Håvard was the antipodes of what I had imagined the typical Norwegian: a lanky, dread-locked, tattooed, turquoise-pirate-pants-clad anarchist. I met him in Bucaramanga, Colombia at a paragliding school where I was staying a few months ago. He had been bumming around Latin America for fourteen months, living off tax refunds and government education stipends re-appropriated for travel instead of school. His Spanish was still terrible. He’d had a brick-sized loaf of marijuana delivered to the front door of the hostel within a few days of arrival and made his way through much of it during the times we weren’t flying. I cringed at the thought of him learning to fly under the influence, but he kept clean for the most part when it mattered. He was convivial, opinionated as any card-carrying anarchist should be, and fun to be around.
Ansermanuevo Photos
Much to my surprise, first step out the door was a parked jeep and a collection of other pilots loading up their gear. I introduced myself as the clueless new guy and hitched a ride. I counted a total of fifteen people and two dogs stuffed inside and clinging to the exterior of the jeep as we rumbled uphill through the jungle and coffee plantations. At several points in the road we all had to get out and walk over sections where landslides blocked the road due to heavy rains. Men carrying loads of plantains on their backs passed us walking the other way, carrying their wares to the nearest truck in the absence of a road. Life must go on even when the road goes out.
Road repair. Photo by Hector Jairo Arboleda Suarez
At launch, a man in a tall, conical straw hat with a name that sounded like “Mongoose” charged us two dollars to use his property for the day. The flying conditions were amazing- the sometimes difficult task of finding thermals was cake here. Several pilots took off in to the distance for 30-40 km flights toward a horizon that to me all but looked like rain soon (not safe for flying). As a more novice pilot I always stayed within reach of the designated landing zone, but during my several days here I had several hour-long flights, nearly bottoming out and at the last minute and then finding a strong thermal, spiraling several thousand feet back up in to the sky. Someday when I’m a little more experienced I look forward to coming back for the epic XC flights everyone talked about here in the Valle de Cauca region.
When I lent My Camera to An Eight Year Near the Landing Zone
Upon landing, I was greeted daily by the squadrons of wing-folding children I’ve come to expect at established sites like this. They critique my wobbly approach and too-late final flare and busy themselves with packing up my equipment before I can even barter. They guided me back to Jaime’s place, a friendly paragliding instructor whose house I ended up staying in for the rest of my time there.
Apart from amazing flying conditions, there’s not much for the casual traveler in Ansermanuevo other than the opportunity to experience a totally non-touristy town. Cowboys ride muddy horses down the street, old men play dominos in the shade outside the bodegas, horse carts full of coffee beans are shuffled to the collection center. “You must be a paraglider,” the man at the arepa stand quizzes me when I buy lunch from him. Apparently there’s no other reason for foreigners to visit here.
In the evenings I spend time chatting with Álvaro, who is a few years older than me, works at the family bodega on the main square, and has a perpetual smile. He lived in Atlanta for ten years and owned a carpet-cleaning service until he was deported in 2006, when he came back home to help with the family business.
“I love America too much, man,” he tells me. We converse in a mix of English and Spanish. Often I find myself irritated with people who persist in English with me even if I refuse to reciprocate (I am going to learn Spanish, dammit)- but I empathize with the deportees I’ve met and am happy to indulge. “Everything so organized. People follow traffic rules there, people don’t dump trash all over. Cops don’t take bribes so easy, politicians not so corrupt. It’s not like that here, man,” he laments.
He tells me about his experience with Ansermanuevo city council elections back in November. He ran as a candidate for city council and won- the poll results were published in the paper, online, and verified in the local registrar. When the time came for the incumbent to leave, he refused to recognize the election results and maintained his office. Alvaro’s protests were met with silence, until he decided finally to give up the fight and try again in the next elections, four years ahead.
I tell him that’s crazy- why give up so easily? Isn’t there some kind of state or federal elections agency to appeal to? There is, he says, but in this country people who try and oust strong-arm politicians have a bad history, a history of being threatened or killed.
My head spins a little bit to confront in person this reality I’d only read about, heard in sighs as someone folds the newspaper back up. I remembered reading about the elections a few weeks earlier, the president declaring that things had gone “fairly smooth” with the 100-something (reported) acts of politically-related threats/violence since the last election cycle, down from earlier years.
“But in America, people so tame sometimes. Not so often you gonna find a party going on till seven in the morning like here. And people real greedy about their stuff too, man, no one gonna give you nothing from their pocket.”
After five days I left Ansermanuevo feeling like I’d glimpsed under the skin of something, headed for Salento, just a few hours away across the valley.
Salento
I believe it was the same Aussie traveler whose guidebook had been punked that told me I really ought to check out Salento. A non-flying destination up in the cooler air of the mountains sounded good for a while. A quick bus ride over to the East slopes of Valle de Cauca dropped me off in to a well-lit and clean main square, where several enthusiastic and clean-cut young men greeted me in English to tell me about the hostels and horseback-riding trips they offer. I escape them just as I did with the baggage handlers and hoofed it for Hostal La Serrana, a few kilometers outside of town.
Salento Photos
The hostel is a converted old farm house set along a ridge with sweeping views, opened up a few years ago by an ex-pat New Yorker. Here I met a collection of travelers from every continent save Antarctica (though one had spent a few months working there). Salento draws visitors who come to see the Valle de Cocora, home to other-worldly forests of 50 meter (150 ft) tall palm trees in an emerald valley, as well as the many local coffee plantations that offer tours and home-stays.
Early the next morning I set out on a long hike to a local plantation with Niru and Swami, a cute Indian-American couple who I would spend some time with over the next few days. Several months ago they quit their corporate jobs in Silicon Valley and took off to go see the world, a virtually unheard of maneuver for a young Indian couple. In their travels, they tell me, they hope to inspire other Indians to aspire to more in life than getting a good job and making babies. In the hour hike each way to and from our destination, Reserva Natural Sachamama, I am equally fascinated in learning from them about the intricacies of caste-influenced marriage formalities and what it takes to escape from the corporate world as I am the landscape we pass through- steep green valleys, bored burros tied to fence posts, the rush of the river beside us. Local families are perched along the river shore in several places with buckets of sand and large metal plates, panning for small flakes of gold.
At Reserva Natural Sachamama, proprieter Don Pedro is quick to correct me when I ask him about his coffee plantation. “It’s a Natural Reserve,” he says, “And yes, there are some coffee plants there too, so we harvest the beans. But mostly what we grow here is forest, birds, and animals.” Apparently the land was long ago plantation, then abandoned when prices crashed in the 80’s. Since owning the property he’s chosen to leave it mostly in a natural state, though coffee plants can still be found crowded under the dark shade of the jungle. This is not a traditional monoculture plantation, he explains. It’s apparent that the biggest crop here is tourism, but it’s fascinating to have a glimpse of what small-scale, sustainable production looks like. In his bamboo and wood open-air home where we are offered coffee, I notice a portrait of Einstein on the wall of the doorway where in any other Latin American home one would find a portrait of the Virgin Mary or Christ’s crucifixion. There is a home library full of books (another rarity), and a chalkboard showing schematics for a 4x4 vehicle. We meet his wife and two daughters, home-schooled due more to poor quality of local schools than their remote location. Don Pedro´s family would live somewhere around Talkeetna were they in Alaska.
“Coffee is one of those things that is meant to be savored in the moment, “ he says after we’ve collected a few handfuls of beans from the drying racks to put in the roaster. Throughout the afternoon, we are led through the coffee-production process all the way from fruit on the tree to a steaming cup. “Coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol- these are all things we don’t really need, but they do something for us. There is the chemical effect, sure, but I think they’re really meant more to crystallize a moment. To pause for a second, and consciously or not, maybe remember all the other times we’ve consumed these things, the memories we have associated with them.” I think about coffee in my life- rushed mornings before a big exam in college, in my summer job as a wild land firefighter waking up an hour before the rest of the crew to start the camp fire and dump half a can of Folgers in to a boiling pot, coming indoors from the -40 winter to curl up around a steaming mug.
I find a home for Christmas at the hostel here, La Serrana. For Christmas Eve, I spend nearly all day gathering the sparse firewood from Eucalyptus groves dotting the landscape and am not disappointed by my efforts. Dozens of people, visitors and locals, are drawn from all over town like moths to a light for music and good times. One of the hostel’s employees notices my efforts and recruits me to gather more wood for the clay oven tomorrow that they´ll use to cook most of Christmas dinner. I’m game. Christmas dinner is wonderful if not necessarily Colombian- turkey and stuffing, potatoes, beans, everything I would expect back home. It felt good to be in this little cosmopolitan enclave of fellow travelers for the holidays.
Two towns only an hour apart, nearly identical in geography and populace, one geared almost exclusively towards tourism and the other had never heard of such a thing. In one town I am greeted with stares and friendly, curious inquiries, the other I find a welcoming community but am at some level a sort of resource to made use of by the local economy, like cattle or petroleum. As a solo traveler in less-traveled places like Ansermanuevo, one can’t help but experience the warmth of people who are happy to have a visitor in a place where visitors are few. I’ll be forced to confront the confusion and loneliness of a strange place and ultimately find redemption in overcoming language and cultural barriers. In well-traveled places like Salento, I’ll find a cosmopolitan cocoon of adventurous, creative, and attractive fellow travelers. I’ll be speaking English at least part of the time. Information about hiking, tours, and transportation will be easily available. I will be just another foreigner with a wallet, but I’ll be safe and comfortable and happy.
Each of these experiences I find “authentic” in their own way. Paragliding continues to guide me with it’s odd sense of geographical preference to new and exciting places, but there’s lots else to see along the way. Some places I visit are well-traveled, some not, but both have their charms and can be judged by their merits regardless of how lauded or not they may be in a guide book.
I write to you now from Ecuador where I have been for the last several weeks. Further updates pending. Hope to hear from you if you’ve made it this far reading through my digressions!
(Note: Title "Tourist and Toured" credit to friend Will Elliott)
Several of us at the hostel went out downtown one night after a day of flying to see the lights. “I’m gonna go score some drugs,” I think were his first words when we stepped out of the taxi in to the darkness. Not that we expected anything less from him, but we couldn’t let him just disappear by himself (although it would happen eventually anyways). Boris (another fellow traveler) and I took turns throughout the night of accompanying him on his jaunts down dark alleys to inquire in pidgin Spanish to huddled clusters of young men with slicked hair and heavy jackets. The evening culminated in a deal where Havard apparently didn’t have any money left to spend and had to borrow from Boris before the dealers (and police with backs turned) became agitated...
“That’s the guy!” exclaimed an Aussie traveler I met several weeks later at some point in my rendition. “That’s the same guy! The bastard.” We were sharing travel stories and a bottle of aguardiente on a lakefront porch under a starry night in Guatapé, a small town outside of Medellín. I found him tedious- his tales seemingly lifted verbatim from a new-age travel guide- but the evening was too nice to be irritated. Apparently the two of them had shared a dorm room at a hostel in Bogotá, and there had been an incident. One evening the Aussie returned to find his copy of Lonely Planet’s South America on a Shoestring he’d left out stuffed with pages of cheap pornography- silicone seductresses amongst the trope of “pulsating salsa clubs” and “off the beaten path villages.” He didn’t take the prank too well and was livid. When the obvious culprit was confronted, Havard was playfully didactic : “Don’t you see, they’re the same thing!” he had explained. “They’re the same! That corporate shit is just like porn. It’ll take you where everyone has already been, where everyone is going, like some tired old whore. If you only go to places listed in that book it’s like you might as well stay home and watch a documentary.”
I can’t help but find some wisdom in my porn-wielding Norwegian friend’s assertion, however crudely expressed. After more than a year of travel, he had grown jaded with the crowds he found sheparded from one mediated tourist environment to the next by the “corporate shit” in guide books. His grievance seems to be with travelers who don´t see beyond their guidebooks and equate the cocoon of the traveled trail with that of a newly-forged path of their own making. His condescension was for the tourist, who sees what they have come to see rather than what is actually there- to paraphrase the G.K. Chesterton quote.
So what are we to make of such brooding over mainstream tourism? Having grown up in a place that sees plenty of visitors itself (Alaska sees 1.5 million visitors annually and has less than half that as permanent population) I have some perspective on what the trail traveled by most visitors feels like. I remember as a ten-year old equating in my mind the words “tourist” and “terrorist.” I scowled from the backseat at blue-haired and white-shoed cruise ship passengers as my mom drove through downtown Anchorage. I grumbled with my dad about RVs with Florida license plates clogging up the highways. I stared at the Japanese people taking pictures of the produce section in the grocery store. I was at once sad and smug in knowing that most these visitors weren’t coming to see the places I loved- Hatcher’s Pass, the Palmer Hayflats State Game Refuge, the creek behind my house. They were going to more famous places, led to where they were going by what they had heard, what they knew.
How can you go someplace if you don’t know about it? It’s not easy. It takes a certain sort of recklessness and preparation to travel somewhere on little more than a hunch, an idea that something interesting is just beyond the horizon. There is an element of risk involved. For some travelers I meet, it is this feeling of exploration that drives them on. The worry that a million people have already done what you are doing seems to be a constant preoccupation of many backpackers I meet, the task is to seek out something new. What most independent travelers I meet are looking for is authenticity of some kind, any kind. Something to explore, something to connect with. They feel that steering clear of guidebooks will help them find it.
Personally, I think we all owe it to ourselves to acknowledge that it’s not so simple. The experience we have in traveling is not only what we experience at the moment but the sum of all things that led us to that moment, including all forms of media (internet, films, and yes, the guidebooks so loathed by my Norwegian friend). Far from lessening the authenticity of our experiences, with the awareness of how media influences us we can more fully appreciate the pull of remarkable (and popular) places even against a background of what many would bemoan as “touristy.”
I share all of this with you because the question always on my mind is: where should I go next? How do I decide? What is it exactly I’m looking for? I’ve been traveling in pursuit of a particular theme- paragliding, but really all I want is a good story. Tapping in to the community of fellow pilots I meet along the way is just an excuse to find it. Paragliding has sometimes been a kind of compass to guide me to places that few others have any interest in. As an example, I offer my experiences in two towns in the Valle de Cauca region of Colombia only an hour apart, similar in size and geography- Ansermanuevo and Salento. Both equally “authentic”, but a world apart in my experiences.
Ansermanuevo
Photo by Ramon Eduardo Rodgers. Coffee beans out to dry in Ansermanuevo- note the paraglider mural in background.
“That’s the guy!” exclaimed an Aussie traveler I met several weeks later at some point in my rendition. “That’s the same guy! The bastard.” We were sharing travel stories and a bottle of aguardiente on a lakefront porch under a starry night in Guatapé, a small town outside of Medellín. I found him tedious- his tales seemingly lifted verbatim from a new-age travel guide- but the evening was too nice to be irritated. Apparently the two of them had shared a dorm room at a hostel in Bogotá, and there had been an incident. One evening the Aussie returned to find his copy of Lonely Planet’s South America on a Shoestring he’d left out stuffed with pages of cheap pornography- silicone seductresses amongst the trope of “pulsating salsa clubs” and “off the beaten path villages.” He didn’t take the prank too well and was livid. When the obvious culprit was confronted, Havard was playfully didactic : “Don’t you see, they’re the same thing!” he had explained. “They’re the same! That corporate shit is just like porn. It’ll take you where everyone has already been, where everyone is going, like some tired old whore. If you only go to places listed in that book it’s like you might as well stay home and watch a documentary.”
I can’t help but find some wisdom in my porn-wielding Norwegian friend’s assertion, however crudely expressed. After more than a year of travel, he had grown jaded with the crowds he found sheparded from one mediated tourist environment to the next by the “corporate shit” in guide books. His grievance seems to be with travelers who don´t see beyond their guidebooks and equate the cocoon of the traveled trail with that of a newly-forged path of their own making. His condescension was for the tourist, who sees what they have come to see rather than what is actually there- to paraphrase the G.K. Chesterton quote.
So what are we to make of such brooding over mainstream tourism? Having grown up in a place that sees plenty of visitors itself (Alaska sees 1.5 million visitors annually and has less than half that as permanent population) I have some perspective on what the trail traveled by most visitors feels like. I remember as a ten-year old equating in my mind the words “tourist” and “terrorist.” I scowled from the backseat at blue-haired and white-shoed cruise ship passengers as my mom drove through downtown Anchorage. I grumbled with my dad about RVs with Florida license plates clogging up the highways. I stared at the Japanese people taking pictures of the produce section in the grocery store. I was at once sad and smug in knowing that most these visitors weren’t coming to see the places I loved- Hatcher’s Pass, the Palmer Hayflats State Game Refuge, the creek behind my house. They were going to more famous places, led to where they were going by what they had heard, what they knew.
How can you go someplace if you don’t know about it? It’s not easy. It takes a certain sort of recklessness and preparation to travel somewhere on little more than a hunch, an idea that something interesting is just beyond the horizon. There is an element of risk involved. For some travelers I meet, it is this feeling of exploration that drives them on. The worry that a million people have already done what you are doing seems to be a constant preoccupation of many backpackers I meet, the task is to seek out something new. What most independent travelers I meet are looking for is authenticity of some kind, any kind. Something to explore, something to connect with. They feel that steering clear of guidebooks will help them find it.
Personally, I think we all owe it to ourselves to acknowledge that it’s not so simple. The experience we have in traveling is not only what we experience at the moment but the sum of all things that led us to that moment, including all forms of media (internet, films, and yes, the guidebooks so loathed by my Norwegian friend). Far from lessening the authenticity of our experiences, with the awareness of how media influences us we can more fully appreciate the pull of remarkable (and popular) places even against a background of what many would bemoan as “touristy.”
I share all of this with you because the question always on my mind is: where should I go next? How do I decide? What is it exactly I’m looking for? I’ve been traveling in pursuit of a particular theme- paragliding, but really all I want is a good story. Tapping in to the community of fellow pilots I meet along the way is just an excuse to find it. Paragliding has sometimes been a kind of compass to guide me to places that few others have any interest in. As an example, I offer my experiences in two towns in the Valle de Cauca region of Colombia only an hour apart, similar in size and geography- Ansermanuevo and Salento. Both equally “authentic”, but a world apart in my experiences.
Ansermanuevo
Photo by Ramon Eduardo Rodgers. Coffee beans out to dry in Ansermanuevo- note the paraglider mural in background.
A Colombian pilot I met in Bucaramanga, Bayron, recommended Ansermanuevo to me as an epic-yet-novice-friendly thermal flying site. It was definitely not in my South America on a Shoestring even on the map, and information online was perfunctory. I stepped off the bus South from Medellín in to the darkness of Cartago, the nearest city en route, and was immediately swarmed by several would-be baggage handlers/taxi hailers hoping for tips. My taxi driver found a frill-less, empty hotel for six dollars a night for me and I fell asleep watching El Diablo Viste de Moda (The Devil Wears Prada) dubbed on cable TV. The next day I found my way to nearby Ansermanuevo, home to a boxy, crumbling cathedral blaring Christmas carols and streets full of coffee beans drying in the sun. I had no contacts or idea of where to go. I dropped off my ostentatiously large backpack in another nearby six dollar a night hotel, prepared my gear for a long hike uphill somewhere, and walked outside to go ask around town about parapente.
Ansermanuevo Photos
Much to my surprise, first step out the door was a parked jeep and a collection of other pilots loading up their gear. I introduced myself as the clueless new guy and hitched a ride. I counted a total of fifteen people and two dogs stuffed inside and clinging to the exterior of the jeep as we rumbled uphill through the jungle and coffee plantations. At several points in the road we all had to get out and walk over sections where landslides blocked the road due to heavy rains. Men carrying loads of plantains on their backs passed us walking the other way, carrying their wares to the nearest truck in the absence of a road. Life must go on even when the road goes out.
Road repair. Photo by Hector Jairo Arboleda Suarez
At launch, a man in a tall, conical straw hat with a name that sounded like “Mongoose” charged us two dollars to use his property for the day. The flying conditions were amazing- the sometimes difficult task of finding thermals was cake here. Several pilots took off in to the distance for 30-40 km flights toward a horizon that to me all but looked like rain soon (not safe for flying). As a more novice pilot I always stayed within reach of the designated landing zone, but during my several days here I had several hour-long flights, nearly bottoming out and at the last minute and then finding a strong thermal, spiraling several thousand feet back up in to the sky. Someday when I’m a little more experienced I look forward to coming back for the epic XC flights everyone talked about here in the Valle de Cauca region.
When I lent My Camera to An Eight Year Near the Landing Zone
Upon landing, I was greeted daily by the squadrons of wing-folding children I’ve come to expect at established sites like this. They critique my wobbly approach and too-late final flare and busy themselves with packing up my equipment before I can even barter. They guided me back to Jaime’s place, a friendly paragliding instructor whose house I ended up staying in for the rest of my time there.
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| Future Pilot Jean-Paul checking out a paragliding catalog. |
In the evenings I spend time chatting with Álvaro, who is a few years older than me, works at the family bodega on the main square, and has a perpetual smile. He lived in Atlanta for ten years and owned a carpet-cleaning service until he was deported in 2006, when he came back home to help with the family business.
“I love America too much, man,” he tells me. We converse in a mix of English and Spanish. Often I find myself irritated with people who persist in English with me even if I refuse to reciprocate (I am going to learn Spanish, dammit)- but I empathize with the deportees I’ve met and am happy to indulge. “Everything so organized. People follow traffic rules there, people don’t dump trash all over. Cops don’t take bribes so easy, politicians not so corrupt. It’s not like that here, man,” he laments.
He tells me about his experience with Ansermanuevo city council elections back in November. He ran as a candidate for city council and won- the poll results were published in the paper, online, and verified in the local registrar. When the time came for the incumbent to leave, he refused to recognize the election results and maintained his office. Alvaro’s protests were met with silence, until he decided finally to give up the fight and try again in the next elections, four years ahead.
I tell him that’s crazy- why give up so easily? Isn’t there some kind of state or federal elections agency to appeal to? There is, he says, but in this country people who try and oust strong-arm politicians have a bad history, a history of being threatened or killed.
My head spins a little bit to confront in person this reality I’d only read about, heard in sighs as someone folds the newspaper back up. I remembered reading about the elections a few weeks earlier, the president declaring that things had gone “fairly smooth” with the 100-something (reported) acts of politically-related threats/violence since the last election cycle, down from earlier years.
“But in America, people so tame sometimes. Not so often you gonna find a party going on till seven in the morning like here. And people real greedy about their stuff too, man, no one gonna give you nothing from their pocket.”
After five days I left Ansermanuevo feeling like I’d glimpsed under the skin of something, headed for Salento, just a few hours away across the valley.
Salento
I believe it was the same Aussie traveler whose guidebook had been punked that told me I really ought to check out Salento. A non-flying destination up in the cooler air of the mountains sounded good for a while. A quick bus ride over to the East slopes of Valle de Cauca dropped me off in to a well-lit and clean main square, where several enthusiastic and clean-cut young men greeted me in English to tell me about the hostels and horseback-riding trips they offer. I escape them just as I did with the baggage handlers and hoofed it for Hostal La Serrana, a few kilometers outside of town.
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| Palmas de Cera (Wax palms), Valle de Cocora, Colombia. Photo by Swaminathan Sundaramurthy |
Salento Photos
The hostel is a converted old farm house set along a ridge with sweeping views, opened up a few years ago by an ex-pat New Yorker. Here I met a collection of travelers from every continent save Antarctica (though one had spent a few months working there). Salento draws visitors who come to see the Valle de Cocora, home to other-worldly forests of 50 meter (150 ft) tall palm trees in an emerald valley, as well as the many local coffee plantations that offer tours and home-stays.
Early the next morning I set out on a long hike to a local plantation with Niru and Swami, a cute Indian-American couple who I would spend some time with over the next few days. Several months ago they quit their corporate jobs in Silicon Valley and took off to go see the world, a virtually unheard of maneuver for a young Indian couple. In their travels, they tell me, they hope to inspire other Indians to aspire to more in life than getting a good job and making babies. In the hour hike each way to and from our destination, Reserva Natural Sachamama, I am equally fascinated in learning from them about the intricacies of caste-influenced marriage formalities and what it takes to escape from the corporate world as I am the landscape we pass through- steep green valleys, bored burros tied to fence posts, the rush of the river beside us. Local families are perched along the river shore in several places with buckets of sand and large metal plates, panning for small flakes of gold.
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| You can check out Niru and Swami's travels at http://cravetotravel.blogspot.com |
At Reserva Natural Sachamama, proprieter Don Pedro is quick to correct me when I ask him about his coffee plantation. “It’s a Natural Reserve,” he says, “And yes, there are some coffee plants there too, so we harvest the beans. But mostly what we grow here is forest, birds, and animals.” Apparently the land was long ago plantation, then abandoned when prices crashed in the 80’s. Since owning the property he’s chosen to leave it mostly in a natural state, though coffee plants can still be found crowded under the dark shade of the jungle. This is not a traditional monoculture plantation, he explains. It’s apparent that the biggest crop here is tourism, but it’s fascinating to have a glimpse of what small-scale, sustainable production looks like. In his bamboo and wood open-air home where we are offered coffee, I notice a portrait of Einstein on the wall of the doorway where in any other Latin American home one would find a portrait of the Virgin Mary or Christ’s crucifixion. There is a home library full of books (another rarity), and a chalkboard showing schematics for a 4x4 vehicle. We meet his wife and two daughters, home-schooled due more to poor quality of local schools than their remote location. Don Pedro´s family would live somewhere around Talkeetna were they in Alaska.
“Coffee is one of those things that is meant to be savored in the moment, “ he says after we’ve collected a few handfuls of beans from the drying racks to put in the roaster. Throughout the afternoon, we are led through the coffee-production process all the way from fruit on the tree to a steaming cup. “Coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol- these are all things we don’t really need, but they do something for us. There is the chemical effect, sure, but I think they’re really meant more to crystallize a moment. To pause for a second, and consciously or not, maybe remember all the other times we’ve consumed these things, the memories we have associated with them.” I think about coffee in my life- rushed mornings before a big exam in college, in my summer job as a wild land firefighter waking up an hour before the rest of the crew to start the camp fire and dump half a can of Folgers in to a boiling pot, coming indoors from the -40 winter to curl up around a steaming mug.
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| Photo by Swaminathan Sundaramurthy |
I find a home for Christmas at the hostel here, La Serrana. For Christmas Eve, I spend nearly all day gathering the sparse firewood from Eucalyptus groves dotting the landscape and am not disappointed by my efforts. Dozens of people, visitors and locals, are drawn from all over town like moths to a light for music and good times. One of the hostel’s employees notices my efforts and recruits me to gather more wood for the clay oven tomorrow that they´ll use to cook most of Christmas dinner. I’m game. Christmas dinner is wonderful if not necessarily Colombian- turkey and stuffing, potatoes, beans, everything I would expect back home. It felt good to be in this little cosmopolitan enclave of fellow travelers for the holidays.
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Two towns only an hour apart, nearly identical in geography and populace, one geared almost exclusively towards tourism and the other had never heard of such a thing. In one town I am greeted with stares and friendly, curious inquiries, the other I find a welcoming community but am at some level a sort of resource to made use of by the local economy, like cattle or petroleum. As a solo traveler in less-traveled places like Ansermanuevo, one can’t help but experience the warmth of people who are happy to have a visitor in a place where visitors are few. I’ll be forced to confront the confusion and loneliness of a strange place and ultimately find redemption in overcoming language and cultural barriers. In well-traveled places like Salento, I’ll find a cosmopolitan cocoon of adventurous, creative, and attractive fellow travelers. I’ll be speaking English at least part of the time. Information about hiking, tours, and transportation will be easily available. I will be just another foreigner with a wallet, but I’ll be safe and comfortable and happy.
Each of these experiences I find “authentic” in their own way. Paragliding continues to guide me with it’s odd sense of geographical preference to new and exciting places, but there’s lots else to see along the way. Some places I visit are well-traveled, some not, but both have their charms and can be judged by their merits regardless of how lauded or not they may be in a guide book.
I write to you now from Ecuador where I have been for the last several weeks. Further updates pending. Hope to hear from you if you’ve made it this far reading through my digressions!
(Note: Title "Tourist and Toured" credit to friend Will Elliott)
2 comments:
Amazing stories, Ben! Happy to hear you are have great adventures and meeting interesting people. It is funny to hear you had virtually the same Christmas meal in Colombia that our families had up in Alaska. Safe travels!
Props! Great writing. I feel like a big slacker after reading your posts. Nice word play. Saludos de Canada
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