Cartagena

We got into Cartagena around 7pm.  Our trip leaders had planned a rooftop reception at the hotel, but that was scratched for lack of time.  They made up for it by transporting us in horse drawn carriages to a restaurant (Don Juan) for our farewell dinner.  The appetizer selection included very thinly sliced, marinated octopus, thin slices of eggplant rolled around cheese with a tomato sauce, and thin slices of beef served on zucchini slices.  I had a delicious shrimp risotto for dinner and warm chocolate cake for dessert.  And a great caipirinha to drink!

City wall

lizard door knocker

lion head door knocker

View from our hotel rooftop over the city

In the morning we had a tour of the city with a history and language professor from Cartagena.  The part of the city most available to tourists is the old walled part including the City Center and the Getsemani neighborhoods.  There is also a fancy high rise area along the beach called Boca Grande that we did not get to.  We were told that most other areas outside the city walls were not so safe.  The city center has been well maintained and some parts are still being restored.   Many buildings have a central courtyard and are two to three stories tall.  Cartagena has a new mayor that everyone seems excited about.  Apparently the last few have been at best irresponsible and at worst corrupt.  This mayor was even likened to the Spanish Jesuit priest Peter Claver, who was made a saint for ministering to the slaves in Cartagena, although this was by a guy who seemed somewhat demented or drunk at 9 in the morning.

We were also introduced to a couple palenqueras, women of African descent who live in a village outside Cartagena founded by escaped slaves.  The women make money by coming into the city in their colorful dresses and baskets of fruit to pose for photos with tourists.

Dancers

Palenqueras with our trip leaders

The tour ended outside the Naval Museum where our trip leaders had arranged a band and dancers to perform a few of the traditional Caribbean dances, most of which have African and Spanish influences. Our final trip activity was to gather to say goodbye at the hotel and learn the winner of the Colombian trivia quiz that had been handed out on the bus ride the day before.  There was a tie for first place between me and Jake and the mother-daughter team, but in the tie-breaking question Jake won it for us!  We got a little replica of the naked lady statue by Botero that I am sure we will always treasure.  The tie-breaking question was about the large brass door knockers seen on many doors around the city.  They used to be used to represent your status in the city.  The lizards represented homes of those associated with royalty for example.

On our own in the afternoon we wandered around the city center taking in the scenery and hot, humid air. We had lunch at Pescadita, a very small ceviche restaurant that was quite good.   We met our friends from Santa Fe for dinner again (they had been to Medellin in between Bogota and Cartagena) to swap travel stories and impressions of Colombia.  We ended up sitting outside on a plaza for pizza and craft beer.  There were some odd pizza combos like sausage and French fry pizza.  We went with chicken and mushroom.

On Saturday we took a walk around Getsemani, a neighborhood with narrower streets, very colorful buildings and street art.  There are lots of hostels and restaurants in the area and it would probably be a happening place at night.  We had a leisurely lunch at a place featuring local dishes.  Jake got a whole fried fish and I had the cazuela, a hot stew filled with all kinds of seafood.  Both were served with a dark brown coconut rice and patacones, fried plantain patties.  After a lazy afternoon hanging out by our hotel’s pool we took a cab to the Cartagena airport (only 20 minutes from the city center and surrounded by city itself) for our 8pm flight to Bogota and our 12am flight to Dallas.  If you are flying international out of Bogota be forewarned that there can be a long, slow line to go through customs before getting to your gate.

street art in Getsemani

A street in Getsemani

The Caribbean Coast

Paso Fino horse and rider

After a short visit to a Paso Fino horse farm and therapeutic riding center near our hotel, our group flew from Pereira to Bogota to Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast.  From Santa Marta we crossed northeast from the dry coastal forest over mountains to wet tropical forest and our hotel, Cayena Beach Villa.  The Villa was built by two brothers and has about 11 rooms.  Next door is a hostel they own. Both are down a very bumpy dirt road off the main road. Our room had a bougainvillea covered balcony overlooking the large pool.  Past the pool is the beach, long and nearly undeveloped.  Below the rooms are open air sitting areas and the bar/kitchen.  The whole building is post and beam construction. The food was excellent.  A buffet breakfast in the mornings with arepas, scrambled eggs, bacon or ham, and fresh fruit and fruit juices.  Lots of seafood dishes with interesting salads, tender barbecued pork ribs, and packed lunches with eggplant and avocado or Cubano sandwiches.

In the morning we set off on a half hour bus ride to Tayrona National Park.  Our 9 mile hike started on private land that was charging a brand new admission fee of 2000 pesos/person (less than $1).  Once we entered the park, the path became narrower and went through a forest of large trees up and over the mountains to the sea.  It was a beautiful hike and our local guide Juan told us about how the Kogui people use some of the plants.  Some Kogui were selling handmade ocarinas, stone sculptures, and bags and bracelets made of plant fibers.  They have negotiated with the Park Service to close the park 2 months a year.  They probably would have liked it to be closed more often.  The Kogui believe that there is a balance between positive (men, water, sun, etc.) and negative (women, earth, the moon etc.) energies.  Positive and negative doesn’t refer to good or bad, just to opposites.  They kept to themselves during La Violencia, but have started to become more activist as they view their environment to be under threat by too many people.  After a steep downhill, we arrived on the nude beach (not very crowded at all) then walked east past the extremely popular beach with a hostel on it.  The hostel had a big covered pavilion with hammocks and tents for camping. Past that beach was another quieter beach where we stopped for lunch and cold drinks.  From there we went on horseback back through the forest to a different entrance.

Rocks laid by native people hundreds of years ago.

Road up to Tayrona Park

Ceiba tree

leaf cutter ants

The beach

Despite returning to the hotel exhausted and sweaty, I took a quick shower and headed to a yoga class at the hotel with a few others from our group.  It felt good to stretch out.  We had dinner at our leisure and managed to stay awake for a dance class.  We learned some basic salsa moves and the moves to a couple Latin-style line dances (think La Macarena).

The next morning we had a three mile hike to our guide Juan’s house up in the hills not far from the hotel.  Juan was born in Bogota and studied Ecology, but didn’t get his degree.  He lived with the Kogui tribe for 2 years before buying a piece of land in their area.  He is married to a German midwife and they have 4 young children.  The village on his road asked him to be mayor a few years ago as he seems to have a passion for sustainable living and sustainable development.  I think he has given up that position now.  His wife was assisting a birth as we were walking up to their house and his neighbor was watching the kids.  The neighbor is a musician who teaches music in the local schools and plays in a couple bands.  He also runs a small ecolodge. On the way up to Juan’s house we were accompanied by a “mamo”, a holy man of the Kogui.  We took a side path to the river where he performed a silent ceremony on rocks in the middle of the stream looking downstream to let our concerns and inharmonius thoughts drift down to the ocean and upstream to receive the bounty of the Earth.  Each of us then bent over a hollow in the rock to release the bounty we had received back into the Earth, turned around counterclockwise once and walked back to the bank.  Each of us received a string bracelet representing our connection to the Earth, like an umbilical cord.

mural on the school building

Juan's house

Juan’s house is built in a traditional style, round with a tall thatched roof and mud covered walls.  The walls are supported in part by wood that has calcified after being underwater for a long period of time.  Our lunch of fresh fruits and salads was served in the outdoor kitchen.  The bathroom was in a separate shelter and has to have one of the best views ever.  I noticed powerlines going part way up the river, but Juan’s house is powered by solar panels and he said the powerlines haven’t worked for the last 12 years since the wealthy drug lords that used to live up the valley stopped maintaining them.  We were also invited to chew on some coca leaves on the walk up to the house; they are supposed to provide energy.  Can’t say as I noticed any effect.  Juan and his neighbor were almost constantly chewing leaves mixed with lime that comes out of a gourd that they carry with them.  The lime helps to release extra compounds in the leaves.

the bathroom

On our last day in the area we took a short 2 mile hike along the river Don Diego passing through an area that had been a coca plantation, then a cut flower farm, and seems to now have cut flowers and many mixed fruit trees.  The hike ended at the river where we got on innertubes and had a delightful float downriver for about 20 minutes to an eco lodge.  The lodge has beautiful grounds on the river with various places to stay.  We could shower there and got a snack of patacones (fried plantain patties) with something like sour cream and a salsa, fresh fruit, juice and coffee.  From there we took a motor boat back down to the bus. 

The bus ride from Santa Marta to Cartagena should be about 5 hours. West of Santa Marta we passed by extensive wetlands with mangroves and marshes.  One large area was full of mostly dead mangroves, maybe a result of flooding from the ocean that has increased the salinity.  This must be a road that is highly susceptible to sea level rise!  It is basically constructed on a spit of built up land bisecting the coastal wetlands.  We pass through Baranquilla at the mouth of the Magdalena river.  Traffic is extremely heavy.  At one roundabout there was an accident or broken down car and once that cleared our driver had  to edge his way into a river of buses, cars, motorcyles, and even a donkey cart.

Pereira and Surroundings

We met our Backroads hiking group at the Hotel Sazagua on the outskirts of a Pereira.  The hotel is a lovely place with all the eating areas open to the outdoors.  A sloping lawn with brick paths is edged with thick plantings of tropical plants like gardenias, lantanas, cycads, palms and heliconias.  The place is constructed using the local bamboo as support beams.  Every morning they put out bananas for the birds which include saffron finches, scarlet flycatchers, and blue grey tanangers.

Hotel Sazagua hot tub

We arrived by plane from Bogota on Friday afternoon and gradually met a few of the 11 people on our trip.  The whole group met at 8:30 am Saturday morning, prepared for hiking.  We took a small bus to the Hacienda Venecia coffee plantation near Manizales and hiked about 4 miles down a dirt road and around the property.  The plantation has places to stay and beautiful grounds.  They offer both coffee and cacao tours.  After lunch on the gazebo about half the group opted for a hike up to an overlook while the rest of us went on a coffee tour.  In Colombia most coffee is grown in sun on steep hillsides.  Apparently they don’t do shade grown coffee because there is enough shade provided by cloud cover.  This means though that the beans do not ripen all at once and must be picked almost year round, although there are two peak times for picking in spring and fall.  All the beans are hand-picked and the pickers are paid by the kilo. Often now the pickers are from Venezuela.  This Hacienda offered housing for its workers but I don’t think they all do.  This one was also large at 200 ha.  The average size of coffee farms is more like 20 ha.    They process their beans on site and roast a small amount.  Most is exported as green beans to Japan.  Colombian coffee is known for its fine flavor but tends to be a lighter roast here in Colombia.

View over Hacienda Venecia

cacao fruit

bamboo construction

From fruit to green coffee bean

A few years ago they started planting cacao trees as an experiment because the price of coffee had fallen due to increased production in Brazil.  They are at a high enough elevation that you might not expect cacao to grow there, but because of climate change it seems to be doing just fine.  They also grow bananas and papaya and small amounts of other fruits. 

Saturday night was the welcome dinner, a barbecue in the garden, complete with a 3 member band playing traditional Colombian music.  Our companions are mostly retired, although some only partially.  A mother and her senior in college daughter are on the trip too.  They are from the Boston area and are taking a trip to celebrate her graduation before she starts Teach for America.  4 people are from Denver and have had various interesting careers (including running an adventure camp for teens).  One woman lived much of her life in Italy working in the film industry.  Another couple is from California and he has taken up photography as a serious hobby.  Our guides are Nathalie and Neik (from the Netherlands).  Both are very sociable, organized, and fit and they have run the Colombia trip at least five times together.  Apparently organizing a trip in Colombia takes a great deal of patience!

Sunday’s trip was to Valle de Cocora National Park. The tall wax palm is the iconic tree of the park. Jake went on the longer, faster hike and I opted for the 6+ mile hike with a local guide more focused on natural and cultural history.  Our guide Luis is well-versed in medicinal plants and demonstrated the uses of various plants.  One leaf is heated and used as  a bandaid and antibiotic for instance.  We also got a good view of an Andean condor soaring over pastures!   Our hike mainly led through private property where cows and horses grazed and then along the edge of the woods.  The forest suffers from some incursions by pines imported from Canada and eucalyptus trees imported from Australia.  The local birds have been dispersing the seeds into the park from surrounding plantations.  The plantations are mainly used to produce paper.  Luis had been trained as a bioarchitect but seems not to have practiced long.   He owned a small farm near the Pacific coast that he was forced to sell for a low price due to FARC activity.  Now he lives near the park in a rented apartment leading guided tours.  He feels he successfully treated his stomach cancer last year using natural medicines from the Amazon.  He doesn’t feel confident enough in the government to make any sort of long-term investments like buying a house.  He is working with a group trying to reform visitation to the park.  It has seen a huge increase in tourism and there were thousands of people near the entrance going into the park on foot and horseback.  He said most Colombians simply visit the park because it was a setting for several tv shows and movies (including Narcos).  He would of course like to see more people using official guides so they learn something about the environment.  The park itself has one official employee and the farm at the entrance has several employees for visitor safety. The farm now charges 4000 pesos as an entrance fee since you have to cross their land to get into the park. 

Luis pointing out an orchid

wax palms

View over the Cocora Valley

Unknown flower

Looking into the moountains

Salento

When we got back to the parking area we took a Jeep Willy (3 people in front, 6 in back, and 3 standing up behind the jeep holding onto the roof) up to the town of Salento, about 20 minutes above the park entrance.  It’s a pretty little town with lots of tourist shops and restaurants.  The town was packed on Sunday with Colombians and other nationalities on holiday.

Bogota

The national shield of Colombia

Our plane from Dallas arrived in Bogota after midnight with a  short delay due to a disabled plane on one runway.  We heard later from friends who arrived a few days before that one runway was closed unbeknownst to the airline, so we’re not sure what the real story is!  We were asked no questions at customs and gathered our luggage and steeled ourselves for the scrum of drivers outside baggage claim heading right past them to an official taxi line.  Our taxi was a bit worse for wear and the driver took any bumps in the road with extreme care.  Then about 10 minutes into the ride he said he had a flat tire.  We were sure this was going to turn into a scam, but at the first open gas station he pulled right up to an air hose and filled two of the tires.  It still seemed pretty iffy that we were going to get to the hotel in his cab, but we made it.  The other odd feature of cabs is that the meter shows the distance, but not the fare.  The driver looks up the fare on a table based on the distance.  You can ask to see the table if you want to make sure you aren’t being overcharged.  We’ve also had trouble getting used to translating from pesos to dollars because the exchange rate is about 3300 pesos to the dollar. 

Our hotel is in the the Zona Rosa, one of the upscale parts of the city that features lots of fancy name brand stores, like the Kitchen Aid store and a BMW dealership.   The mall across the street from our hotel has private security people with dogs that sniff every bag being brought into the mall.  The friendlier looking golden retrievers get lots of pats from kids.  They seem to stay away from the muzzled rottweilers and German shepherds. The street in front of the hotel is torn up, but construction isn’t that loud because a lot of the work is being done by hand.  If all you saw was this part of Bogota you would think the whole city was undergoing a construction boom and very wealthy.  In fact the paper this morning had an article about how desirable Colombia is for foreign investment.

Zona Rosa

Plaza in front of the cathedral

Houses in Candelaria

Many of the people asking for money on the streets are from Venezuela.  They are often selling black plastic trash bags as a trade for your charity and most are families with children.  A couple women were selling pouches woven from now worthless Venezuelan currency.  The paper is very strong even if the bolivar is weak!

Our first morning we walked a few blocks before finding a place for coffee and a pastry. It was one of what turns out to be a local chain, Tostao, and was pretty good.  Nothing like starting out vacation with a Nutella filled croissant sitting outside in the sun!  Bogota is at 8900 feet and the sun is strong but the air is reasonably cool.  After breakfast we attempted to use our phones to get an Uber, but couldn’t get the app to work. Friends with iPhones have had no issues using Uber. The hotel had given us the number for their transportation coordinator, so we called her and she arranged a cab for us.  But when she tried to call us back to tell us the name of the driver and license number to watch for she couldn’t reach us.  She actually walked over from the hotel to the corner we were waiting on to let us know this and to call for another cab while she waited with us.  The hotel cabs are white instead of yellow and tend to be more comfortable cars in our limited experience.  The driver took a route along the hills bordering the eastern edge of the city.  This is the area where the politicians and upper level military officials live he said.  Tall apartment buildings with views over the city.  We wound our way down to the Candelaria district, one of the oldest parts of town.  He dropped us off at the gold museum with partial directions to a café a few blocks away and instructions to only ask security guards and police officers for directions. 

We decided we needed some lunch before visiting the museum but found a good looking Colombian -Caribbean place before the place our driver recommended.  It was on the early side for lunch and we were the first customers of the day.  The staff gave us recommendations for their best dishes and while our food was being prepared Jake had an expresso and I had a refreshing lemonade with ginger.  We shared a delicious plate of grilled vegetables and octopus and a sort of pot roast cooked in panela (sugar cane extract) and tamarind juice served with a slightly sweet coconut rice.  The restaurant was situated on a street where nearly every other business was a jewelry store selling emeralds.  Out of curiosity I asked the price of a gold ring set with a small emerald of a nice clear green color and was told it was about $1000.  Guess I’m not getting an emerald ring any time soon!

The gold museum had wonderful examples of gold figurines and ornaments from different eras and parts of Colombia as well as explanations of the metallurgy involved.  They did not discuss the after effects on the environment of mining unless I missed something.  They did have an interesting exhibit on the cultural importance of gold to different Colombian cultures.

We strolled around Candelaria some after taking in the museum and uneventfully caught a yellow cab from the Gold museum back to our hotel.   After a short nap we headed out again to meet friends from Santa Fe for dinner.  They are studying Spanish for a week and had rented a beautiful AirBnB apartment in the Zona G (the gourmet district) near one of the universities and a 20 minute walk to their school.  We got a tour of their apartment and caught up over appetizers before walking to dinner at an elegant Spanish restaurant.  The waiter was from Galicia and somewhat dismissive of Colombian seafood saying that they import nearly all their seafood from Spain to maintain quality!  Their octopus was no better than what we had at lunch but I didn’t ask where the lunch octopi were from.  The food we ordered was quite good though especially the grilled vegetables and marinated mussels.  This elegant dinner with two of us ordering wine set us back $80 for the four of us.  Our friends ordered an Uber for us to take back to our hotel as the busy day and lack of sleep the night before was catching up to us!  We hope to meet up with them again when we overlap in Cartagena.

On our walk to the Zona G the night before we came across the very pleasant Calle 9 and headed there for breakfast.  We chose a place called Masa that had a nice variety of breakfast options.  I went with an acai bowl with granola, strawberries, blueberries and chia seeds and we shared a chocolate croissant. Later in the afternoon we had lunch at the French restaurant Bagatelle, just a block from Masa.

We opted to let the hotel arrange transport for us to the botanical garden in the morning and one of the staff escorted us down the street to our taxi.  It turned out to be almost a half hour drive to the garden with the traffic.  We arranged to meet our driver where he dropped us off in two hours.  The garden is hosting a big light show with figures of endangered animals in Colombia.  The figures look good during the day too.  We started out in the part of the garden that wasn’t included in the light show and I got to know a few Colombian plants.  The part with the light show had roped off much of the garden, but we were at least able to walk through on the main paths.  The garden has some interesting projects like labeling all the urban trees in Bogota with an app so that you can look them up.  At the garden, and really all over Bogota, there seems to be a big effort to recycle and reduce use of disposable materials.  Carteros (people pulling carts) sort out recyclables to take to central locations.  There is very little trash on the streets.  The garden had a big composting and gasification facility for its green waste. 

Colombian fuschia

Huge yucca flower!

Herbarium building

giant hermit crabs

Id sign on a downtown tree

Dinner tonight was at the food court of the Andino mall up on the 4^th level.  We opted for Italian.  Perfectly adequate given that we were not particularly hungry and tired of walking!  It was like any food court in the US I would say.