Small car crash- no Brits injured

This is quite a long email because we’re at the end of our trip and I’m writing this at Bogota airport but sending from Heathrow while we wait for our bus.  It took nearly half the time of flying from Madrid to London to get our bags from the aircraft to collection so we missed one bus by a couple of minutes and now have a one and half hour wait.

As you will have noticed if you’ve been reading these, we met up with our friends Bonnie and Newt from Massachusetts and have spent two weeks travelling around together.   It’s all gone very well and they’re a delight to be with.  It seems as if we’ve known them for years but we’ve only spent a few days in India and even fewer days in New England together.   As Newt said “it’s been very easy”.  They continue in Colombia for a couple of weeks and then fly off to Ecuador a month.   Their big news is that they’re getting married and we think it’s about time too.

Small car crash- no Brits injured

Local transport in Salento is old US Willys Jeeps and we took one to a really lovely walk along the strikingly situated Cocora Valley.   We could see saw-toothed peaks ahead of us but the walk was fairly level for 2 hours then a really steep 0.8km (it said) climb followed by a long gradual descent for about a 5 hour total.   Open country, then cloud forest alongside a stream and then lightly wooded on the way down.   Saw a calf born on the way, a few good birds and the extraordinary Wax Palms which are endemic to this valley, growing to something like 80 feet with just a tuft of leaves at the top like all palms.   On a day trip from Salento we had to change buses somewhere on the route in the middle of nowhere on the other side of a dual carriageway.   As we approached the spot our bus driver started yelling out the window.  As we got off we realised he was waving down our bus for us and the same thing happened on the return journey.  The following day as we were leaving the town, the man at the bus office (station is too grand a word) who’d explained the bus change to us came and asked if it had all worked out well.

Having decided on a couple of days chillin’ we’re booked into a family run coffee plantation/small hotel and now know lots more about coffee than we really need to.   There’s a lot more than just picking the beans and roasting them.   All the damaged, not quite ripe and beans with insects in go to the instant coffee market.   Bug Coffee or Nescafe they called it.  A picker has to choose only ripe beans and still picks 100kg of beans a day, often working on steep slopes and everything is carried.  Unsurprisingly on our coffee tour they were very sniffy about coffee from anywhere else, especially Brazil.  The best thing we learned was that light roast is for the best coffee, medium roast hides some of the poor or bitter flavour and dark roast hides even more - all those years I’d thought dark roast was the best.   This farm was the best place by far that we’d been in Colombia for birds although many were attracted by bananas left out for them.   Amazingly friendly and helpful people here and when we left it was as if they were saying goodbye to family who were off for ever.  

Leaving here we’re in a Collectivo, a sort of cross between a taxi and a bus.  Costing more than a bus ride it takes about 8 - 10 people in a more comfortable manner directly to a destination instead of touting for custom or stopping everywhere.   I got ‘talking’ to a young Colombian, ‘talking’ because it was again a few Spanish words, a few English words and some mime.   He said to phone if we had any problems, wrote out his name, phone number and showed me his Columbian equivalent of a warrant card because he was a policeman.  We shook hands at the bus station and off he went with his girlfriend.  Certainly to us the police and soldiers are very friendly, a whole patrol of soldiers in camouflaged combat gear and armed to the teeth will pass on some street in one of the towns and every one of them will smile and say good afternoon, or buenos tardes for you pedants out there.

The day I’m writing about has about 6 hours of travelling to Honda, a low altitude, and hence hot and sticky town which is to be a break before we get back to Bogota.  There are three mountain ranges running roughly north to south which we are crossing on the Bogota route so the scenery is really spectacular as we ride in some comfort in our second collectivo of the day on a four hour trip.   I have a wiry, sharp featured, curly haired, sparkily toothed, gold rings on several fingers on each hand Columbian English teacher next to me.  If you can picture a very camp Keith Richards then you’ve got him nailed.   Then he told me he really liked Dolly Parton.  Game, set and match I’d say.  Part way through the trip the driver asked (in Spanglish) if I’d like to share my music with the bus because  I’d been listening to my iPod.  So I got to be DJ for the trip taking the odd request (but only from Bonnie).   At some road works we got out for a leg stretch and my iPod played Pachelbel’s Canon but I never found out what Keef fought of it.

Honda ‘s claim to fame is that it sits on the Rio Magdalena, Columbia’s biggest river, up which until the 1950’s paddle steamers used to chug 500 miles or so south from the Caribbean  at Barranquilla with cargo.   Other than that, Honda could and frankly should be overlooked, but to be fair we do have a nice hotel with a small pool on the ground floor and a Jacuzzi on the first plus a couple of raised areas on the roof to catch any breezes wafting past.   It was however the first place we stayed in Colombia with suicide showers.  These are the ones where the electrical heating element is in the shower head and on the same circuit as the lighting, so I only had cold showers with the light off.   This wasn’t any hardship, it was so hot and sticky that one afternoon I had three cold showers and a trip to the Jacuzzi to keep cool.   There were two Dutch mid 30’s men staying as well, one of whom was unwell and feverish.   After a visit to the doctor it turned out that he had Dengue Fever, a mosquito borne viral infection, one strain of which, haemorragic  Dengue is very nasty indeed.  Fortunately he just had common or garden Dengue.

The River Magdalena here is fast flowing, full of fish and unsurprisingly has fish restaurants lining the banks so we had some lunch here.   During our meal a number of peddlers had tried to sell things to us but after we’d finished, a man, tall for a Colombian and I guess in his 50’s came up and stood next to us.  We said we didn’t want anything but he stayed and we realised that he wasn’t selling or asking for money.   The penny finally dropped.   He wanted the remains of our lunches which he gathered up in a plastic bag.   This has never happened to us before and I think we were all a bit disturbed and embarrassed by the incident.   It seems too easy to mistake wealth for worth but this poor devil was reduced to eating other people’s scraps.   All we could know was his poverty and had no idea if he was kind, thoughtful, loving or disturbed.   It was a fleeting moment but one I’ve reflected on several times since. 

Having tried to get some food in the evening before we left and ending up with a slice of pizza and a 7-up I‘ve decided that of all the world dumps we’ve been to, Honda is the dumpiest.

We travelled back to Bogota with the Dutch fellas, one of whom was Dutch/Venezuelan and spoke fluent English and Spanish as well as Dutch.  He was horrified when we said we used the Transmilenio and had wandered around the Candelaria district because they are dangerous.   He also warned us off hailing a taxi because of the danger of robbery/kidnap (oldfogeynap).  We still plan to go to the airport via Transmilenio tomorrow for our homebound flight.  

And that car crash.  In a taxi (not hailed) from the bus station to our hotel and moving very slowly if not already stationary we were rear-ended by another taxi.   Quite a jolt too but no-one was hurt.    Naturally our driver got out and words were exchanged.   It seemed as if the other driver was doing the arguing as if he wasn’t completely to blame although naturally that was implied from the tone rather than the content of the conversation.

One final thing.  After a very pleasant last evening meal, we couldn’t open the door to our room which opened straight onto the dining room.   So we had a waitress, receptionist and chef with several knives trying to get the lock open, somewhat amusing the remaining diners.   Eventually the whole lock barrel came out and we could go in.  Does this sort of stuff happen to everyone ?

A few random bits remembered. 

Bonnie and I had a disagreement when she said there were gorillas in the forests here.  I said there were no gorillas in South America, they were African.   She insisted.  Eventually we found out that she meant guerrillas and I meant gorillas.  It was another line for that song, “I say tomaato, you say tomato, I say potaato, you say potato”.

Street sweepers are out regularly here and in Medellin we saw a novel way of emptying a waste bin.  The cleaner upended the whole bin out on the pavement and then shovelled it up and tipped it in her cart.  Time and Motion anyone.

An Abbey Road Colombia T-shirt, being the standard Beatles crossing the road with an overprinted Colombian in sombrero leading a donkey going in the other direction.  It doesn’t sound very funny written down but it was quite amusing.

Somehow a driver the two Dutch Guys (Adrian and Arno) had had some days previously heard about the Dengue Fever and phoned the hotel just to see how Arno was.  Having been here nearly six weeks it was a surprising and yet not unexpected further example of the warmth of welcome extended by Colombians to strangers.

One sentence summary

A lovely country with some spectacular scenery and really lovely people, not deserving the legacy reputation of being a dangerous place to visit.