Imagine a country stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Amazon, from the Equator to the Caribbean Sea.
Imagine a country twice the size of France, with 5700 metre snow-capped mountain peaks and sweltering tropical jungle.
Imagine a country so dangerous in 2001 that even its own people were afraid to travel between cities by road because of the very real possibility of ambush, robbery or kidnapping.
Imagine a country (for the most part) so safe in 2007 that travel by bus, on horseback and even on foot is possible for its own people and foreign tourists alike and is a delight, with uncrowded roads and magnificent scenery.
Imagine a country whose outdated reputation still keeps tourist numbers to a minimum, with even those numbers confined mainly to the principal cities.
You are imagining Colombia.
Hacienda Torre Blanca, Venecia, Antioquia, Colombia. 31 December 2007
Dear friends
We have just come back to Colombia after a short pre-Christmas visit to England, where we spent time with our mothers in Wiltshire and Yorkshire.
The two weeks flashed by and it was soon time to pack our bags for the return journey. During this peak season for travel to Florida we wanted to be sure of getting to Miami, so we chose Christmas Day as the most likely to have spare seats. It turned out to be a good choice, and we even managed to make the connecting flight that afternoon to Panama. With the five-hour time difference, our Christmas Day lasted for 29 hours! A chance meeting with old friends at the airport in Panama provided us not just with a lift into town, but with two nights relaxing and reminiscing in their rented apartment. Thank you, Tom and Lilianna!
We also had an invitation from new friends in Colombia to stay at their house on a finca (farm) in Venecia, not far from Medellin. Taking advantage of COPA‘s direct flights from Panama to Medellin, we arrived here a couple of days ago. We seem to have landed in Paradise! The house is absolutely gorgeous, with views in every direction of the most stunning lush mountainous countryside, including the sacred triangular peak just behind the house. There are wonderful walks in all directions and on Saturday we went horseback riding with our hosts. We will stay here to see in the New Year with Hernan and Leslie before returning to Songline in Cartagena.
Songline has been securely moored at the Club de Pesca marina since August, when we relaunched her from the boatyard where she had spent the early summer months. Before setting out to explore more of Colombia we decided to take advantage of the excellent and inexpensive medical facilities here to catch up on dental repairs and sort out some areas of sun-damaged skin. As time went on we were concerned that our string of medical appointments would leave us with no time to go travelling. Cartagena’s annual fiesta in early November with colourful and noisy parades, including two processions of beauty queens and the crowning of Miss Colombia 2007/8, caused a further delay.
Finally, on 16 November, we set off on a three week trip which would take us through some of the most beautiful country we have ever seen. Although Colombia is still listed by the British Foreign Office and by the US State Department as dangerous to visit, the reality is that this only applies to a few areas still frequented or controlled by the guerilla forces of the FARC (Feurzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia). During recent years, the Colombian government of President Alvaro Uribe has had great success in eliminating this terrorist threat from large areas of the country, and the military presence on all the roads we travelled was very visible (and comforting!). We travelled on 35 different buses, ranging in comfort from the colourful but hard bench-seated ‘chivas’ used in many rural areas to the supremely comfortable inter-city coaches with their air-conditioning, reclining seats and bloodthirsty videos.
Not once did we feel threatened - quite the reverse in fact; we found the Colombians to be some of the most welcoming, friendly and warm-hearted people we have met anywhere in the world.
News of Colombia’s recent security improvements is reaching the outside world quite slowly and in most of the rural towns and villages we visited, we were the only foreign tourists. Even in the big cities, sightings of other foreigners were few and far between. Fortunately the Colombians themselves are great travellers and love to explore their own country, so there is no shortage of places to stay. Medellin, not long ago the narco-traffic capital of Colombia and rated one of the most dangerous cities in South America is now one of the safest and we made it our first stop. Transport around the city is by metro - frequent, clean, fast and inexpensive. A recently-added cable car route links the trains with one of the poorer hillside communities to the north of the city centre and provides spectacular views from its terminal station.
We particularly enjoyed the museum and square dedicated to Medellin’s favourite son, the prolific artist Fernando Botero. The hallmarks of Botero’s paintings and sculptures are his naďve style and the abnormal fatness of his people, horses and other animals. The square contains more than twenty of his enormous bronze sculptures, in what seems to be a glorious ‘fatty’ celebration.
To the southeast of Medellin is a mountainous region dotted with small towns and villages, each with its central plaza and Spanish colonial style church dating back as far as the 17th or 18th centuries. Their streets are narrow and roughly paved, the lower walls of the single storey houses are whitewashed or painted in pastel colours and the doors and windows decorated with patterns and pictures. Everything is tidy and clean, there is no rubbish in the streets and there are no cafes blaring loud music. It is truly as if you have stepped back in time to a gentler, more leisurely age where everyone stops to say "Buenos Dias".
From Medellin we went south to the Zona Cafetera. With altitudes varying between 1400 and over 3000 metres, the climate there is pleasantly cool with enough rainfall to provide (as its name implies) ideal conditions for coffee growing - almost half of Colombia’s coffee is produced on its lush green hillsides.
For scenery, the Valle de Cocora was hard to beat, with mountain peaks rising to either side of a wide, green valley and cloud forest covering the head of the valley, interspersed with enormously tall, slender wax palm trees towering over the forest below. When we set off for a short walk from the village of Cocora, we had no idea that there was an eight kilometre trail ahead of us, winding up through the cloud forest. It was good that we had started early. By 2 pm we had completed the round trip and were back in our comfortable mountainside cabin, able to watch the spectacular afternoon deluge and grateful that we were not still out on the trail!
An essential stop was the capital, Bogota, which we had visited briefly in 2001. On our first trip there, although we enjoyed parts of the city, especially the Gold Museum with its fabulous collection of pre-Columbian artefacts, we found the public transport system quite chaotic, very confusing and horribly slow - hundreds of minibuses vying for business, belching black fumes and causing near-gridlock along the city’s main arteries. In the six intervening years, the creation of the ‘TransMilenio’ bus system has banished all the minibuses and replaced them with a fast and safe metro-like bus service using dedicated sections of the principal roads and accessed via its own self-contained stations. Bogota is now a much safer, smarter city, easy and cheap to get around, and we were lucky enough to find a good hotel in the heart of the historic district, not far from many of the main sights. We were able to walk to the Plaza de Bolivar and to a magnificent restored colonial mansion which now houses several museums and art galleries - including more ‘fat’ paintings and sculptures by the ubiquitous Botero and an incredible collection of Impressionist paintings with works by Picasso, Monet, Cezanne, Renoir and others.
We also visited the small country mansion (now in the heart of the modern-day city) which was home to Simon Bolivar in the early 1800s while he was busy trying to unite Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela after liberating them from Spanish rule.
A day trip from Bogota took us to Zipaquira, famous for its salt mines. The mountain just outside the town is honeycombed with tunnels where rock salt has been mined for hundreds of years. Some of the old workings have been converted into a spectacular underground cathedral, large enough to accommodate more than 8000 people. Our English-speaking guide gave us a fascinating tour of the cathedral itself as well as fourteen of the abandoned tunnels leading to it which have been carved to represent the Stations of the Cross.
After Bogota we headed northeast to Villa de Leyva. Founded in 1572, this old colonial village is now a Colombian National monument. The streets are still cobbled, the buildings whitewashed and their roofs tiled with locally-made terracotta tiles. Our hotel, a beautifully maintained building where family ownership can be traced back to the mid-1700s, overlooked the Plaza Mayor. This huge 120-metre square expanse of cobblestones has a small stone fountain at its centre which for four centuries provided water to the people of the village.
Wherever one looks in this part of Colombia, there is evidence of its submarine past, before the Andes mountains were thrust thousands of metres above sea level. Fossils of creatures which once lived on the seabed abound, often embedded in the many paths which criss cross the hillsides. The showpiece (locally known as El Fossil), only a few kilometres from Villa de Leyva, is the almost complete remains of a 115 million year-old Kronosaurus. This crocodile-like marine reptile from the age of the dinosaurs measured 12 metres from head to tail - and this one was only a baby!! What awesome creatures its parents must have been! A museum has been built around the Kronosaurus, which has been left exactly where it was found, and numerous other fossilised creatures are displayed around it.
San Gil, another seven hour journey by bus, provided an exciting morning’s white water rafting on the Rio Fonce. From our one previous white water experience in Canada, we knew how important it is for the ‘captain’ of the inflatable raft to give precise and timely commands and for the crew (that’s us!) to respond quickly. ‘Precise and timely’ were not our captain’s forte - and in fact the captaincy of the raft seemed to rotate at random and without warning between the three expedition agency employees in the raft with us. So we were quite relieved that the rapids on our stretch of the river only amounted to Level 3 at the roughest. It mattered little that we were paddling hard when we shouldn’t have been or not paddling at all when we should! But we were sure that we’d have come to grief very quickly in Level 4,5 or 6 rapids!
Our final destination in the mountainous northeastern part of Colombia was Barichara, yet another charming colonial-style village, this one dating back to 1705.
It was here, in another beautiful old hotel with exposed beams and whitewashed walls, that we met Leslie and Hernan, our hosts here in Venecia. Like many Colombians they have just returned from the USA and are as thrilled as we are to be able to rediscover their wonderful country. Hernan was at school with President Alvaro Uribe and is full of admiration for this quiet, dedicated man who has made it his mission to restore Colombia to peace and prosperity
Another 3 bus rides, nearly 20 hours in all, took us back to Cartagena, where we found the marina’s annual 3-day sport fishing competition and regatta about to get under way. Participation in the regatta (for a modest fee) bestowed upon us the right to tuck into an enormous breakfast and an overflowing lunch hamper each day, plus evening entertainments of a fashion show, a musical/dancing evening and the final prize-giving ceremony, all accompanied by unlimited drinks and ice cream courtesy of the sponsors! We were invited to join the crew on a friend’s boat (brave man - racing a 56ft cruising yacht is not for the faint-hearted!), which enabled us to leave Songline firmly tied to the dock. The racing was fun for us, with winds blowing up to 25 knots, but some of the more aggressive racing tactics meant some heart-stopping moments for Tristan, the owner, and we were doubly glad that we had left Songline safely in her slip!
The regatta over, we had just one day to recover from the festivities before setting off on our trip to England.
We plan to be back on the boat on 2 or 3 January, where we will start the New Year by reinstalling sails and rigging and getting ready for our departure from Cartagena. We hope to be on our way by 10 January. With three months of ‘dry’ season ahead of us, we are looking forward to exploring some of the islands close to the coast of Colombia, en route for eastern Panama. Plans have a habit of changing, but the current one gives us a few weeks in Panama before we head north towards Honduras, Guatemala and Belize. We are still trying to make up our minds if we should take Songline into the Rio Dulce (a beautiful and well-protected river/lake system in Guatemala, sandwiched between neighbouring Honduras and Belize) to spend the hurricane season, June to November, there. The alternative is to return to Panama and Colombia, both outside the hurricane belt, before the season begins. Although it’s a long way to come back, we have so loved our first taste of this country that we are almost sure we will decide to sail back to see more.
And so, as 2007 ends, we are hoping that you have had a very happy Christmas and are enjoying celebrating the arrival of the New Year. We look forward to seeing you or hearing from you in 2008 and hope that it will be both a happy and a healthy New Year for you all.
With love
J&B