I walk down Avenida Costa Rica towards the street where my parents’ office used to be. It’s now crammed with small shops selling accessories and cell phone accoutrements, those long sticks for taking selfies, hats, ‘I Heart San Andrés’, alcohol, alcohol, cheap booze. There are discounts announced in all the shops: sheets, towels, fans. A native guy sells me mango in Creole, which makes me happy; a cinnamon-skinned man passes me on the pavement, wearing a formal shirt and long pants; whatever I’m looking for I’ll find ‘very cheap, very cheap’, insists a hirsute Arab guy with dark eyes; a woman with a coastal accent assures me she’s at my service. She repeats the same line to the long-limbed Europeans on their way back from the beach, a blond couple nearly two metres tall, speaking something that sounds like Dutch. And I think about how a piece of this place belongs, in some way or other, to all of them, about how the whole world converged here in the Caribbean. Nowhere else in Colombia is this so obvious; on no other border are there six other nations. And no other place is so closed to its possibilities. There’s nowhere else I find so painful, certainly, and nowhere else that consoles and confuses me in equal measure. A woman with an Antioquia accent offers me beef or chicken empanadas from her chair, the peeling real estate of the North End pedestrian road. A tousle-haired, bearded guy hawks henna tattoos from his seat on the ground, an old bleach-blonde woman in a long skirt exhibits some Rastafari-hued woven bracelets. ‘Manta ray tours, cay tours, barrier reef tours, mami, mami’, and suddenly the voice changes: ‘Pssst, I’ll take you for free, why so serious?’ Beach lines.

Pirates. That’s it. What is it we all have in common? We’re all pirates here.

I’ve made my way to the northern tip. I reach the enormous glass display of the perfume store near the café. Looking at my reflection in the window, it strikes me that I still look like a tourist: my sunglasses and white dress, my trainers and shoulder bag. My own blitheness. Then comes the abrupt clash of air-conditioning, smelling like one of those fragrances announced with gilt and frost. A woman with long tanned legs smiles sidelong from the white background, and there’s George Clooney in a dinner jacket in the tropics; beside him is an ad warning visitors that they only accept payment in cash, as in all other branches of the store, due to a money laundering scandal in Panama.