Another South American Country

[Arab Nights (imported)]

I had a chance recently to go to Columbia.

The arrival was the first challenge. I would have been OK getting a taxi, but they arranged to send a driver. It turns out in Medellin that there is a side of the airport for international arrivals and one for national arrivals. Having been told I was American, the driver went to the international side. I actually flew thru the capital, so arrived at the national side. No driver. I had not changed currency in the US because the currency exchanges in the US airports are ripoffs. My flight to the capital had been delayed and I barely managed to catch the connection - no time there to change currency. So there I was late at night waiting until all the other passengers had left and no driver and none of their money. I did what I always do and looked for a friendly looking person. I found him in the cargo office of another airline, but he was happy to use his cell phone to call the contact numbers I had and it was all sorted out quickly that the driver would come over to the national arrivals and get me.

The neat thing about the airport experience is that since I waited and waited, I saw what happens when Columbians come home. Mind you, this did not cover everybody, but a lot of people were greeted by a whole crowd of friends who applauded when they came into sight and there are all kinds of smiles and hugs and slaps on the back.

It is quite dramatic coming into Medellin at night. The city fills a steep valley. The airport is up on the mountaintop. You wind your way back and forth to get down. Young men on motorcycles go zipping by too fast and too close. There are way too many young folks injured and killed on motorcycles. In one area the side of the highway is clogged with young men and women which obviously is the mating area if you don’t have money for clubs. You also wind past brightly lit and really nice nightclubs for those who have money. The driver told me that many things in Columbia had stabilized, but that there is a lot of crime in the poor areas surrounding the city. You hear that a lot. Once there was a lot of killing by political groups, now it is just uncontrolled criminals.

Medellin has sections of downtown that are very classical, parts that are sort of so-so and parts that are pretty new and nice. The hotel and office are in one of the latter, but it was not such a big wealthy district that it took more than 5 minutes walking to find middle classs restaurants. Nothing like dinner with the taxi drivers to see how the other half lives. There were several really nice restaurants in the area. One of the surprises was that McDs is upscale there. Occassionally weddings are even held there because it is one of the nicer places. A quarter pounder with cheese meal runs the equivalent of about $7. It is worth it, too, because the meat is noticeably better quality than quarter pounders in the US. I often ate with others but also several times ate by myself. The thing I noticed is that when I was eating alone the Columbian waitresses would really go out of their way to be sure everything was fine and that, for example, I did not get something too spicy for gringo tastes. It is just really nice when you realize somebody in another country is trying to be helpful without being overbearing.

The hotel was one of those with a European name. It was actually quite stylish, but lacked things like air conditioning (it was almost uncomfortablely hot when I was there) and the WIFI kept coming and going. At one point they put this silly portable air conditioner in my room. It was about as big as a workshop refrig. You cannot have AC without pumping the heat somewhere. So it had this flexible tube that ran across the floor as a tripping hazard and out the open window. Now let’s see, air conditioner running in the room means a big window needs to be opened for the exhaust hose. Does anybody see a no-gain tradeoff there? The other thing I noticed was the very sleek looking toilet that unfortunately was so low that you have to be careful when you wipe to be sure you don’t stick you hand where you don’t want. The hotel made up for that with the mini-bar. Not only were there chocolates, etc. in there, but a small box holding a condom (preservativo in Spanish). I have to wonder what wives think in Colombian hotels.

Another thing I noticed was how common Mexican music was in the residential areas. At times you really wonder which country you are in. I asked a lady at a mini-market about it when I was buying an after dinner beer. She said that if I had a girlfriend and things hadn’t progressed as I like, take her to a mariachi concert and the night would end up perfectly. She said the last part with a big smile and two thumbs up.

One thing that surprised me was how much people in that district of Medellin love dogs, even if they live in apartments and condos. There are people walking their dogs everywhere after work.

Medellin has this great public transport system which includes buses, a train system and a couple of telefericos which connect to train stations. Once you pay to get in, you can go all over the place for that one price of entry as long as you don’t exit the system. One teleferico line takes you up and out of that valley, over a crest and past the next valley. The first principal valley is middle class homes and on Sunday there was a mass being blasted out by loudspeakers. When you cross the ridge, you cross into a lower class of people with a cacophony of all kinds of jaunty Latin music and people wandering around with a beer in their hand or obviously drunk. I wanted off in shantytown.

I got to get out of Dodge for a couple of days. The first morning we left at first light and ate at a restaurant after you crest out and leave Medellin Valley. It was a restaurant which was like a big patio right beside the highway. As we watched the traffic go by, it dawned on me how neat the truck drivers keep their trucks. There was a lot of gleaming chrome going by. The towns are picturesque for the colors and the flowers, which are ubiquitous. The country rightfully calls itself Colorful Columbia.

Once you get into the sticks, the transportation vehicles that just makes me smile are the chivas. They are big Ford truck frames with an open boxlike steel body. With the climate there, you do not need windows. Everything is open with just a roof. They are painted all kinds of bright colors. I saw one on a Friday night full of people with an open bar and jaunty Latin music blaring away.

By horseback and foot I got far enough up a mountain that somebody told me that they had not seen a gringo in decades. There are all kinds of small gold mines up there. What fascinated me were the gold mills. They actually use arrastres there (google it). An arrastre as they do it is basically a wooden tub about 10 feet across. The sides are made of about 2” planking and the floor is actually made of cobbles. An arrastre crushes rock by dragging a big boulder around and around over the cobblestone base. II have only seen ruins and historical drawings showing a horse or mule used to drag the boulder around. Columbia is like the Alps with lots of vertical relief. There also is a lot of rainfall so the creeks run full all the time. They divert part of a creek into a wooden raceway at a shallower inclination than the terrain until the water had a vertical fall of maybe 12 or 15 feet. That would funnel into a nearly vertical PVC pipe perhaps 10 or 12 inches in diameters with a 90 elbow at the base. The pipe would discharge at the bottom against a horizontal turbine. The turbines are nothing fancy with flat planar blades. The turbine turns a vertical 10”X10” wooden shaft which connected to a horizontal arm which whirled around and around and drug via chains a boulder that had about an arm’s breadth in diameter (maybe 3 – 4 ft.). They hand break the rocks up to about 2” at the mines and bring them down in rice sacks (white gunney sacks you find all over South America) on their backs. The contents are dumped into the arrastre. The ground up rock is light enough that it is washed into a drain hole by all the swooshing around of the boulder. The ground up sand is run over a sluice box which is panned down to gold concentrate which is sold in town.

It just does not look like it should work to me. It is hard to believe that the water has enough force to move the boulder. I see an A & P mechanic sometimes at morning coffee and I was telling him about that. He began quick calculations of foot pounds of force and said that he thought Americans had really missed the boat by not using water to do things on the local scale like the Columbians.

I went to the Gold Museum in Bogata back about 95. At the tail end a guard with a submachine gun held open a blanket so I could go into a dark room. I asked him if it was good and he smiled and said, “Si senor.” I was standing there in the dark and this surreal music began playing. In sync with the music, lasers began lighting up one by one. Each illuminated one gold pre-Columbian artifact. By the end there were all these beams illuminating gleaming gold artwork all over the little room and all around me. It was one of the most impressive museum experiences I have seen.

Among the people that I know, Colombians have a good reputation (the good ones). They are intelligent, hard working, well educated and pleasant people to be around. Their economy is growing by 5 – 6 % a year. The internal wars are a thing of the past, but the country is not really secure. It is more uncontrolled gangs now rather than the controlled violence of political extremists. You have to ask where it is safe to go. In Colombia, you do not jump in your car and drive until 9 PM to get somewhere. You make sure you are where you want to be by 6 or 7 PM. They just don’t do cross country drives like we do. But if you can live in the rules, you can have a great visit in a beautiful country.

[moi621 (imported)]

for sharing your adventures.

Any chance Columbia is eventually going to go the way of Venezuela and Bolivia?

Which government serves its' "indian" population the best?

Thanks again for sharing. You seem to take the inconveniences in stride. As if you like them.

What special vaccinations and malaria prophylaxis is recommended and did you take?

Bewaring those bugs too. Major ouch that lingers.

Moi

[Arab Nights (imported)]

I had not thought about it before, but you might be right on seeking the inconveniences. I jokingly told one company that I would consider working for them if they would move their project 50 kilometers because I only work 100 km. from the nearest white guy. I just really enjoy working out in the middle of local folks, whether it is east Tennesseee or East Bumfuckonia. It energizes me to get the call to go to a new place, so I try really hard to make it work. It gets harder as I get older, but you know you gotta wanna.

I have not done malaria prophylaxis. I am not sure if that really is the right thing. I have heard of cases of even doctors dying of malaria because they were taking a preventative which hid the signs of which type of malaria it was. I have heard that the doctors who deal with it all the time are reasonably good at treating it if they can identify the type. Caution - as I was typing those words I was thinking of one guy I knew who died of malaria in Venezuela. I have heard many times that the malaria mosquito is only active in early evening and night hours. My prophylaxis against malaria and VD is to get into bed early and have the netting in place. Perhaps yourself or another medical type here could offer some wisdom of malaria preventatives, if they are 100% effective (which I have been told that they are not), if they hide the symptoms of malaria types (which I have been told they do), and whether the local doctors are pretty good about treating malaria if they can identify the type.

I don't claim to be a social expert, but I can offer some comments on the political question.

To me, Bolivia and Peru are about the same. That is based on two years living and working in both countries plus being married to a Peruvian. They both have a really strong Indian heritage. That leads to a continual undercurrent of thinking the government can cure all and the tendencies for strikes. Both countries (and also Mexico) have also had a pretty good injection of Spanish culture from the earliest days because of the mineral wealth. That cuts both ways because there were governmental, legal and educational systems in place since the 1500s, but those were always for the benefit of the people of Spanish blood and not for the benefit of all. Sort of like pre-1960 laws in the southern US were only for the benfit of whites. Especially in Peru, they seem have found a sort of reasonable system that has opened the country to the world which has resulted in years of rapid growth. To me there are three levels in the world. One is the clearly advanced societies like the US, Canada and Europe. The second level is where you get in a taxi and go. The third is where the country is so poor that you get in a taxi, negotiate a price and pay it so the driver has money to get gas to take you. Since I have been going to Peru, it has changed from the 3rd world to the 2nd world.

I have two years living and working in Venezuela. Nobody gave a rat's ass about Venezuela until the first gusher in about 1935. Venezuela was just an empty place on the map. The illiteracy rate when the first gusher flowed was about 98% in contrast to Peru which had been cranking out university degrees for 350 years by that time. Now the literacy rate is way up there, but the society has had to cram in centuries of development in a few decades. Venezuela is like the Beverly Hillbillies turned into a country.

I only know Colombia from the visits. I have heard about Colombia thru the years, I have a good friend married to a Colombian, I know a whole bunch of Colombian friends here in Arizona and I know that there were many Colombians who were the best workers on my project in Venezuela in the 90s. That was when the violence in Colombia was so bad and people were looking for a better reality for themselves. I know at that time that the telenovelas on TV were and interesting comparison. They shed tears for life's failed seductions and terminal illnesses in the Venezuelan telenovelas, in Brazilian ones they had big smiles as they climbed into bed together and in the Colombian ones they killed each other. I do not know why Colombia has such a history of violence, but my wife says she has heard it all her life. I do know that in my business they have a reputation of being well educated, professional and good workers. Of course, when you get to know a bunch, there also is all the normal gossip, petty jealousies and so on that are a part of human existence everywhere. Still, they have a justified reputation for the good qualities which is more than I can say for some other nationalities.

I bit of a ramble, but I hope it might offer some useful thoughts.