Thu May 6, 2010

Coming home.

We spent last night in a hotel near Adriana’s apartment, after meeting her fiance, David. It was actually more of a long-term apartment, complete with refrigerator and small kitchen. You could live there quite comfortably, though you’d need something less than the nightly hotel rate (about $80). Traffic noise was horrendous this morning, however.

Our taxi drive out of Medellin and back to the new airport outside of town was again delightful chaos. Our driver is a “regular” that Adriana and her family request when he’s available. The street we took was nearly as steep as the streets in San Francisco, but it kept going up and going up (and going up). We climbed nearly 3000 feet from the hotel to the crest of the road. So my original statement that Medellin is at 7000 feet was not entirely incorrect.

Reflections….

One of the worst things about visiting new relatives in Colombia is farts.

Colombian food is very different from US food in a number of ways. There are staple items like yuca (manioc) and plantain, neither of which is typically eaten in the US at all. There are fruits served with every meal that the US palate finds exotic, like pineapple, or completely foreign, like the one I call snot-fruit (call it fruta de mocos, and any Colombian will know exactly which one you mean, especially if you also comment that it is delicious). Maize (corn) replaces wheat. But the hardest difference to accommodate, unless you are from the deep south of the US, is that nearly everything is fried or deep-fried.

The unaccustomed gut reacts to this assault of strangeness with gas. Lots of gas. Volumes of gas. So you excuse yourself and ask “Donde está el baño?” and you discover that it is two steps from where everyone is talking, behind a thin interior door. You close the door, and you can still hear the conversation clearly. As you relieve the pressure, the door rattles in its frame. A bottle falls into the sink and rolls around. Outside, you become aware of conversation resuming — you had not noticed it had stopped, concerned as you were with other matters.

This makes it difficult to truly relax.

While I am discussing matters scatological, I have to make a comment about Colombian public restrooms. First, they are invariably very clean, especially compared to US public restrooms. Colombian men can apparently aim. Second, they are weird.

The first public baño I went into turned out to be typical for malls, airports, and the like: a normal flushing toilet bowl, but minus the seat. Since I needed to sit, I dithered for a while, trying to decide how to handle it, but finally decided to perch on the edge. Fortunately, they keep the water levels low, or it could have been … chilly.

Later, Papito and I both commented on a baño in Chinchiná. There is a rectangular style of urinal with an opening about six inches by five inches. It’s made of heavy ceramic, just like an ordinary toilet, or (say) a flowerpot. I will have to ask Marta if there is a Colombian expression of “watering the flowers.” These don’t flush: instead, they have a simple spigot that turns on the water, like a sink, and you need to turn it on and off to rinse the bowl after use. This particular baño had two, and both were set rather high on the wall. It worked fine for me, but it occurred to me that I’m very tall compared to most Colombians. Gigantic, even. When I finished, Papito and I looked at each other, and both of us pantomimed standing on tip-toe. A puzzle.

The third was the strangest. I stepped into the baño, and found myself in a tiny tiled room, scarcely big enough to be called a closet. The only light was what came in from above the saloon-style swinging door, but there were no fixtures of any sort. I stepped out and looked at the sign — it was certainly marked “Baño.” I went back in and noticed a faucet knob on one wall, just like for the little flower pots, but with no flower pot. A thin plastic hose hung from the spigot. I looked down and saw that a raised divider ran across the floor, creating a small trench next to the wall with the spigot. Sure enough, in the shadows of the trench I could see a drain. Rinse the wall when you’re done.

I’ve been told on returning that the secret pocket of the carille is not to contain a picture of your girlfriend — it is to contain a picture of your mistress, as well as any love-letters she has written you. And the matches are actually supposed to be a fire striker (flint and steel). We’re still working on the last two items.

I also have a lot of reflections on fear and security. But I think those will require a full essay.

As a final note, I need to say that this blog is entirely my own work; Marta has provided no editorial services. In fact, she never even had time to read the blog while we were in Colombia. Otherwise, I would not have misspelled Chipechape. Nor would I have given such a confused and apparently incorrect description of how panela is made. I take personal responsibility for errors, and for all humor, good or bad.

Wed May 5, 2010 (Miercolas)

Our last full day in Colombia.

We rose reasonably early and had breakfast at the hotel, as usual. Nena and Papito came to the hotel, and Marta went out with Nena to shop for some souvenirs to bring back home, while I gave Papito a short course in using his new laptop in our room. The language-barrier was pretty severe, but he’s sharp and grasped most of what he needed to know.

I think.

When Marta and Nena returned, we took lunch at a place I wish we’d known about before, and am glad we’ll know about next time, since it’s within easy walking distance of the hotel. They have an extensive menu, much wider than what we’ve tended to see here, and their ice-cream list is worth the whole price of lunch. Like many restaurants in Colombia, the dining area was outdoors, with only a roof to keep rain and direct sun off our heads. The rain finally let up, and the day turned hot, drier, and very pleasant. Especially with ice cream.

From there, it was off to the airport, far outside Cali, and our eventual farewells. It would have been much more painful, but for the knowledge that we’ll be back soon.

Our flight to Medellin…. I don’t think I’ve ever been more enchanted by a flight. I decided as we boarded that I would pretend I had never seen or heard of an airplane before, and try to see the whole flight with new eyes. We become so jaded to the everyday miracles of our technology.

The plane was a small commuter with props under a top-mounted wing. Simply watching the propellers spin up and hearing the angry hornet buzz through the curved walls was impressive in its own right. But when we reached the start of the runway and they released the full power of the elemental spirits driving the engines, I found myself awed, even frightened. They released the brakes for a moment, and the entire cabin shuddered with the eagerness of this beast to be off: this was no humble servant — it was an untamed, barely-contained primal force of nature desiring freedom of the skies.

The pilots received clearance, and as they released the brakes, I was pressed back in my seat by the force of the beast’s freed enthusiasm. Our speed doubled, and doubled again, and doubled yet again, and I was still held in my seat by the relentless acceleration. In the bigger planes, you lose the sense of perspective, so high above the ground. Here, we were close to the tarmac; I could viscerally feel our reckless speed. The wings caught wind, and suddenly we were grabbing altitude, the ground and the apartments and houses below rapidly shrinking to dots in the rich green of the Colombian fields.

The clouds were layered and magical, a gargantuan three-dimensional environment of incredible beauty. We passed through layer after layer of light clouds, some almost invisible veils of mist, some great puffy mounds of stark white cotton, some dark layers threatening rain and chaos that streaked the windows with moisture. The vista changed every moment as the dark earth vanished into mist below us. We fled north, and I sat on the eastern side of the plane and watched late afternoon sun illuminated this sky kingdom. We came to a great aerial lagoon — huge puffy clouds formed a ring that glowed like white mountain peaks, and a perfectly flat, still layer of transparent wisps created the still surface of a lake in the center of the circle. My eye kept insisting that the clouds I could see through the wisps were reflections of the white peaks above.

The plane banked, and we curved around a great puffy cloud, almost close enough to reach out and touch its surface; I could see the curls of cold steam at its edges that hung motionless in the still, humid air.

As we began our descent into Medellin only thirty minutes later, we drove straight through one of the great puffy mounds of cotton, and the plane shuddered as though it had struck something. Which it had: a layer of greater density, barely noticeable to our heavy earthen forms, but consequential to this beast of the air. It shuddered, steadied, and then we were through and the ground became visible again, startling deep green wrinkles lit by the setting sun and shadowed by the sky mountains that now hung above us.

We slipped between mountain peaks, made of earth and hard stone this time, and suddenly the ground fell away in a great, steep-sloped gorge that folded around us like a pair of cupped hands. The City of Eternal Spring spread out beneath us, its red tile roofs matching the red soil and contrasting with the deep green of its parks and pastures. We made a tight turn, then dropped swiftly to the short runway and touched ground again. The beast’s roar dimmed — it was content after its run. We taxied to the terminal, and the trip was over.

Tue May 4, 2010 (Martes)

Today was our last full day in any one place in Colombia. It was a difficult, draining, but ultimately very good day.

This was the day for family issues.

Papito is old, he isn’t rich, and his living situation with Nena is not good for either of them. It is a difficult situation, and very for Papito and Nena to talk. So this afternoon was all about opening the can of worms, communicating, and solving problems. We used our hotel room as a neutral space to meet.

In the end, we had a good clearing of the air, a straightforward accord among all of us, and some immediate next steps.

Afterwards, we went back to Nena’s. We had originally planned to go to Paula and Alejandro’s for dinner, up on the north edge of Cali, but Marta was not feeling well enough to drive through Cali or eat dinner. I think none of us felt much like being sociable after this afternoon. So we called Paula and Alejandro and cancelled, then ended up having a very quiet evening at Nena’s.

The weather today was positively sucky. The constant rain finally flooded the city. A kilometer or two below Nena’s house, a mudslide covered the road, just a few hours after Natalia took us home and that road and drove back. And apparently large parts of Cali (far from us) are flooded right now, with up to three feet of water in places. Today has had only spots of drizzle, but it has been chilly — yes, chilly here in equatorial Colombia — with 100% humidity. My favorite kind of weather.

We understand that Fort Collins weather has been lovely as well. The forecast I see for Thursday night calls for a low of 28 degrees. Blecch. At least it looks like the weekend might be kind of nice.

We’ll call it a day. Marta and I are both exhausted.

Mon May 3, 2010 (Lunes)

We are approaching the end of our stay in Colombia.

One of the things Papito wanted to show us was the clinic where he worked for so many years. I need to consult with Marta for the details of Papito’s career: he went from medical student in Manizales, to some kind of practicum or rotation in New Orleans (Marta’s first exposure to the US), to a surgical practice in Cali. In the last few years, a friend and associate offered him office space in his ophthalmology clinic to meet with the last of his long-time patients before he retired for good, which was only in the last year. We went to this office and met the wife/receptionist of the ophthalmologist.

From there, we went to Chipechappe Mall for some shoppy-shoppy. They’ve converted the old freight train station into a huge shopping mall. It’s way up on the north edge of the city, while our hotel was down in the south. Our drive back took us through the heart of the city, which was all the downtown New York or Hong Kong you’d ever hope for. Like either New York or Hong Kong, driving through doesn’t really do it justice, but walking through it takes good shoes and an ability to draw energy from the city. I can do that, though it isn’t my primary mode; Marta, however, is hopelessly drained by that kind of nervous energy.

After several stops for groceries and the like, we finally came back past the hotel (remember, it’s at the south end) and then further south and west up the mountain toward Nena’s house.

Her house is on the border of a huge natural park that was purchased by some extremely wealthy Gringo who designated it a nature preserve and prevented any further development within it. The preserve has long walking trails that Marta and I will not be able to experience on this trip.

We opened a bottle of wine, and had cheese and maduro (ripe plantain) for dinner. That was good: Colombian food is generally very heavy, and we’ve been eating far too much of it. The five of us — Papito, Nena, Natalia, Marta, and I — sat on her front porch and talked and laughed until what felt like very late, though it was only about nine o’clock. Natalia drove us home.

Marta crashed almost immediately. I got sucked into the TV movie she’d started, and watched until about midnight.

Rain has been intermittent, but heavy all afternoon and evening.

Sun May 2, 2010 (Domingo)

Three packed days and I haven’t written. Let’s see…

Friday started as another laid-back day on the finca. It picked up a bit as Alonzo, Marta, Papito, and I went into Viterbo for final groceries for the party. While we were there, Alonzo gave me a gift of a carriel, which is what you might call a cowboy’s wallet: very traditional in Colombia, and you see them a lot. It’s a leather pouch, typically with three major dividers inside. By tradition, there must be the following twelve items in the carriel:

A picture of your girlfriend
Matches
Tobacco and papers
A knife
A comb
A deck of cards
Dice for gambling
A mirror
A razor for shaving
Spare shoelaces
(something)
(something)

I also experienced my first (and so far, only) open-faced request for money. A skinny, healthy looking fellow with a shoe-cleaning kit slung over his shoulder saw me, and his face lit up. I try to suspend immediate judgement on such things, especially in a foreign country, but his smile said “Hey, my long-lost Gringo buddy I haven’t seen since the … where did we meet, anyway?” It’s been my experience that people don’t approach strangers who are minding their own business unless they want something: typically directions or money. They’ll also approach you if you look reasonably safe and very confused, usually to help. I didn’t think I looked confused.

He fired a stream of extremely rapid Spanish at me, of which I caught only the word “comida” meaning “food.” I sized him up and decided he didn’t really look like he was starving. So I politely shook my head and said my Spanish was terrible, and I didn’t understand. I did not ask him to go slower: I really didn’t want to know what he said. He repeated himself a couple of times, pantomiming eating. I just shook my head and repeated that I didn’t understand, and he eventually got the message and went away.

I’m sure the reason was the camera, which was hanging around my neck. I had gone into Viterbo specifically to take some pictures. I think the only way to get away with that is to carry a whole backpack full of camera equipment and handle it professionally. Then you might get curious people saying, “What are you doing?” but not the “Hey, my long-lost Gringo buddy…” dreck.

After we returned, some of the party guests began to arrive. Marta and I were tired and both turned in early. We had another night of rain.

On Saturday, a whole bunch of us woke up sick. I’m not sure what hit us, but Papito, Marta, Alberto (Luz Elena’s husband), one of their daughters, and I all felt like absolute crap. We think it might have been a turn in the water, from all the rain: although no one was drinking the stuff, we were showering and washing dishes with it.

As a result, I was pretty out-of-it throughout the entire party, which was a smashing success. I mostly took pictures and chatted with some of the guests who spoke English. I’m afraid under the stress of feeling ill, all my Spanish abandoned me. I’m also becoming more sensitive to the glaring but somewhat subtle errors, like saying “Mui gracias” instead of “Muchas gracias.” I leave out “hay” all the time, emulating English, such as “No problema,” as opposed to the correct “No hay problema.” In addition, several of the people there spoke excellent English, and they were happy for the chance to practice.

It was a lovely gathering for Nena. Her closest friends gathered from wherever they are scattered throughout Colombia (some of them date back to her college years), as well as her cousin Paula and her family, her kids (Javier, Natalie, and one of their cousins named Angelita), and her cousin Fernando, and her uncle Carlos. I think that got everyone: I’ll have to look at the picture with Marta and make sure we’ve annotated it with names.

We had noisemakers to accompany cutting the cake, and the poor parrots went wild, shrieking along with all the noise.

The conversation went on for hours after the party was over, but I crashed hard at sunset: I went to bed and slept straight through until dawn, at least twelve hours. All of us felt much better this morning.

This morning, Marta, Fernando, Natalie, and Luz Elena all went out and harvested mangoes, mostly for fun. Fernando fell out of the tree several times and got himself all muddy. One of the trees was at the top of a steep hill: when they knocked the mangoes loose, they rolled down the hill. They gave up chasing them, and decided to just pick up whatever they could find on the trip back down.

After lunch, we said our sad good-byes, and started the long drive to Cali.

We crossed the Cauca River once between Viterbo and Periera, and we were actually driving upstream along the Cauca. However, the road climbs significantly from that crossing as we move toward Periera, and from there it is a long, slow drop into Cali. There are three mountain ranges in Colombia, running more or less north to south, and the two ranges that bracket the Cauca eventually merge just south of Cali and become the Andes range that runs along the western edge of South America. So, as in Medellin, we are once again in a valley between two ranges, though the eastern range is quite some distance from us here.

Cloud-views were spectacular on the drive to Cali. The valley broadens going south before it narrows again past Cali, and rainstorms played all about us.

We arrived in Cali shortly after nightfall. The rains we’d driven through had not yet reached Cali, so it was still hot, and the air was thick with dust and pollution. Traffic was initially light, as it was Sunday: however, we passed some kind of stadium game letting out just as we drove by, and the traffic stopped completely. The stadium is quite some distance from town, perhaps four or five miles, but a huge number of people simply walk there and back. The roads were lined with pedestrians and the usual game of chicken, though on the multi-lane divided highways it is a game of “I’m cutting in front of you,” and was a lot more like Denver traffic. There is a significant amount of air pollution in the part of Cali we drove through (the industrial district) — it’s one of the few times I’ve seen bright streetlights casting shadows in the air.

The hotel at which we had reservations a) could not find our reservation (they seem to have a lot of trouble with that here, though I’ve had almost as much trouble at times in the US), and b) was not an acceptable room. It was a cute little hotel, but the rooms were tiny, there was no air conditioning at all, and the toilet would not shut off. It was late, we were all tired, no one was feeling especially well, and we gave up and got a room in the Radisson, where we’ve decided to stay until we leave on Wednesday. It’s expensive, but we’ve paid for almost nothing on this trip but the air fare: we can splurge for the last three nights.

A word on prices. I finally figured out that the way to think of pesos is as pennies, not dollars. The Colombians use the European custom of using the period to divide thousands, and the comma to separate fractions (2.000,43 €), so when you see a price of twenty-thousand pesos, it looks like this: 20.000. It looks a lot like twenty dollars, with an extra zero tacked on. The current exchange rate is very close to two thousand pesos to the dollar, or twenty pesos to the penny, so if you simply divide the price you see by two, you’re there. Twenty-thousand pesos is ten bucks.

What we’ve found is that local items, like food, cost a little over half what the equivalent would cost in the US. If you look at a typical restaurant menu and don’t divide by two, it looks a little pricey but still reasonable. Imported items, like computers and games, are little bit more expensive than in the US. Marta got an Acer laptop in the US for about $300, and here an equivalent laptop is about 800,000 pesos ($400).

Fri Apr 30, 2010 (Viernes)

The last couple of days have passed fairly slowly, easily, and without much to say. In addition, I have no Internet connection here, so I’m working strictly off-line.

It is rainy season, so we’ve had mostly rain, and days have been cool. To my north-conditioned skin, it’s pleasantly cool — locals are wearing sweaters.

I had thought I would go into Viterbo on Wednesday, but Marta wanted to go by herself with Luz Elena, and then Nena went along; I would have been a complete annoyance. So I stayed here. Later in the day, we went to the next farm up, which is still on Alonzo’s property — he has quite a bit of land here — and met Roberto, his wife Gladys, and their daughter Elizabeth.

That’s where I got the coffee that pushed me over the edge. A typical way to serve it here is sweet, using panela. All sugar in Colombia is cane sugar; preparation involves cooking it, and that results in a skin of toasted (almost-burned) sugar at the bottom that they call panela, very dark with a molasses-like flavor. This coffee was prepared the traditional way, pouring the sweetened (hot) water through the grounds and then allowing the grounds to steep in the water. The result was a very complex set of flavors entirely unlike any coffee I’ve tasted before.

I also got an exposure to the endemic dangers of Colombia. Roberto took me on a tour of his farm, and at one point handed me a cutting of mint. On one of the mint leaves was a caterpillar. It bit me: two little vampire bites on my pinky.

I’m glad Papito is a physician with lots of years of local experience, because there are insects in Colombia with deadly bites, though the worst are to the north, around the swamps that surround Cartagena. He’s been giving it a look daily, and it’s healing well: a tiny bit of local inflammation, like a mosquito bite, and nothing more. As Alonzo said, that’s one of the troubles with the tropics — you have to know where you put your foot.

The experience has left me with a creepy-crawly feeling.

Papito had a low-blood pressure incident during that same visit; he got very dizzy and could not walk unassisted. That upset Marta. We need to have one of those very serious where-do-we-go-from-here family discussions, which was part of the idea of coming to visit. Right now, Papito is living with Nena, and it isn’t working very well for either of them. There’s still lots of time for that discussion before we leave, but it is growing shorter.

That night it really rained: hours of steady rainfall, still raining when we got up yesterday morning.

Yesterday we drove into Pereira to get party goods for Nena’s birthday party on Saturday, her birthday being another reason for coming down now.
Pereira is a large city, about an hour’s drive from Viterbo. We had passed through only the outskirts before, and we started out in the outskirts again at a big mall. The supermercados (supermarkets) in South America are a bit like a Sam’s Club, but with a consistent inventory: we could buy everything from computers to tires to potato chips to fresh lobster. We were able to get most of what we needed for the party.

For the remaining items we needed to go into the heart of town. I enjoyed that part more than Marta did. It’s very crowded and busy, and reminded me of 42nd and Broadway in New York City, though it felt safer. There are the stores all along the street, and street vendors everywhere, selling everything from chorizo to earrings. The sidewalks are packed with pedestrians, and since I was generally serving as Papito’s companion, letting him hold my arm for balance, we made a wide package. I started to learn to dance around him as we walked, though we weren’t there long enough for me to get very good at it. Still, I didn’t bump into too many people.

One basic rule here is that cars have the right-of-way, not pedestrians. If you are in the street itself, drivers expect you to dodge. Because of Papito, we were always extremely conservative when crossing the street, but with Nena driving we saw a lot of jaywalkers darting across in front of us. She simply expected them to be out of the way by the time she got to them.

We came straight home from Periera, and encountered the police again — they apparently set up speed traps all along that road, like the camera cops in Fort Collins — at the turn-off to Viterbo. This time everyone was wearing a seat belt, and they waved us through.

Alonzo’s parrots have picked up Marta’s laugh, and when they get started, it makes all of the rest of us laugh, too.

The morning dawned heavily overcast. It’s clearing a bit, and is still cool and pleasant. Ah — the sun just appeared.

Wed Apr 28, 2010 (Miercolas, morning)

Yesterday passed slowly and gently. Not much to report: it was a day at the beach, without the beach.

Alonzo lives alone here, but has a woman, Luz Elena, who cooks and cleans for him, and her husband takes care of the property. They, and their four girls, live in the downstairs portion of the house. Alonzo has kidney problems, and needs dialysis four times daily — he just had the machine brought here. I haven’t probed with too many personal questions, and since I can’t follow all of the rapid-fire Spanish, I miss a lot.

So yesterday morning Luz Elena made us breakfast of fresh arepas and farm-fresh eggs, with coffee. At some point in the day, I got into the pool and swam a bit, showering before and after. There is no heated water in the house. If you want hot water, you heat it on the stove. So showers are cold. It’s very refreshing, and it certainly solves the problem of people lingering in the shower and using up all the hot water. Not that this is a workable strategy in temperate climates.

Other than that, I spent the entire day playing with photographs. I’ll be posting some as soon as I get an Internet connection. The automatic adjustments on the camera are fantastic, but they wash out the pictures in this light. In particular, the electronics do not seem to be able to believe the shades of green, so they try to compensate. I’ve been able to adjust the pictures back to something closer to what we see, here.

My Spanish is improving daily. I keep learning more words, and my ability to parse streams of conversation into words is getting better. I still can’t follow a fast conversation, because I trip over words and expressions I simply do not know. But when people speak slowly and simply, I can usually follow them, and last night I even managed to tell a couple of jokes in Spanish. Vulgar humor translates the best: those conditions are universal. Political humor also does pretty well, so long as you know the politics. Word-humor doesn’t translate at all.

Last night was pretty ghastly for me, weather-wise. The humidity kept increasing, despite the intermittent rains, and all of the insects last night came out in vast hordes to hang out around the indoor lights — the night before, there had been bugs, but not that many. Despite the heat, Marta and I needed to cover up and tuck with the sheet, just so the little bastards didn’t tickle us to death. None of them were biters, thank goodness, or there’d be nothing left of us but bones this morning.

In the middle of the night, the heat finally broke, with long rolls of thunder and a fairly heavy rain. This morning dawned pleasantly cool and cloudy.

At the moment, Papito, Marta, and Nena are quietly conversing, the various songbirds are making jungle-sounds, the hens are clucking, the two roosters are announcing daylight, and one of the captive parrots keeps shouting “ele-NA! mar-TA!”

Mon Apr 26, 2010

I write this sitting on the veranda of Marta’s uncle Alonzo’s finca just outside the village of Viterbo. Veranda? Actually, it’s his living room.

The architecture of the house exposes just how tropical this environment is. Directly behind my back is a long concrete and plaster wall that runs along the center ridge line of the roof, shared by the three bedrooms and the common bath: each bedroom is like one of the separate rooms of an old cinderblock roadside motel, doors facing out. The room in which I sit occupies the other half of the house. The floor is elegant tile; a glass-topped dining table and several couches are arranged about this huge room; artwork hangs on the wall behind me between the bedroom doors.

The entire room is completely open to the outside.

I can grasp the idea of year-round warmth that precludes the need for artificial heat. I can almost get my head around the idea that there are no serious biting insects around (the bedrooms have screens, but mostly, I think, to keep out unwanted legions of fluttery, tickling critters that would disturb sleep). But what seems impossibly odd about the room is that there is no provision for wind.

I grew up in Wyoming, where a bowling ball on a strong chain is used to determine which way the wind is blowing. I remember the time in college when they couldn’t report the wind velocity in Boulder because all the weather equipment had blown away. At least twice a year, Fort Collins has winds that flatten privacy fences and sometimes rip shingles off roofs. Wind is like death and taxes: unpleasant and inevitable.

Here, my eye catches the overhang on the roof — about two feet. Right at the edge of the room, its back to the “window” under that two-foot overhang, is a couch with a soft velour upholstery that isn’t going to survive getting soaked, especially in the perpetual humidity — if it got wet in the rain, there would be little choice but to throw it out. Right next to the couch, under the same window, is a nice stereo system. All this is protected by a scant two feet of overhang.

I can do the math, but the answer seems wrong.

Everyone else has gone to bed. I think Alonzo is watching television in his bedroom — I hear a voice and music, faintly. But the principal sounds are crickets, frogs, and something that sounds like a pair of sticks being banged together (a different frog, I think). The dogs and chickens are asleep. I don’t know what other animals are about, but I’m sure they are asleep, too, or perhaps hunting. I heard someone say something about coyotes, but none are calling at the moment.

It’s very peaceful.

Our road trip today was mostly unremarkable. We rose for our final breakfast at the Recinto de Pensamiento, and had a delightful and lengthy conversation with Carlos, our waiter, and Fernando, the desk clerk who had checked us in on Friday night. Carlos is happy as a waiter, but he wants to learn English so he can interact better with foreign customers. Fernando speaks excellent English, after living in the US for three years. He liked the money he made in the US, but he simply could not stand to be so far from family.

Quite some time later, Javier, Papito, and Nena came for us. We got the luggage secured to the top of Nena’s car, dropped Javier off at the first taxi we found at the side of the road, and headed toward Cali.

We stopped for lunch in Chinchiná in the very heart of coffee country, the place that Papito says he wants to move. It’s unfair to judge a place on one viewing in the rain, but I simply didn’t much care for Chinchiná. Its climate is only slightly warmer than Manizales, and it has a burned-out feel to it. It didn’t help that I picked a bad lunch item: Marta’s chicken was delicious, but my beef was very tough and they gave me a slab large enough to use as a tire retread.

A little further along we came to Pereira, which Marta and I really liked. It’s a larger city, like Manizales (nothing like Medellin). But Manizales is built on top of a mountain peak, and the streets and traffic are pretty much totally insane. Pereira is in a valley, surrounded by lots of flat open space, ringed by distant mountains, so it has been able to build its roads differently. It also seems to be a very vibrant area with lots of varied industry. It didn’t hurt that we also caught our first clear weather and sunshine for the day. We stopped at an Éxito shopping center to get pillows and towels for ourselves (Hitchhiker’s Guide, you know) as well as some gifts for the staff at Alonzo’s finca.

The entrance to Viterbo from the main road is spectacular, a long side-road lined with cultivated trees that arch overhead to form a long, graceful tunnel. I will try to get photographs later: we will be here all week. We stopped in the town center to get coffee, pastries, and final directions to Alonzo’s farm. Those directions took us to a narrow, muddy, bumpy road that ran a few kilometers into the hills. Then we saw Alonzo at the gate, waving, and we were here.

We had one uncomfortable moment between Pereira and Viterbo: Nena got pulled over at a police stop and cited for Marta and Papito (in the back seat) not wearing their seat belts. Then the officer decided to let her off with a warning. I kept my mouth absolutely shut through the whole thing — no need to alert anyone to the presence of a stumble-tongued Gringo in the car. That loses you lots of points in negotiations: whether looking for good prices at a roadside fruit stand, or looking crestfallen enough to get out of a traffic ticket. It can also be dangerous — sometimes the police aren’t really police.

I do apologize for having no pictures recently. Technical problems. Pictures to resume as soon as possible.

Sun Apr 25, 2010

A long, tiring, and emotionally powerful day for Marta.

We started off with The Tour that our hostel (Recinto del Pensamiento) offers, which was enchanting. I still don’t completely understand the place. It sits on a land-grant of some sort, as a combination nature preserve, farm, ecological education center, and hostel with a spectacular outdoor reception center. At some point I should probably figure out what this place actually is. In the meantime, I’m simply going to call it an excellent place to stay.

The tour started with the herb gardens. We needed to catch a chairlift for the next part, so our herb herb tour was rushed. I was surprised to find that I knew most of them (such as mint and rosemary) as well as their basic medicinal properties. The only real surprise was cannabis, which is simply an herb here: it’s good (not surprisingly) for nausea and anxiety.

The chairlift took us up the mountain over the lush rainforest. It’s not a high lift, and in many places came quite close to the ground, though in others it took us across some pretty deep clefts with streams running at the bottom.

At the top, we toured the butterfly pavilion (papillón de mariposa). After that, we listened to a brief lecture on common birds of the area. Marta was interpreting for me, and she stopped at one point and said, “Oh! Oh!” On Tuesday through Friday they take birdwatching tours through the forest in very small groups, and Marta was rather upset about the fact that we are leaving here tomorrow (Monday). Had we been here longer, she’d have been on the sign-up sheet in a flash. Even without the tour, however, we saw some of the birds they mentioned later in the day. One, the Colombian equivalent of the turkey (protected now, since it has been hunted almost to extinction), is reputed to appear only before it rains, and sure enough, it rained.

We ended the tour with a walk back down through the rainforest, to view the orchids.

All forests possess a sacred quality, but there is something magical about the rainforest. You see prehistoric ferns set amidst very recent wildflowers. Birds are hard to spot, yet if you simply let your eyes take in the whole forest, there is constant windless movement as birds leap from branch-to-branch. The forest sounds preternaturally quiet, but only because our modern ear is tuned to the roar of machinery. Shift that perception and the rainforest is suddenly full of the chatter of living things, from birdcall to the sound of crickets and frogs, to the chuckle of running water.

After the tour, I was soaked, though not by rain. In humid heat, I do just fine, but in humid chill, I sweat endlessly: which does nothing to my body temperature, of course, because the sweat can’t evaporate anyway. The climate here is quite chilly, but every bit as humid as a steam room. I don’t think I could live here comfortably.

After I changed shirts, we went for lunch, then soaked in the adjacent hot springs. This entire area is volcanic; one of the nearby peaks blew up as recently as 1985. The thermal waters contain a typical mix of volcanic minerals, but they are intensely salty to the taste, at least as salty as seawater: I’m more accustomed to the sulphur pools of Colorado, and I don’t recall the water tasting that salty. The soak relaxed me to a degree that made it difficult to keep my eyes open for the rest of the day.

Papito did not join us in the pool, but he was tired afterward, too. So we took him back to Javier’s apartment and then set out again, first to the cathedral.

Our interest in the cathedral bears some explanation. A friend of ours, Anne, recently completed a sabbatical pilgrimage — that’s what it turned into — in which she went looking for Black Madonnas of southern France and northern Spain. One of the historical facts about Catholic churches in Europe is that they are almost invariably located atop old Pagan sites of worship. One can argue that this was simply a religious continuation of the standard Roman practice of appropriating local religions for political purposes, but there is still the question of why the Pagan sites were there in the first place.

It turns out that there is a reasonably consistent answer: the location can be pretty easily dowsed. Anne’s training in dowsing has involved finding what she calls “water lines” and “fire lines.” The former involves different formations of water under the ground, and the latter involves fault lines in the earth. Both water and piezoelectric stresses in stone produce complex electrical fields, and the human body reacts to these, which is probably why dowsing works at all. Interestingly enough, the older Catholic churches, and the still-older Pagan sites they mark, are typically at an intersection of fire lines, water lines, or both. Simply paying close attention to your body as you approach any kind of marked “sacred space” makes it pretty easy to map the energy fields around the site.

Marta and I wanted to “body dowse” the cathedral.

Our impression: the cathedral in Manizales has a huge energy field that encompasses the entire hill that it sits atop. Marta and I are not skilled enough to know whether it is water, fire, or something else. Marta says that she’s heard there is a big underground lake under the cathedral. With all the volcanism in the mountains, I would guess there are some pretty potent fire lines as well.

Interestingly enough, in Bolivar Square just outside the cathedral stands a dramatic sculpture of a traditional shaman shape-shifting into the form of a condor — the sculpture is called the Bolivar Condor. It forms an interesting contrast to the cathedral.

After a brief snack with coffee, we headed up to Chipre, the long park we visited yesterady. Unfortunately, the weather had by now turned overcast, alternating between fog and light rain, blocking the views on every side. In addition, the park was completely packed on this Sunday evening, so there was no place to park. We left without even getting out of the car. That’s when the excursion turned magical for Marta.

Marta and Nena decided to try to find their maternal grandfather’s finca (farm) just outside Manizales. They directed a very patient Javier here and there, searching for anything familiar to lead them to the almost-forgotten road. Manizales is as steep as San Francisco, and its roads plunge up and down with little regard to the limitations of automobiles. We eventually found what seemed to be the right road, and with each kilometer, Marta and Nena grew more excited. We reached the turn-off to the farm, and both Marta and Nena were astonished to find all its main features almost unchanged since they had been children in diapers. The farm had been granted to the Church at some point, and is now a place where children and young people come to learn some of the forgotten arts of farming, animal husbandry, sewing, weaving, and so forth. They met the nun in charge, who smiled and told them to explore to their hearts’ content. They learned that the place rents out to large parties like weddings; it would be perfect for a family reunion that Marta and Nena have been tossing around as an idea. They wandered the grounds remembering where they slept on visits, or where their loyal old farm dog had prevented the two of them from wandering through the gate onto the road, and how their grandmother, Santa Paula, had worked the gardens behind the house.

After finding the farm, we returned to Manizales and went up and down the streets again looking for their paternal grandmother’s house in the city. When we found it, they pointed to the door that had a counter-balanced staircase that could be lifted with one hand, allowing the horses to walk straight through the house to the stables in back. I could only pick up the few stories Marta shared in English: the Spanish throughout this was non-stop and impossibly rapid.

The rest of the evening was unremarkable, except for the ghastly lasagna Marta and Nena picked up in a supermarket to share for dinner. I did reasonably well — I limited myself to half a serving — but poor Marta’s stomach complained all night long.

We went to sleep with the sound of gentle rain on the roof.

Apr 24, 2010

Today turned out to be a “fun with Spanish” day.

We took breakfast this morning at the hostel: huevos revueltos con jamon, cebolla, y tomate (scrambled eggs with ham, onion, and tomato), with the ever-present arepa — this one made of very white corn and, like ultra-white Wonder Bread, not very tasty — with fresh mandarin juice and a fruit plate. And, of course, coffee.

I messed up with the fruit plate, but lucked out. They indicated that there were three fruits, piña, niña, and santa maria — hold it, that’s not right — piña, mango, and papaya, and that it was available mezcla, meaning “mixed.” That sounded good to me, so I asked for mezcla. I must have mispronounced or somehow confused the issue, because both Marta and the waitress jumped on me, demanding (so I thought) that I pick one of the three. So I shrugged and picked piña. When it arrived, Marta had her fruit mezcla, just as I’d wanted it, and I had a plate of only pineapple, just as I’d ordered it. However, the mango turned out to be slightly underripe, and the papaya was actually boring old cantaloupe. The pineapple was excellent, and I had a whole plate of it. So ñah, ñah.

The taxi trip to Javier’s apartment near noon was filled with a rapid, animated, almost-arm-waving conversation between Marta, who was catching up on recent Manizales history, and the cab driver, who was full of recent Manizales history. Our hostel is located out in the boondocks of the zona industrial, surrounded by manufacturing plants. Right next door to us is a plant that makes magnesium wheel hubs for most of the auto industry, worldwide. After the driver had explained that, the next thing I thought I heard was zona devina, which had me scratching my head: is that the area where they build churches, or does God perhaps have a vending booth? If so, what does He sell? I had to ask, and after they got done laughing, neither Marta nor the cab driver could remember saying anything that could possibly be mistaken for zona devina. Certainly not the equally enchanting zona de vino, which unfortunately doesn’t exist here either.

By the time we reached Javier’s apartment, it was time for lunch, so we set out on a walk for food. Marta kept walking ahead with Javier, leaving me with Papito, who carried on a non-stop barrage of very fast Spanish full of words I’d never dreamed of: I caught perhaps one word in a hundred, tried to build a context for even parsing the rest, and then watched my brain melt down in slow-motion. I was lucky that the day was cool or all that brain-melting would have made me unpleasantly warm.

What’s surprising is how much I did catch. I actually understood that the huge tower we were approaching had once held cable-cars that led to the deep valleys that surround Manizales, and that the building we were passing had been the terminus station for the cable-cars.

We finally found lunch in the food court at the local mall. Food is done differently here: it has not gone the “efficiency” route of all the burger and fast-food outlets in the US. It is inefficient, and you have to wait for your food to be prepared. It is consequently much tastier. I had something called plataños, which is a single plantain, flattened and deep-fried, and then buried in stuff. A flattened plantain is almost exactly the size of a small wooden cutting board. I know this because it was served on a small wooden cutting board. The mezcla on top in my case was a combination of chicken and pork, in a divine sauce (perhaps this was the zona devina?) Interestingly enough, they served it with really cheap plastic knives and forks, and I went through two forks before Javier got up, went to the serving stall, and complained. They brought out a real knife and fork, and I had no trouble after that. Papito only destroyed one fork, and got the real utensils, too. Marta ate with her fingers, and Javier had ordered something that he ate with a spoon.

We walked again after lunch. We passed a sign advertising ice-cream cones, conos, and I pointed out to Javier that conos and años are two words where pronunciation is critical. Javier was amused. We turned back as rain threatened, and it caught us about a block from home: fortunately only a light sprinkle. We sat in Javier’s tiny student apartment with its two plastic chairs, one bed, and one bean-bag. Marta used Javier’s temperamental iron to dry my shirt (I had gallantly taken the brunt of the rain when it came to sharing the umbrella), while I used Javier’s internet connection to post yesterday’s entry. I tried to keep up with as much of the conversation as I could without being a nuisance.

After the rain stopped, we took a taxi out to the edge of town, where a long park overlooks the valleys in that direction. Papito had finally begun to grasp just how little Spanish I understand, and began to speak more slowly and with simpler words. He also started pulling out his long-abandoned English — he had once been fluent. We actually began to converse, on a variety of subjects. He is a very funny man, very intelligent with a pointed sense of humor, and I think a lot of wisdom. I do wish I spoke a better Spanish.

It is always interesting to watch people. We bought snacks along the park walkway and sat down on a stone wall to eat. Just up from us was a young woman and her man, and they clearly were not speaking. She fumed silently, and he was clearly at fault and didn’t know exactly what to do next. After a long period of silence, she got up and walked away, and he followed her to their motorcycle, clearly intending to take her home or to the next brooding-spot. Or there was the happy couple walking down the street, smiling, laughing, talking, touching. Or the fellow dancing at the side of the path and sort-of lip-synching to a very loud (and very cheap) boom box. I say sort-of because he was actually singing loudly enough to hear, and had a lot more enthusiasm than talent: he was, in fact, so bad and so enthusiastic that everyone smiled as they passed him.

A continued short walk took us to the Space Needle. It’s part of a permanent municipal amusement park featuring a giant swing that lets you fly out over one of the steep slopes, a zip-line for kids, trampolines with tethers, and similar self-powered rides. We went up in the space needle to look at the surrounding countryside as dusk fell. Tomorrow or the next day Marta and I will try to get up there again at dusk, with camera and tripod, and I will describe the spectacular view then.

From there we walked to a little open-air restaurant, and the discussion with the waitress reminded me of the Monty Python Cheese Shop skit. The restaurant seemed to be out of everything. Then the waitress had to stand there tapping her pen impatiently while Javier delivered a lecture on the nature of food preparation in Colombia from first inhabitants on Earth, while Marta argued with him and Papito added his personal recollections. They eventually came to some kind of agreement, and we ordered arepas choclo to take home. These are the kind of arepa Marta had our first night in Medellin. Most arepas are made from hulled corn germ prepared in various ways, dried, and then ground to flour of different textures. The arepa choclo is made from the unprocessed corn germ, and as a result, it tastes almost exactly like sweet corn-on-the-cob.

We had some of the best conversation yet (for me) while we sat waiting. There was a very attractive young couple in a preliminary discussion of human anatomy at the next table (the place was nearly deserted at that hour), and Papito asked why I wasn’t paying more attention to the couple. I explained to everyone that I had to be very careful, because every time I looked, the guy would look at me, and I had to look away. The conversation rapidly ran downhill toward the gutter, and when it comes to innuendo, I can hold my own in any language. I related my earlier conversation with Javier, and Papito fixed me with a stern eye and asked if I liked coños, deliberately mispronouncing it. I raised an eyebrow, bared my teeth in a grin, and said, “Si, con mucho gusto! Mui delicioso!” Javier howled, Marta howled, and we all laughed until we nearly choked. When Marta remarked that we were corrupting poor Javier, I shrugged and replied “Mi trabajo, a mucho honór.” (“My job, with much honor.”) Somehow, I was managing all of this in Spanish, and thanks to Marta, my diction is clear. Though diction doesn’t help when you say something like casa-a-casa, when you actually mean cara-a-cara, which happened as soon as I met Nena a short time later.

We took a taxi back to Javier’s apartment and waited for Nena, Marta’s sister, to join us. After she arrived, and after I made my comment about finally meeting house-to-house, recovered from her utterly blank look and then corrected myself (face-to-face), we ate. Later, Javier introduced us to Angela the landlady, who — it turns out — is also a Restrepo, and relatively closely related. We sat for a fifteen-minute conversation in which Angela and Papito argued about one of their common ancestors.

So today, we walked, we ate, we talked. Then walked, ate, and talked some more. Then listened to the elders remember the ancestors. It would be hard to imagine a more delightful day.