I’d Like to Sell Your Product in My Bar.

This should be on a list of ‘Things That Do Not Motivate Colombian Drinks Suppliers’. When it comes to buying stuff for our bar, nothing is easy, concrete or straightforward.  

One example: we are trying to buy Coca-Cola to sell in the bar.  In London, I imagine it would go something like this: 

1. www.coca-cola.com
2. contact us > restaurants > find my local dealer
3. call
4. meeting
5. order
6. delivery  

In Barú Island, Cartagena, Colombia, it goes something like this: 

1. www.coca-cola.com
2. ???
3. ok I’ll ask a friend with a restaurant
4. get a local dealer's number (and a side note advising me that they’re useless)
5. call dealer
6. get transferred to 3 other people who apparently deal with Baru island
7. wait 5 days, get nowhere
8. roadblock a passing coca-cola lorry with my car by pulling across the road in front of it, shouting desperately, I want to buy your products (really, we did this) to get number of dealer from driver
9. call dealer
10. get given another number
11. call number and arrange to meet person at coca-cola depot
12. get stopped by police for pulling over on side of road because coca-cola representative doesn’t know address of depot and is trying to explain while we drive around in circles
13. get taken to police station because business partner yells at police that he can’t search a bulletproof car unless we are in a police station
14. make friends with police after a brief recap of the last 30 years of FARC / civil war
15. get police escort to coca-cola depot
16. wait in line behind 15 coca-cola trucks returning from the day’s business
17. finally meet contact who turns out to be… the driver we flagged down
18. arrange to buy products directly off him on his next trip to Baru on Friday morning, some time between 8am-9am.  
19... to be continued. 

It’s been a week since I tried to buy some Coca Cola, I still have no Coca-Cola, and that’s just the Coca Cola.