ChiChiFly to Bucaramanga, a visit to La Mesa de los Santos

Colombia is roughly the size of  California and Texas put together, a large area encompassing a variety of terrain, including three ranges of the northern Andes. As such, travel by car or bus can be very slow. So for my first weekend foray into another part of Colombia, I chose to fly one of the small and quite affordable local airlines, EasyFly, an hour’s flight versus a 14 hour bus ride. 

The gals of Mar Adentro (my apartment building) decided to go to the city of Bucaramanga, in the mountainous area west of the Venezualen border, for a weekend getaway.  Christy lived and taught there for three years. She is from Colorado and was anxious to share the beauty of Colombian mountains and see her boyfriend, Hernando. 

View of Bucaramanga from the airport mesa

Reminiscent of Hawaii, people in Colombia welcome friends of friends as they would family, offering places to stay and fresh coffee. I went to Hernando’s sister’s home with Christy and we dropped Leah and Jackie off with Catalina, a delightful older woman who is the madre of Hernando’s brother-in-law. She was thrilled that we flew on ChiChiFly. I never did figure out if she just couldn’t quite wrap her tongue around the English word ‘easy’ or if some people just call it that, but she is well-traveled and was very sweet. 

Irish pubs are everywhere, including
Buca's trendy downtown

We drove up the mountains the next morning (riding in a car was wonderful) and the main thing I noticed were the road cyclists climbing the narrow highway up to the mesa. It was incredibly steep and there was little shoulder. Upon reaching the top, mountain bikers appeared as well, on the pavement but muddy from hidden trails.

I was envious and will be looking into a cycling excursion at some future point. We stopped for some local specialty arepas (a Colombian empanada, deep fried, made with sweet corn and queso) but I was distracted by a tienda (store) with the most amazing rustic furniture and stained glass, though no one was around to ask about prices, probably a good thing.

It wasn’t until I looked at the pictures later that I noticed the nod to Finding Nemo in the stained glass! The artist has a sense of humor, or young kids, maybe both.

 

In less than an hour of traveling outside the city, we reached the beautiful countryside and the much appreciated wide open spaces of La Mesa de los Santos. We visited a market where we sampled the local treat, deep-fried ants, and yes I tried one, crunchy and oily-tasting.

We spent the equivalent of about $7 on an array of produce to get us through the weekend. 

Driving through forests cultivated with coffee, we arrived at a house on a small reservoir at Casa de Campo, an area full of weekend homes and rentals for those escaping city life. It was lovely and the view from my balcony was sublime; the only noise, birdsong.  Friends of Christy and Hernando came over and we enjoyed dinner and wine, card games and music, with no distraction from TV or internet. The area offered hiking and I kayaked on the lake, which made me a very happy non-camper.

The big draw of the mesa is Chicamocha National Park, a viewpoint around what is known as Colombia’s great canyon. The gorges are 2 km deep in places, and the views impressive. We accessed the park via a gondola ride that traveled nearly four miles, though here it is called a teleferico (the irony of riding a gondola just like the Silver Bullet is not lost on me). The park itself is more like an amusement park with ziplines, canyon swings and the like. It is well-tended with the most brilliant bougainvillea I’ve ever seen. We were lucky in that crowds were thin the Saturday we visited; Sundays here are family days and attractions are always packed then.

The best of the man-made attractions is a massive sculpture that honors a 1781 uprising of the commoners against unfair taxation and oppression of the Spanish church and overlords. Over loudspeakers, a recording tells the story, in Spanish and English, of the bravery of the Santander people, and the whole thing is on a curved platform to represent a tobacco leaf, the dominant crop at the time. 

Now the area is known for its coffee and chocolate, with Santander chocolate bars going for hefty prices at Starbucks in the United States, apparently. I can get them here for about $2.50 and it is the most delicious chocolate I’ve ever tasted.

With the first weekend trip under my belt such a success, I look forward to a week-long break in October, another in November, and a little jaunt at Xmas time before I head to California. You’ll hear all about it soon, as well as a post coming up on my school and the city of Cartagena. 

Love to all, besos! (Scroll down for more pix)

View from the lake house

Chicamocha Canyon from the lake area

Christy & Hernando

Jackie & Leah

View from the top of the park

Night hiking

Of Spilled Coffee and Cucarachas: Greetings from Colombia

City View

Aloha! This blog is for family, friends, and acquaintances all. I’m a beginner at it so you will hopefully see improvements to the look as time goes on. I can email from time to time, and call or text you with various apps as I get more savvy with what’s out there and Facebook is a great venue for sharing moments, but I wanted a place to post photos and stories so this blog will serve that purpose. Blogging can be self-indulgent and imply a hey-look-at-me-and-my-cool-life mentality, but for me, it’s a convenient way to keep in touch since I’m not really a retiree yet with loads of time on my hands. We are our stories and I do like to make people laugh, as my foibles surely will. So here goes…

Always being a logical and analytical sort, I surprised myself with a gut decision to retire from teaching in Colorado and pursue teaching abroad as a way to save some money and have a little adventure before settling on the Big Island (a long-time plan which has had some major detours). I accepted a job at Colegio Jorge Washington in Cartagena,

El Centro

Colombia, and arrived here in late July after selling many of my possessions, packing up the rest to store at my parent’s house, and leaving well-loved friends and family and Colorado behind, at least for now.

Flower at my school

In spite of my excitement over this change and generally positive take on life in general, after a few days here in Cartagena, the magnitude of what I had done began to hit me, and I had a couple of weeks of some tough adjustment. Through the very helpful efforts of the local school staff, all the new American teachers (over a dozen of us) were quickly moved into our apartments. For the first week we were bused to school for interminable meetings which take twice as long as everything is said in both Spanish and English (the staff is in no way all bilingual), and feeling under pressure to process all the new information, my normally quick brain felt crammed to the point of overload. I was feeling rather badly about things but conversations with a couple of my new expat colleagues made me feel less alone- they were having similar thoughts and they are half my age and much more malleable. We all left something behind: lovely homes, nice schools, and dear ones, to try something new. It is a big step out of my comfort zone, but as one of my favorite quotes by Andre’ Gide states: "One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a long time."

A short boat ride to here, Playa Linda

After a few days here, in typical Linda K-is-for-klutz fashion, I tripped and fell on my slippery tile floor and dumped an entire glass of iced coffee into my Mac laptop: the very Mac that was my lifeline for communication back home and full of all my teaching files. The fall also broke a toe, rather nastily, but I didn’t even notice it at first, I was so concerned over the computer. The tech guys at school worked valiantly to retrieve most of my files from my caffeine-soaked hard drive, and my new MacBook, which arrived a few days ago from the school’s JetBox in Miami (shipping here being notoriously unreliable) has now been loaded with my music, pictures, and files galore. What a relief. PCs and I just do not get along.

Best sangria ever, at an
Argentine restaurant

The story of my first couple of weeks of wouldn’t be complete without mentioning las cucarachas. My apartment is nice and roomy enough for visitors, though it was grimy when I moved in and I couldn’t rest until I had wiped every surface with Clorex wipes, thankfully available down here. After a couple of days in my new home, with photos up, linens of my own, food in the pantry and fridge; the cockroaches, who had apparently not been interested in the place while it was empty, made their presence known. I hate cockroaches. Having lived a good portion of my life in Colorado, which is not known for its teeming insect life, the addition of cucarachas to the equation made me ask myself what the hell was I thinking to leave my beautiful townhome with my lovely kitty cat to live in an apartment with cockroaches. Even if it is across the street from the beach.

My first piece of local art

Leave it to my darling mother to cheerfully end my little pity party. When I complained to her about the roaches in an email, she wrote me back a pithy response which basically said something like honey-what-did-you-expect-they-are-everywhere-in-the-tropics. Mom ended her message with, and I quote “They rule the world!” She is right, of course. We have all seen the graphic that shows how after humans have destroyed ourselves, cockroaches will remain a viable life form, or the ones that indicate the mass of insects or nematodes far exceeds our own. 

The gals of Edificio Mar Adentro... and they all
speak much better Spanish than I do but I am
working on it!

We lived in the Marshall Islands when I was a kid and all the precautions (which also must be taken in Hawai’i, come to think of it) came flooding back to me. Trash that has even touched food goes into the freezer before I take it directly to the “shut de basura” (yes, that is how chute is spelled here), no standing water, dirty dishes, or crumbs in the sink or counters, and I cover the drain. Oh, and my helpful empleada cleaning my place to a lovely shine weekly doesn’t hurt either. The cucarachas still try to hang out, one or two little ones skittering on the metal counter every couple of days but they quickly meet their demise. Thanks Mutti, for the perspective!

I'm happy to report now I’m very comfortable in my surroundings and getting into a good routine of work and play. There will be lots to share… the awesomeness that is El Centro, my love-hate relationship with the beach across the street, the local cuisine, life at school with typical middle schoolers, and starting next week, travels around the country of Colombia.  So stay tuned for more pictures and stories. A hui hou, nos vemos, to all! 

The most exceptional sunset so far, from the balcony of one of the friends upstairs in my building.