Quick intro: I'm Sam Stallone, and yes, I'm related to that Stallone. Fourth cousins, twice removed, maybe thrice. We share a last name and a tendency to grunt when lifting luggage. Until this week, I thought that was the whole connection.
I came to Bogotá, Colombia to write about arepas and altitude sickness. Instead, my first three days went like this:
Day 1, Parque de la 93: Dizzy from the altitude, I tripped over a curb that wasn't there and body-slammed a man reaching into his jacket during a senator's speech. The jacket held a pistol. I was holding an empanada, which survived. A crowd chanted "¡Como Rambo!"
Day 2, La Candelaria: A morning earthquake. I ran outside in an "I ❤️ Ohio" shirt and one sock, saw a colonial lamppost tipping toward a mom and her toddler, and tackled them both into a doorway. She called me an angel. #GringoGuardián trended by lunch.
Day 3, Plaza Bolívar: A teenager stole my phone. I chased him into a warehouse holding 200 stolen tourist phones and five men eating soup. I swung a mop, slipped in the soup, and fell face-first into their alarm panel. An elderly German man saluted me.
Now, I'm not a scientist. But I am a blogger, which is close. And I looked at the data. Once is luck. Twice is coincidence. Three times is genetics.
That night I bought a red bandana from a street vendor. I did push-ups in my hostel (eleven). I started thinking of my $9 pharmacy umbrella as "the partner."
Day 4, Morning: Charging Up on Monserrate
My theory was that thin air had switched the gene on. Logically, thinner air would charge it. So I went up Monserrate, the mountain that towers over Bogotá at 3,152 meters with a white church on top.
I walked. The trail up is roughly 1,500 steps, and at that altitude every one of them hurts. Near the top, the path passes the Stations of the Cross, and I stopped to rest at each one. I was bent over the railing at Station XI, gasping, when a grandmother climbing on her knees passed me. “Ánimo, mijo,” she said. I tried to say gracias. It came out as a wheeze.
Along the path I leaned in to smell some gorgeous orange trumpet flowers. A woman selling obleas grabbed my sleeve. "Borrachero," she said. Tourists who sniff those, she explained, "wake up without their wallet." I thanked her and moved upwind.
I took the cable car down in the drizzle, pressed against the glass with a dozen strangers, two of whom were filming me. I felt fully charged.
Then I did the safest thing a tourist can do. I went on an art tour.
Day 4, Afternoon: Street Art and the Botero Museum Incident
Where: La Candelaria street art tour, ending at Museo Botero
New sidekick: Andres
The tour met at the statue of La Pola: Policarpa Salavarrieta, a seamstress who spied for Colombia's independence movement until the Spanish executed her in 1817. Her pedestal has collected a few opinions since.
"Our first piece of street art," said our guide, nodding at the base.
His name was Andres, a guy about my age who walked like he always knew where the exits were. He knew every mural in La Candelaria: who painted it, which wall the city painted over, which artist painted back over the city.
At one corner, he pointed out a street artist in the middle of a mural.
At the third stop, I asked where he was from.
"Venezuela," he said. "I served in the army there for a while. Then things got bad, and I left. Colombia took me in." He shrugged at a mural of a giant hummingbird. "Now I show people walls."
He said it lightly, but he scanned the street the whole time. I didn't push.
Then he looked at me sideways. "You're the lamppost guy."
"And the assassin guy. And the phone guy." I adjusted my bandana. "It's genetic. I'm related to Sylvester Stallone."
"La Pola wasn't related to anyone," Andres said. "They still gave her a statue."
He let that sit. "My cousin was in the plaza. He says you fight like a man falling down stairs."
"That's how the gene presents early."
The tour ended at the Museo Botero, which is free, gorgeous, and full of Fernando Botero's famously round people and animals.
Andres was mid-sentence when a man in a security guard's jacket two sizes too small pulled a pistol.
"¡Todos al piso! ¡Celulares!"
Phones again. After Day 3, I took it personally.
Two more men came in with a duffel bag and went straight for Botero's Mona Lisa, the version where she looks like she's had a very good lunch.
Everyone hit the floor. I hit the floor next to Andres, still holding the partner.
I immediately began devising a plan.
"When he passes the fat horse," Andres whispered, "his wrist. Then kick the gun to me."
That had also been my plan. Basically.
The gunman worked down our row, collecting phones. He passed the very round horse.
I swung.
WHACK.
The umbrella caught his wrist. The pistol hit the marble. I kicked it across the gallery in what I would describe as a perfect pass.
"It hit a bench first," Andres said, already holding it.
"And then it went to you."
Andres was on his feet in one motion. "¡Quietos!" His voice had dropped an octave. He was not a tour guide anymore.
Across the room, the thieves had a bigger problem. They had the Mona Lisa off the wall, and it would not go into the duffel bag. They tried lengthwise. They tried diagonally. Nobody had measured the Mona Lisa.
One of them looked at me, then the umbrella, then the bandana. "Are you the Stallone?"
"Distantly," I said.
He put the painting down and his hands up.
Officer Martinez, who had my number saved by now, walked in, looked at me, looked at the umbrella, and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Señor Stallone. Four days. Four crimes."
"I'm on vacation," I told him. "I can't turn it off."
That night, #UmbrellaJustice trended across Latin America. A local paper ran the headline "BOTERO LO HUBIERA PINTADO" (Botero would have painted him), with an illustration of me that was, I'll be honest, quite round.
Walking back, Andres was quiet for a while. "I was a soldier for six years," he finally said. "I have never seen anyone do anything that stupid that worked."
"Is that a compliment?"
"I haven't decided."
Day 5: The Coffee Farm Rescue
Where: Hacienda La Esperanza, 45 minutes outside Bogotá
Team: Me, and Andres as backup
Officer Martinez found me at 7 a.m., splitting arepas with Andres. A British tourist named Nigel had been taken during a coffee farm tour, and the kidnappers wanted ransom.
"Why me?" I asked, mostly to hear him say it.
"Things happen near you. Then they end well. We don't understand it. We would like to use it."
I told him I'd need full operational control.
"Of course," he said, and handed the file to Andres.
At the farm, Andres chatted with the pickers in rapid Spanish while I nodded at plants and said "wow" a lot, which turns out to be excellent cover. A picker told Andres that strange men had been using the old processing shed on the far slope, and they "didn't know anything about coffee."
The grounds were gorgeous. I scouted them for cover positions.
Andres laid out a plan. Wait for the shift change. Come up through the coffee rows. Quiet.
I respected the plan. But the gene doesn't do waiting.
"Overwatch," I said, pointing at a wooden drying platform above the shed. Andres said a word in Spanish I didn't know, but I got the gist.
I climbed up. The board snapped. I went straight through the shed's tin roof onto a pile of coffee sacks, between three kidnappers who were, I swear, brewing coffee.
Everybody stared at each other.
"Hi," I said. "Is there a bathroom?"
That bought Andres the four seconds he needed. He came through the side door, put the first guy on the floor, and shouted "¡Sam, el inglés!"
Nigel was tied to a chair in the corner, sunburned and furious.
"Blimey," he said, as I fought the knots. "Are you actually related to Stallone?"
"Distantly!"
"Distantly will do. Hurry."
The fourth kidnapper had been outside, and he'd brought friends. We ran. Down the coffee rows, Nigel in his socks, shots snapping through the leaves, Andres steering us like a sheepdog. I executed a tactical slide down a muddy slope (I slipped) and took out a fifth man at the shins.
"Your best work," Andres said, not stopping.
We ended up pinned behind a drying rack covered in beans. A bullet thunked into it, and coffee sprayed everywhere like confetti.
"Will the rack hold?" I yelled.
"It's not a shield!"
"It's working like one!"
"That's not the point!"
Sirens. Martinez's team came up the access road, and the kidnappers, short several guys and still unsure who the American in the bandana was, gave up.
Final tally: hostage recovered, six arrests, my plan executed flawlessly.
(Andres has asked me to include his version of events, which is: "He fell through a roof." I have included it.)
The farm owner, Doña Carmen, named a new blend after me: Stallone Supremo. Bold, brave, accidentally heroic. The mayor gave me a key to the city. The British consul bought dinner, and Andres ordered the most expensive thing on the menu without looking.
At the airport, Andres hugged me. "Come back," he said with a smile. "But tell me first, so I can leave town."
Epilogue: Two Phone Calls
The first came during my Miami layover, from a blocked number.
"Sam? Sam Stallone?" Gravelly. Slow. Very familiar. "It's Sly. Your cousin. Fourth cousin, whatever. Kid, I've been watching the news."
I sat down on the floor of Gate D14.
"An umbrella," the voice said. "That's family, kid."
We talked for an hour. I missed my connection. Afterward I emailed his agent to follow up and got an automatic reply. I'm choosing to read it as warm.
The second call came that night, at my airport hotel.
"Señor Stallone." Calm. Patient. "You've had a busy week in my city."
"Who is this?"
"The men in the plaza with the phones. The men in the museum. The men at the farm." A pause. "All mine. Very expensive men to lose."
"I was just a tourist."
"Sí. A tourist who keeps falling through roofs. Go home to Ohio, Señor Stallone. Bogotá is my city, and I have a very long memory."
Click.
I'm writing this at 35,000 feet with a bag of Stallone Supremo in my carry-on and the partner across my lap. I've thought a lot about that second call, and I think I finally understand it.
He's scared of me.
I texted Andres to tell him I'd be back in January.
He replied in under a minute: “Good. I’ll warn Martinez.”
Fictional disclosure: Fake Travel News publishes fictional travel stories inspired by real places. I have fun inventing impossible events, but I also love travel and the very real magic it grants to the human experience. For real-world travel details, see Bogotá, Colombia: Insider's Guide - Wendy Perrin.
