It takes a village to raise a child

What do you see in this picture?  Two women, friends maybe, with identically-dressed babies?  Wrong.  Instead, a mother of twins boards a bus in Mendoza, turns to the stranger sitting next to her and asks, “Can you hold this for a moment?”  as if she’s asking her to hold a bottle of water or her jacket while she puts her wallet away.  The mother did not reclaim her baby until 40 minutes later when she reached her destination.  Amazing.

Breaking the mold

ia

Everyone should one day take a mountain bus driven by an allergic-to-life Colombian.  It is true maniacal pleasure.  Once you get nauseated the sensation doesn’t go away; doesn’t matter if you stop reading, stare at the horizon, take deep breaths, etc.  The travel gods don’t even care if you still have eight more hours to go—they will not hear your pleas.  Tia and I learned this on our ear-popping trip with Bolivariana from Manizales to Bogotá.  To top it off we spent an hour at the side of the road watching tractor trailers try to extract themselves from each other like two very confused elephants mating.  Is it possible to put a bus company on the list of state-sponsored, terrorist organizations?

Compared to its South American contemporaries, Bogotá itself had a lot of artsy character.  Think Jackson Pollack dripping paint in front of a stolid audience of pencil-wielding automatons.  Aside from the scarf-wrapped, rocker jean-toting hipsters that dotted the brick laid sidewalks, our hostel in La Candelaria abutted a street that had various statues on the rooftops, one fishing with a squash on his line, another looked likely to jump.  Wandering down Carretera 7 

 on a drizzling Friday night, we encountered the weekly tradition of Septimazo:  a motley gathering of meat grills, Bob Ross wannabes, melted plastic sculptors, brass bands, Latin dancers (good and bad), cotton candy, and temporary TV stands featuring Asian singers, all with crowds formed in semi-circles packing the street.  Elsewhere, when confronted with the need for a better public transportation system, rather than build a metro the city simply shut down a few major streets for the exclusive use of buses.  In fact, even more roads are shut every Sunday to bikers only!  Kind of ingenious, huh, and something out of a madman’s mind?  Bogotá doesn’t play by the rules and we like it. 

Sadly, it rained down on us the entire four days we spent there and Tia was horribly afflicted by altitude sickness.  As such it won’t make our list of cities to live in one day, but not a bad place for a visitazo!

Oh, and most importantly, we found Duff beer (sí existe!).

I think I have the black lung, pops

An hour and a half outside of Bogotá, lies the sleepy town of Zipaquirá.  An otherwise unremarkable place except for having Colombia’s #1 tourist attraction: a Roman Catholic cathedral built 200 meters underground in a still-working salt mine.  In addition to the main cathedral which holds Sunday services that can accommodate around 8000 people, there are 14 smaller chapels representing the events of Jesus’ last journey.  You can wander unchaperoned through the three different underground levels, stumbling across beautiful sculptures, secluded rock confession booths and narrow pathways leading from place to place.  Pictures don’t really do it justice but we can see why it’s considered one of Colombia’s most notable architectural achievements.

We paid an extra $5 each to take the special “miner’s route”.  Described as dark and claustrophobic, we expected to get an intimate view of the paths actual miners took.  Well, apart from the first three-minute walk, we were basically in big, well-lit spaces not much different than the rest of the cathedral.  Tear.  We did, however, get to discover that Juan has a future as a salt miner if nothing else works out.   Our guide stopped at some point and started making people take turns with a pick-axe.  When it was Juan’s turn and the guide found out we were from the U.S., he promptly said, “Oh.  Well, let’s see how an American does it!” and everyone laughed.  Luckily for us, Juan salvaged our pride by breaking the biggest piece of salt off the wall out of the entire group.  Yay for Juan!

All-you-can drink espressos = mistake

Our one day spent in Medellín was a bit anti-climactic.  We were most excited to visit the Parque de los Pies Descalzos, a park with a bamboo forest, lots of shallow pools to wade through, different-sized stones to climb, and signs encouraging you to remove your shoes.  Unfortunately, when we arrived the park was under renovation or something because there wasn’t a single pool to cool our feet in and the stones were all roped off.  Sad.

On top of that, we were discouraged from exploring much else when we saw a couple of policemen driving a man, naked from the waist down and missing an arm, off the sidewalk with the front wheel of their motorcycle.  No one else seemed disturbed by this which made us think we weren’t in the best part of town.

We quickly shoved off for Manizales, one of three towns in the Zona Cafetera where most of Colombia’s coffee is grown.  Its fresh, chilly climate was a nice change and the steep, tidy streets more closely resembled a city in Europe than Colombia.  From here, we organized a tour of the Venecia coffee plantation where we learned about the entire coffee production process, including how they export the best coffee beans and leave the rest in Colombia (unfair, huh?).  Also included in the tour price was all-you-can drink espressos.  I’m pretty sure Juan is the only person that has truly utilized that benefit.  Let’s just say, he had energy ALL DAY.

We were also in Manizales for Valentine’s Day (yes, the Colombians celebrate V-day in October) and the two girls that worked at our hostel invited all their friends over, cooked a 15-person meal, crowded out the hostel guests, and partied until almost midnight.  I really hope none of them ever get a job in the US because they would never understand why they got fired…

No, I won't pay you to splash water on me

After spending a few days in Santa Marta recharging our batteries at the hostel pool and having drunk Brits drool over the impressiveness of Juan’s bigote, we headed for Cartagena.   With its cobblestone streets, flowered balconies, impressively big wooden doors and an eroded fortress wall wrapping around the entire city, it is easy to see why people consider it Colombia’s most beautiful city.

We tried sweets from the portal de los dulces (mentioned in Love in the Time of Cholera), bought Juan some authentic Cuban cigars, and partied with Lucy and Tomas again!  I don’t know how we forgot in the short span of a couple of weeks just how many beers Tomas can drink…

We were too lazy to plan any day trips to nearby beaches, but we did motivate for a trip to Volcán de Lodo El Totumo.   When we first arrived, the 15m mound looked like a poorly placed man-made attraction.  But, after climbing the stairs to the top and lowering ourselves into the natural mud bath, it made more sense.  The mud was buoyant and extremely difficult to maneuver in.  If NASA ever needs a new zero gravity training site, it wouldn’t be a bad choice.   In order to move from one side to the other, it was necessary to create a human chain and pull each other along.  The only thing that dampened the experience was the human vultures – people who will want money if they help you down a single stair, or pretend to watch over your flip flops, or throw water on you when you are cleaning off.   

More pictures here:

Cartagena

Lightning without thunder

Somewhere past the mountains that cradle Mérida lies a little pueblito called Puerto Concha, a busy fishing port on the edge of Lake Maracaibo.  We didn’t come here to see the freshwater dolphins (very cool though) or to watch our corpulent guide, Juan, eat the equivalent of two whole chickens at lunch and seriously gross Tia out.  No, we came for the lightning storms.   According to Juan Gordo, the marsh gases around Lake Maracaibo are ignited by the friction of cool mountain air sliding into the savannah heat, creating the unique phenomenon of lightning without thunder.  It occurs all day, about once every 30 seconds, but it’s at night when the skies light up.  Toward dusk, we arrived by boat at the remnants of old Puerto Concha, nothing but a few houses on stilts in the middle of the lake to prepare for the show.  Slowly, at first, the flashes appeared on the darkening horizon and, by the time the sun had completely set, they were dancing across the sky in brilliant arcs and in absolute silence.  Often, the lightning would begin from the ground and shoot upward or wrap itself around in complete circles and fill the sky. 

A  nearby thunderstorm later descended and, while dispelling the meditative quiet, it increased the magnitude of the aerial pyrotechnics as the “real” lightning set off pockets of methane everywhere.  It looked as if the entire firmament might fall away in shards of black glass.  Unfortunately, it didn’t bode well for our hammock space, with nothing but iron bars between it and the choppy lake.  The two Germans were forced to vacate their perch early in the night and I retreated to the kitchen after failing to stem a steady drip running up my leg.  Tia, three feet from me, was blissfully undisturbed.  

Somos pájaros! (We are birds!)

Mérida is the reputed adventure capital of Venezuela, so it seemed only appropriate that we risk our lives doing something that most people do in their late teens/early 20s, long before one’s sense of mortality sets in. Our choice of poison: parapente. Paragliding. It’s a bit interesting receiving instructions for a sport that has life and death consequences in a language you don’t speak all that well. I made sure that Juan translated the important stuff while still on solid ground: when the tandem guide says “corriendo”, run. Don’t stop even if the ground seems to disappear from below you. Only stop running when he says “sientese.”

Given the language barrier, there wasn’t much time to get nervous. The guide never said something like, “Hey, get ready. We’re going to be the first ones to go and we’ll start running in a couple of minutes.” No. What he said was, “Corriendo!” So, run I did. Pretty soon we were airborne, eagles swooping a few meters away, squawking at us invading their air space. Juan was close behind me (white as a ghost and holding his seat straps so tightly that when we finally reached earth again he had ½ inch grooves in his hands). Our tandem partners knew the local air currents which meant instead of gradually coasting downwards during our flight, we first flew upwards.

I would have gone again right away, but once is probably good enough for someone afraid of heights.

Mérida is also the home of the world’s longest and tallest teleférico (cable car) and an ice cream store in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most flavors. Unfortunately, the teleférico is out of service after two years of political in-fighting (apparently Chavez doesn’t get along with the local representatives and won’t apportion the money), but we did try Heineken ice cream and another flavor called Por Amarte Tanto (which means “because of loving you so much” and tasted like a very pleasant cinnamon). Maybe next time we’re in Mérida, we’ll be braver and actually try some of their ham & cheese or shrimp flavored ice cream…