Bogota :: Colombia
A cursed city, and coffee.
Places: Manizales, Salento, Cocora Valley & Bogota.
Coolest thing I did: Spent the evening playing tejo for real with the fine bunch of kids I went walking down the Cocora Valley earlier in the day.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Chiquita banana company got in big trouble for paying off both left-wing guerillas and right wing paramilitaries in the 1990s and 2000s to leave their bananas alone.
My trip to the coffee growing region of Colombia didn't start out very well. Due to a flight delay I arrived in Manizales wearing a t-shirt and shorts only to find the overnight temperature was below 18 and the airline decided not to bring my bag. That put off my going to Nevado del Ruiz, a snow capped volcano you can see from town, mostly because I had no clothes. So I decided to go the next day, but that night I got food poisoning, and just to add to the gayness all trips up the volcano were cancelled until further notice due to their being too much 'sulfur' and 'poison' in the air. I've decided that Manizales was cursed. There is no other logical explanation.
However, for a cursed city, Manizales is in an amazingly beautiful location. The main street of the city runs right along the highest ridge-line available and as you walk along it you can see the city sliding off down into the valleys on either side. I was particularly blessed that when I got to the hostel in a foul mood (due to my lack of bag) the guy at reception stopped checking me in so we could take a photo of Nevado del Ruiz behind the city skyline at sunset. He said he hadn't seen that since January, so that was kind of cool. Out in all directions are beautiful valleys where this countries second most profitable cash crop, coffee is grown.
There isn't that much to see in the city itself if I'm honest, the best bits are looking away from it from the natural vantage point the city happens to give you. Due it being a highly active earthquake zone (volcanoes tend to be a give away of that kind of thing) the cathedral is only a recent build, and is the highest spire in Colombia by virtue of the fact it's a Gothic structure made totally out of reinforced concrete. You only realise that when you're right up close, as you can see the rusted steel mesh sticking out of several of the saint's heads where the concrete has chipped away.
So due to the cursed nature of Manizales I decided to get into a series of minibuses and make my way to the much smaller Salento, which used to be a tiny little coffee growing hamlet but due to the actions of a single Pom, it's now firmly on the backpacker trail and it's hostel population is growing exponentially. I managed to arrive on a Sunday and that turns out to be a bit of a treat as it's the day when no-one does any work but rather hangs out about town in their best boots and cowboy hat. Not long after arriving in town I went into a small place where an older bloke in a serious moustache was pulling tintos (black coffees) from an ancient espresso machine while his daughter was waitressing. It had the kind of old school diner decor that every designer from Surry Hills to Newtown is trying their hardest to copy so it's crazy to see an authentic version made by simply not changing anything since the 50s. It was full of old men arguing about something my poor Spanish wouldn't let me understand, but one of the joys of people watching in foreign countries is you realise how universal people really are. I'm sure a large component of the conversation was about how young people are screwing up the world, and how it was different in their day.
As the afternoon bled into evening it became obvious that what you do in Salento on a Sunday is sit in a bar around Bolivar square and drink beer. So that's what I did. Again you can see human universals where extended families laugh and sing to the radio, kids run wild in the park and couple canoodle in the corner. I especially liked the old bloke with his face painted white who spent his time miming behind people walking around in order to entertain the patrons of each bar and get a bit of change out of each. Just like home some people have a sense of humour about it, and some people tried hard to punch him.
Besides the coffee Salento is right near the Cocora Valley, a highly green burst of farmland along the river north of town. You get up in the morning, haggle your way onto a jeep (quite often requiring some of you to hang off the back in a form of extreme car pooling) and start walking when you reach the top. It was a good 3 hour loop through a mixture of jungle and people's cow paddocks, with large sections of the hillsides cleared to make way for cows to graze and horses to run angrily at people who don't realise which side of the fence they are on. Like the Lost City I kind of just liked doing the exercise again, and being at a slightly higher 2,500m I feel like I'm getting a bit more used to thin air, which will be really important when I get to Peru.
The main drawcard of the valley, however is the fact Colombia's national tree grows there. It's a palm tree. I didn't think that would be cool either, except for the fact they grow something in the order of 30m high, and you can take very cool pictures of yourself as a dot at the base of one of them. You get a much better idea of just how tall they grow by the fact that so much of the ground around is cleared for cows to eat grass so they look taller than the very few of them that are still rising out of the smaller trees.
I ended up walking with a group of 8, who I met later on that night for dinner and after (rather surprisingly) smoking a Hookah pipe at one of the local cafes, and quite a few beers we decided to go looking for a tejo place. As I think I said earlier in one of these, tejo is a game that could only have come from Colombia. You throw 2kg lead weights across the room at little triangles of paper embedded in clay that contain small amounts of gunpowder. A direct hit by the weight results in an impressive explosion, and if you're really lucky a pile of burning paper landing somewhere in the middle of the people playing in the next lane. It's completely unsafe, and made more so by the fact you tend to be drinking heavily at the same time. We decided to play on the full lanes, where the target is about 20-odd metres away from you and predictably it took a full hour to actually get the weight to hit the clay, let alone make something explode. Even with a few direct hits only one of us managed it, but there is enough exploding going on around you to not matter so much.
So it was a hung over and early morning that had me on a minibus and the bus back to Bogota to make my flight for Lima on the Thursday before Easter. I was quite lucky that completely by accident there's some kind of cultural festival going on and Bolivar square was full to the gills with people waiting to see Manu Chau, who is apparently famous.
After a while you realise the main square & main street in every town in Colombia is named after Simon Bolivar, who was instrumental in getting the Spanish out of South America back in the 1800s. Despite dying on his way into exile he's had quite a resurgence as a historical hero of all the countries that he liberated to make a place called Gran Colombia (Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and parts of Northern Peru). He's a personal favourite of current Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has turned his country into a semi-communist kleptocracy under the flag of what he calls a Bolivarian Revolution, the idea being he's liberating Latin America from yanqui domination. No ego there.
Most of Latin America threw off the Spanish when they were a bit distracted in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars in Europe and really couldn't give too much of a crap what happened in their remote colonies. Bolivar was responsible for liberating pretty much everything down to Peru, but did so after Argentinian Jose de San Martin had already done the same in the south of the continent. They met in Peru during the liberation wars there and Bolivar basically told San Martin to bugger off home, he could handle things from here. Apparently San Martin did just that, quitting the military and politics altogether and living a content old retirement while Bolivar ended up a fairly hated military dictator who died trying to flee the continent (ironically) back to Europe.
So Manu Chao. I wandered into Plaza Bolivar and found half of Bogota waiting there for a free concert by said Mr Chao. Despite not really knowing his work I managed to follow along with the crowd, who seemed to know the words to every song and lose it and dance around like a fool in time with everyone else. There was something cool about seeing all the people filling the plaza and crashing like a wave up the steps of the cathedral (and quite often, climbing up on it) all singing and waving their arms together in time, even though I didn't know basically any of the songs. Well, it turns out, I did know one. When I was taking Spanish lessons the teacher used one of his songs Me gustas tu as a way of us getting to listen to spoken Spanish, and to drive into our heads by crazy repitition that me gusta something means I like whatever. It was kind of cool to be able to sing along to that one.
So tomorrow I leave Colombia behind to start a new life in Peru. The thing that has stuck me the most about this country is just how friendly and curious the people are. I guess we're in the early days of mass tourism here, and it makes me wish my terrible Spanish was a bit better so I could answer all their questions, a remarkable percentage of which seem to revolve around the death of Steve Irwin. You have to give the people what they want, so I learnt that "stingray" is la raya.