons suffer from a weird form of attention deficit disorder. They get disorderly when they don't get attention.
Like labradors, they are compelled to jump up with their tails wagging, thereby sweeping sensitive human porcelain off the tables of life. Sometimes, for their own good, they need kennelling.
After a hyperactive few months during which the words 'Rachel Johnson' and 'publicity-obsessed' were spoken in the same breath, I decided that my own Johnson badly needed 'walkies'.
For years, I had longed to see Cartagena de Indias in Colombia. This pearl of the old Spanish Main sits on the North Atlantic coast of South America a few hundred miles from the Panama isthmus.
And the Old Town of Cartagena, is reputed to be the bestpreserved colonial city of them all. Sir Francis Drake liked it so much he sacked it, wringing 100,000 gold ducats out of the locals in the process.
Cartagena is most famous as the setting for Love In The Time Of Cholera, the masterpiece of Nobel prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who still keeps a home in the city.
But, for me, its added allure was that Rachel knew no one. Better still, no one knew her.
HOPEFULLY even her smart phone -- evercemented to her palm to provide minute-byminute Twitter reports from the social frontline -- wouldn't work.
We could, I dreamt, wallow in the waters of tropical obscurity. So off we went, heading for a night's stopover in Miami, before our flight on to Cartagena the next day.
To cope with Rachel's social withdrawal symptoms, I indulgently allowed her to set up a Miami dinner with a Caribbean legend, Gordon 'Butch' Stewart, the founder of Sandals, who just happened to be in town.
Then I discovered she had already wheedled a night in the uber-fashionable, newly-opened, seven-star luxurious Soho Beach House. We had a penthouse suite the size of a tennis court.
To my relief, an evening stroll through the bar revealed no one she knew. But at breakfast Tom Parker Bowles, food guru and stepson of the Prince of Wales, strolled over for a chat.
My heart groaned when he recommended a friend on the Spanish Main for us to look up when we arrived. Vamos.
From the air, Cartagena looked hugely promising -- a low-lying walled Old Town with a Miamistyle modern beach strip and a nice celebrity-unfriendly, third world-looking hinterland.
Regrettably, however, Twitter still worked, as did my wife's iPhone, laptop and Kindle -- (useful for checking her books on Amazon).
Our taxi to the Old Town revealed just what I like: an unswimmable, muddy beach, but lots of ancient architecture, narrow streets, bougainvilleabedecked balconies, and large, mahogany doors leading to private palm-treed patios.
And, every few blocks, a glamorous, whitewashed plaza -- unpompous and human-scale with a grand church and a jamboree of bars and restaurants. Oh, and no one we knew.
The people were beautiful, too. Strolling old rogues in Panama hats selling bootlegged Cuban cigars, turbaned West Indian women wearing primary colours, with bowls of pineapple, guava and mangoes on their heads, and flashing-eyed men in wife-beater singlets and hot-pants. Not even a D-List celebrity in sight.
Over the next ten days, we flopped from boutique-hotel to boutique hotel, sampling the relaxed lifestyles of the old Spanish caudillos. We stayed at the impeccable El Marques, the startlingly pretty Ananda and, my favourite, the ancient Casa Pestagua. Each had once been the private home of a colonial grandee and now offered five-star luxury.
SO WHAT to do -- apart, that is, from checking the ME-dia (Rachel's joke for news alerts about herself)? In truth, the sights are the city itself. There is a handful of small museums, a huge castle and a pretty monastery on a hill.
siesta lifestyle, its languid atmosphere, private courtyards and contrasting, explosive, salsapowered nightlife.
After a few days sipping pina coladas -- during which, every so often, Rachel would escape to search the internet for news of rivals -- we allowed the local tourist board to strong-arm us to the Isla Mucura, one of the furthest-flung of an archipelago of Colombian Caribbean islands, an hour or two away by fast launch from the city.
The Punto Faro resort was set on an emerald-green island, past the smaller, but more popular, Islas Rosarios.
Despite charming thatched cabanas and golden sunsets, the customer service and communal eating was more Club Guant anamo t han Club Med. When a 40-st rong new age delegat ion arrived queasily off a sea-t ossed ferry for a spot of mediat ion, we fled back to the city.
Anyway, there was next to no mobile signal.
Guantanamo than dub Med. When a 40-strong new age delegation arrived queasily off a sea-tossed ferry for a spot of mediation, we fled back to the city. Anyway, there was next to no mobile signal.
Still determined to log Rachel off from the stream of gossip pouring from her smart phone, I decided that the most likely place to be truly 'offline' was 140 miles away to our east, lodged in the thick rain- forests at the foot- hills of the Sierra Nevada.
Here, after a hair-raising taxi ride, we arrived at the Tayrona National Park and its Eco- Habs-a grass- hut hotel deep in the forest and surrounded by thundering Atlantic rollers crashing on pristine beaches.
It was heaven. But as we walked with our guide through the forests, Rachel's phone chattered alongside the monkeys in the canopy. You just can't rely on the third world these days.
It was only on our way back to fleshpots and salsa-dives of Cartagena that I finally found my El Dorado - not a city of gold, but a mountain of mud. El Totumo looks more like a factory in a favella shanty town than a tourist attraction.
It is a 50ft-high cone of slate grey, surrounded by shacks selling pine-applesand beer. The social form here might alarm even a Z-list celeb, not to mention the most intrepid anthropologist.
As soon as you arrive, you pay a [pounds sterling]2 entrance fee and are escorted to a changing cubicle where you leave everything (including phones) except your swimming costume. Then you clamber uP 50 muddy steps to the top of the 'volcano'. when you reach the summit, the full horror of what lies In store reveals itself. There before you is, in effect, a mini-swimming pool atop allegedly around 700ft of warm, bubbling, wheezing and ponging mud.
Worse still, floating in it with grins the size of watermelon slices are a couple of enormous, middle-aged Colombian gents. They are smiling and beckoning.
After gingerly stepping down a slippery ladder into this inferno, the greeters whoop and laugh as they pass you across the surface and begin what is less a massage than a kneading process more familiar to bread dough than human flesh. There is a lot of laughter.
And, try as you might, any attempt to sink into the muddy oblivion is as impossible as maintaining any semblance of dignity. The warm mud pops you up like a cork.
After half an hour of this, slimy grey from top to bottom, you stumble down the stairs and walk like a humiliated medieval witch down the shanty street to a nearby lake.
En route, you are hijacked by a pair of crones who wade into the water and proceed to dunk you, demanding you hand them what remains of your swimming togs for them to wash.
We took a couple of days to recuperate back at Cartagena, during which Rachel struck up an inappropriately intimate tennis friendship with Claude Pimont, a dashing, long-haired soap-opera star and friend of former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin. It was time to vamos.
As we headed home, still giggling, it was the delights of El Totumo that stuck like a great, mud-grey stain across our memories.
What was it, we asked ourselves, that made it so liberating?
Was it the wandering hands of the masseurs, the hilarious walk of shame to the lakeside, or just the viscosity of what Flanders & Swann celebrated in their hippo potamus song as 'mud, mud, glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood'? Or perhaps it was the knowledge that, with the iPhone in the changing room and the photos unpublishable, it was all - well - a tweet too far.
For a moment at least, phone free, Rachel's ADD and mention-itis had momentarily been washed away by the primeval volcanic swamp.
It is fleeting moments such as these that give me hope.
TRAVEL FACTS
VIRGIN Atlantic flies to Miami from Heathrow from [pounds sterling]571 return, 0844 2092770, virginatlantic.com.
Avianca flies from Miami to Cartagena from [pounds sterling]347 return, 0871 744 7472, avianca.co.uk.
El Marques has double rooms from [pounds sterling]185 B&B, elmarqueshotel boutique.com. Ananda has double rooms from [pounds sterling]217 B&B, anandacartagena.com. Casa Pestagua, double rooms from [pounds sterling]219 B&B, casapestagua.com. The Eco-Habs in the Parque Nacional Tayrona start from [pounds sterling]216, concesionesparquesnaturales.com. Hotel Punto Faro, on Isla Mucura, has double rooms from [pounds sterling]187, including breakfast, lunch and dinner, puntafaro.com. For more information, contact Proexport, Colombia Tourist Office, 020 7491 3535, colombia.travel
WEB WISDOM
The most tempting long-haul destinations are just a few clicks away at travelmail. co.uk
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Glorious mud: Rachel Johnson experiences a bubbling volcanic mud bath during an epic and captivating tour of Colombia Glorious mud: Rachel Johnson experiences a bubbling volcanic mud bath during an epic and captivating tour of Colombia
