Sylvia, Columbia

By far the most exciting thing I´ve done in this country is to go to the Tuesday market in Sylvia. Once a week the Guambiano people come down from the villages surrounding Sylvia to sell their wares as well as stock up on others. The Guambiano, one of Columbia`s oldest indigenous peoples, still dress in their traditional costumes of a blue shawl, bowler hat and skirt, even the  men, though I notice many of the teenage boys are wearing pants. The women wear thick strands of some kind of bead around their necks, had net bags slung on their backs and carried beautifully patterned wool shoulder bags.

On the square in Sylvia

 The market itself is huge and very colorful. On the street there are many clothing booths but inside there is a riot of color where fruits and vegetables adorn table after table after table. Some areas have huge canvas sacks of different kinds of potatoes and rice; sugars come in different colored bricks. There were cooked items and I fell in love with some empanadas made of yellow corn with mashed potato inside.

On the meat section, fresh cuts hang in all shapes and sizes, horrible to those not used to gore, the cutters and attendants get a big kick out of leading us greenhorns through, pointing out hooves, hearts and eyeballs among other things.

My travel partner, Niko, found out about a small settlement higher up so we took a ride in a small Land Rover with eight people and two panes of glass in the back, two up front, two more on top and two men standing on the bumper. We were pretty packed in but having a really jolly time of it. Our destination was Casique, not a town with a square but a caseria, like a neighborhood almost at the top of the mountain. It is an agrarian community that grows potatoes, some corn, and lots of poppies, all worked by hand. We stopped at the school where there food for lunches is grown on the grounds, all of it, even the meat. The gardener told us the students have the job of feeding the bunnies, chickens, pigs and sheep on his off days.

Too bad this bus is full.

View from Casique

Casique - Looking the other direction.

In the late afternoon, we boarded another bus for another ride along a twisting, winding, ridge hugging road with yet another madman at the wheel. As usual we arrived alive in Popayan. Whew!

Villa de Leyva, Columbia

Villa de Leyva is a very small town a few hours north of Bogota. It has a very white washed look with red tile roofing, balconies and overhangs framed in dark wood. Colonial, they call it. The churches are not ornate, not even inside, and they tend to be that square steeple Spanish style, hardly exciting after the cathedrals of Europe. Nonetheless, this is a charming little town, especially when the clouds start to pile up and the afternoon sun bathes everything in golden light. There are a couple major roads that are paved but many are of cobblestone, large, uneven and a challenge to negotiate. What fascinates me is that there are very visible fossils in a number of those stones and potsherds of indeterminate origin scattered among them.

Saturday Market

Check out the feathered pets

My hostel was the funkiest yet most unique I’ve ever inhabited. It shows its age and I certainly don t object to that. The owner, a woman who greets everyone with great affection, has it decorated in the most interesting art I’ve seen, from pencil drawings to posters, to odd things such as antique steam irons, along with the cable spool chair, vapors couch and the antique chair with the peg leg. The roof overhang is extended with plastic that leaks badly in a hard rain. Three makeshift bathrooms, toilet only, are sort of roughed in with rounded slabs from a lumber yard and bamboo. There is one sink on the wall outside and one room is opened up daily for all to share the shower. This place is so eclectic I couldn’t help but fall in love, especially with the large green yard that unfortunately filled with campers on the weekend. The owner offered to move my friend and I to a room in her brand new hotel but we both couldn’t bring ourselves to leave.

One must get away from the square to eat like a local so for every meal we take a different route and choose a hole in the wall to dine in. I’ve had three different kinds of cream soup, chicken, beef and catfish. They all are thick with a base that is distinctly bean, each a meal in itself. One night I had arepes, a thick tortilla with choriso sausage for Dave and for me, mushrooms, beef and cheese. The locals snickered a little because it is to be eaten by lifting the little plate, sliding it just enough off to chew on but I tried to eat it like a well-buttered pizza. I am particularly fond of the drinks, especially lulo juice, as well as those I can’t pronounce.

The side trip was to El Fosil not too far out of Villa de Leyva. Their major attraction is a Pliosaurus from the Cretaceous Period. It is displayed in a bed of sand, an organized skeleton of fossilized bones, much the way it was excavated. They also had many ammonites, those coil looking fossils, concretions split to reveal fern fossils, petrified wood and quartz crystals. I had a little side trip of my own taking a short hike up the road, checking out the ditch. It was quite the little geology adventure that ended with a cone of raisin ice cream back at the museum.

My last day I spotted this old homestead behind the bus station

The Road to Villa de Leyva

I took one of many minibuses leaving from the Bogota terminal to Villa de Leyva. It was not an express bus, stopping for just about anybody who wanted to ride it, or so it seemed.

My seatmate

 Finally, out of the city I got my first glimpse of rural Columbia. I was taken by the many shades of green as fields checkered through valleys, up and over hills, some fairly steep.  Small villages lined the roads, mostly white houses with gently sloping rooflines covered in red tile or corrugated fiberglass and a cow was tethered here, another there, along the highway. As the mountains got steeper and rockier, there was more cultivation, mostly potatoes. I love the look of those heavily furrowed fields, many being harvested with huge pink plastic bags full of spuds dotting the rows. I saw one fellow leading two horses with sacks of potatoes slung over their backs but mostly there were trucks with rounded forms over the back covered with black shiny tarp material, looking like dark, rolling greenhouses.

  

In Tunja, the bus was turned back due to road construction. We were led by a motorcycle cop over what was barely more than a one lane dirt track that wound for an extra hour´s worth of slow, creeping miles along the edge of the mountains. It was steep, very rocky, rutted and quite a different challenge for a driver who was accustomed to cornering at top speed as though he had foot pegs to scrape. Our brakes were screaming and everyone looked really tense. I was the only one that seemed to enjoy the adventure, looking out at plants and trees I´ve never seen before, beautiful green valleys and spring-fed lush little homesteads.

I can´t count the times I had to keep myself from shouting out ´stop the bus!´ so I could take a photo. Shooting pictures through dusty windows of a moving, lurching vehicle is a challenge and I had little success.

Bogota, Columbia

I arrived in Bogota late at night and took a prearranged airport transfer, the safest route to the hostel I booked in the Candelaria district, the old part of town. All the guidebooks warn that this area is not safe at night and I believe it. At midnight we arrived passing several little clusters of men hanging out on the street. I noticed when we got out of the cab that they moved in on us just a little but did not bother us. We had to hike up a very narrow cobbled alley to get to the hostel itself. 

One of my planned destinations was the Museum of all thing fat featuring the Colombian artist Fernando Botero. In it were many of his paintings, big ones of big people, big fruits, even portraits of other artists, all blown up and fat. What a sense of humor! His later style was wonderful, having the look of soft, blended pastels though much of it was done in oil. He also sculpted beautifully. There were paintings by on the notable artists but his were the best.

In a large square in front of a huge old cathedral, there were a handful of people gathered with llamas selling yellow tubes of something I did not buy or even inquire about. Other than them, the square was carpeted with pigeons, millions of them, I´m sure. After watching for a while I figured out what was in those tubes...food for the pigeons. People buy it, pay for the privilege of being covered with wildly flapping, pecking birds for a few minutes. What fun to watch them.

I stopped to eat in a tiny cafe because I was attracted to the little mounds lined up in the window, colorful and obviously sweet. I wanted substance so I went in and ordered a large item wrapped in leaf, a tamal, and a glass of curuba, a fruit found only in the high altitudes of Columbia, mixed with milk. The tamal made with a more textured masa than those from Mexico made of corn with yellow peas in it that looked like mini garbanzos. Inside that was a very tender chicken drumstick, bone and all. Delicious. I even tasted the leaf because  it looked so much like a seaweed but was not at all salty. I asked the owner who was a tall distinguished man, seventh generation of this family-owned business in a 400 year old building. He told me the leaf was a plantain variety. 

What impresses me most about Bogota is the graffiti  It is everywhere one can possibly paint, miles and miles along the highways, on just about every wall, on buildings. No surface is safe from it. It ranges from colorful scribbles to fantastic fine rt. On a bus I passed through an area of new brick apartment buildings, block after block of them, all with iron fences. No graffiti (yawn) how dull. If I were a graffiti artist, I would take that as a challenge.

Stay Tuned

Next trip is Columbia, South America. Soon.

Last Photos From Indonesia

While in Indonesia I asked several people how many islands there were in that country. I got many different answers, seventeen thousand, eighteen thousand, a hundred and some thousand, even three hundred thousand. No two answers were the same. Someone asked me why I didn't look on the internet and I replied that it was too much fun not knowing. Later, I did look on the internet and there were several different options to chose from there. I confess that I only went to six of them. I close on this journey with a mix of photos as follows:



      



 

A bamboo house near Yogyakarta.

Labuhan Bajo sunset

Last Stop, Sideman

Last stop, Sideman, a small town ‘way up in the mountains of Bali. The fastboat from Nusa Lembongan left me on a beach in Sanur where my friend and a taxi met me. The driver got lost a time or two trying to find Sideman and blamed it on the fact that he was new to the job. I’m not so sure I believe that. A short distance from town we had a room rented in an establishment that had an infinity pool, not my ideal but not bad on a hot day. We were surrounded by rice paddies, gardens, mountains and exotic wild flowers. That’s more my style.

That afternoon, we wandered into what I think was the village and turned down a pathway that ran along beside walled compounds that smacked of old, old. I was reminded of the castles I visited in other countries and wondered if defense had anything to do with it. Around a turn or two we came across building where people were processing rice and stopped to watch as they poured sacks of it into hoppers. The bran was blown out a window and the rice came out between what seemed like small millstones, nice and white, where an open bag waited. We watched, took a few photos, got suckered out of a few rupiahs, then moved on.

Our little alleyway took us out to the main road with rice fields on both sides. I fell in love on the spot. The paddies were more or less in rectangles, though some were contour to the shape of the slope, and they were in different stages of the growing process.

I’ve been asking people about the growing of rice and it goes a little like this: A field can be harvested three, maybe four times a year and must be replanted after each harvest. In the beginning, the young plants are the most beautiful shade of green, very bright. It’s like a grass and grows pretty tightly together so I imagine weeding isn’t such a big issue. When it starts going to seed, the birds are deterred by all manner of cloth, clothing, even plastic bags tied to bamboo poles. Then the rice grass is cut, bundled, and carried out on the heads or shoulders of workers, on motor scooters, and any other way it can be transported but seldom by automobile, it seems. It is then left out to dry, the seed is knocked off and into the hopper it goes, if one is lucky enough to have one available. I’ve seen people with big piles of rice on blankets turning it over and over with whatever tool is available, once even a cooking pot. After harvest, the plot is burned, then fertilized, the water is let back in and more rice is planted. There are little waterways everywhere, often concrete, and I was told the water comes from springs in the mountains.  I’ve been fascinated with the process since landing in Bali and am grateful to my travel partner for booking us in the midst of it.

The next day we rented a motor scooter and took off without a map with the goal of finding the water temple. Talk about mountain roads! We twisted, wound, up, around and down all day long passing through several little villages on our way. One had large drying mats lining the streets and there we stopped. We talked to a family who tried to tell us what was being dried, something non-leafy that is smoked as well as mats of cloves. They invited us into their compound where one woman was weaving beautiful material. The women converged on me and wrapped me with a sorong, sashes, even a traditional shirt, clearly having a wonderful time. I was positioned for photos, then Eric was dressed like a Balinese man and more photos were taken. I’ve got to admit, it was the highlight of my day.

We did find the water temple, ate lunch there, then turned back. Finding Sideman after all that was a challenge.  Once in a while I’d see something familiar, but mostly I think Eric was just following his nose because there were very few directional signs. As we got close we stopped to ask a lot, got waved on this way, that way, and finally rolled into out villa just before dark.

The next day we toured closer to home, watched someone playing gamelan instruments at a small temple, walked to the river, then had an incredible ice cream desert before taking a taxi to Kuta for a massage, dinner, then to the airport where I boarded a flight for home. I honestly have to say that this is one trip I didn’t want to end, not ever.