On the night of Monday, July 9, 2018, a local smuggler made his second attempt at the crossing with Kidane and about ten other Eritreans--in Colombia, smugglers often divide the migrants by nationality to make communication easier. Kidane and his compatriots were wearing life jackets of the bright orange variety that slip over the head. As the small motorboat entered the open Caribbean, the waves picked up. Near Capurganá, several hours northwest of Turbo, wave crests are often ten feet high. The boats take the waves at speed; for the passenger, it feels like an extreme fairground ride, with a rush to the stomach as the boat climbs the face of the wave, then the sensation of floating in air as it reaches the peak, followed by a plunge down to a hard landing. Even the ferry-sized high-horsepower boat that carries the tourists arrives drenched in spray. On smaller boats--lanchas as they are called in Latin America--the engine's roar often kicks up an octave from the strain of climbing the rolling hills. On the way back down, the engine often stutters as it tries to find purchase, and the passenger's heart does the same.

When Kidane's boat stopped, it was still some way short of the beach near the Capurganá harbor. The smuggler ordered his passengers to jump into the sea with their life jackets. Those who did not jump were pushed. They had to swim to shore, carrying backpacks with them. Kidane, who can swim, remembers the boat stopping about ten yards short of the beach. Some of the non-swimmers on the boat described it, with horror, as being more like fifty yards. By the time we met Kidane and his group the next day, he and his compatriots, only a handful of whom he had known before Turbo, were drying their clothes on the downstairs railings of a safe house in Capurganá. They were sitting together in an exterior covered porch near the railings, talking over the near disaster of the previous night.

The hotel was not that different to the lodges where European and American twentysomethings were vacationing nearby: a brightly painted clapboard building overlooking a sheltered fishing dock. It was a Caribbean idyll. But the dripping clothes provided a glimpse of an experience as far removed from the tourists' Capurganá as possible. Kidane and his friends were on a months-long journey but only carried enough clothes between the eleven of them to cover twenty feet of railings.