“Buenaventura” means “good luck” (buena ventura) or “fortune”. But it’s way more appropriate to think of it as “buen’ aventura” or “grand adventure”. And the adventure is whether or not you survive.

I’m sitting in the way-back of a station wagon, one hour and 40 minutes into a 2-hour journey, thinking “this is probably information you should have offered two hours and 10 minutes ago, friend”. We’re nearly to Córdoba where I had been expecting to trade the sweaty way-back for a breezy brujita (a motorcycle-pushed makeshift raft that travels the abandoned railway) to San Cipriano. I’ve just asked Hermán – the oily business man who calls me “gringa” like it’s not offensive and thinks having a sister who’s lived in NYC for 25 years makes him somehow better than the other passengers – how much longer he thinks we have, when the man sitting on my left – the one with zero respect for personal space in shared backseats – prompts the other passengers into a conversation about how dangerous it will be to stop in Córdoba.

The consensus is that I won’t make it to San Cipriano without being robbed and, judging by the crude sign language, the sides of my face shredded to ribbons by the thieves’ fearsome fingernails.

Sidenote: Why do so many people equate being attacked with getting one’s face scratched off? I mean, that hardly ever happens.