Colombia Journey 4

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Colombia Journeys 3

The Fincas, part 1

The Colombian word finca, like the Russian word dacha, covers a lot of semantic ground, from small working farms to country houses and vacation homes.  Since everyone knew we wanted to get out of Medellin as much as we could, people generously whisked us off to the whole gamut of fincas.

Nico and a hatful of guavas

pineapple fields above Barbosa

The valley of Gabriel's finca was once planted entirely in sugar cane, and owned by a single plantation family.  Although most of the sugar cane industry long ago moved elsewhere, there are still fields of it, and men bring it down from the slopes on muleback on stone-paved tracks that were used before Colombus.


Gabriel took us on a meandering walk through the mixed landscape of cane, coffee, fruit trees and pasture to the little factory where they make panela, the cakes of evaporated cane juice that Colombians value so much for cooking and drinking.  On this day, the shed was deserted except for a large bullfrog.  A mill race from a small creek turns a waterwheel for shredding the cane, and we followed the process in our imaginations as the juice moved to a tank and then a series of cauldrons and finally to the moulds where it was shaped and hardened.  The place had a gentle smell of fermentation from the mounds of shredded cane being dried for use as fuel to heat the process.

at the panela shed

Swimming amid the sugar cane

The original plantation has been parceled out and most of the various houses were owned by various brothers and sisters of the plantation family, now in their 60's.  An elder brother occupies the great house, a white-washed edifice with red-wooden trim, which sits upon a grassy hillside guarded by a noble white horse.  The owner took us inside to show us around the century old house.  Built of tapia pisada (rammed earth), the walls are 18 inches thick with high-beamed ceilings.  I felt the immense dining room table, built for the ages.  Amidst the plain, sturdy pieces were a few more delicate, brought by some French abeula ages past.  A gray cat slept upon a chair.  The kitchen had a great stone oven, though the old man cooks upon a camp stove.  And built into the counter was a concave slab with a stone roller for grinding the corn for arepas.


Dora, a local woman who helps out, cooked us lunch and afterwards we went with her and her daughters to swim in the creek.


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Far to the south, Gabriel's sisters keep a finca near the village of Uvital, in that part of country they grew up in as girls.  We spent three days with Esperanza and La Mona at her refugio.  The village itself sits mostly upon the top of a ridge, but the house sits just below on the eastern side.  It's a traditional style with bedrooms strung along around an inner courtyard with veranda all around.

Finca of the Tias Angel

The gardens of bougainvillea, citrus, orchids and palms draw in the birds, and I counted over 30 species in Uvital during my stay -- hummingbirds, tanangers, flycatchers, anis, antbirds, carpinteros, euphonia, and others.



The kitchen is strictly the domain of La Mona, though she let Porter in to make buñuelos, since Alberto had trained him already in the task, and since Porter is a great devourer of these spheres of hot cheese-dough.  And we ate well and drank coffee and hot chocolate and aguapanela.  

Walking Uvital

In the morning clear you could see the snow-covered Nevado del Ruiz 80 miles to the south, belching smoke and ash into the sky.  And closer by, each evening we watched the clouds and the lightning decorate the sky in the restless air of these valleys.

The mountain Cerro Bravo above Uvital

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The finca of Monica's uncle Guillermo sits atop a ridge above the Rio Poblanco.  When Monica last saw him over twenty years ago, he'd only recently decided to do what he'd always wanted to do: become a farmer.  So he'd married a campesina and lives upon his ridgetop with chickens, pigs, dogs and a parrot named Patu.  Monica says he is unaged since she saw him last -- only happier and more content.

Mona makes natilla on the woodstove

We had a delicious, traditional lunch there: centered on fresh beans, chicharron, plantains, rice.  And afterwards, while I hiked down to the river, La Mona decided to make natilla -- a kind of pudding from milk and sugar and cornstarch.  Her brothers ate it up.

Lunch at Guillermo's

Guillermo took us on a walk through his fields of coffee, which unlike the great monoculture coffee-deserts of some neighboring slopes, rely on a mix of trees to shade and fertilize much of the coffee.  Every five years they cut the coffee plants back to a stump to revive them, so each section is upon some moment of that five-year cycle.  Off the edge of the property he showed us the large plantain grove they have to feed the coffee workers who swarm to the larger growers for the autumn harvest.  There were small fields of yucca and beans, as well as a large kitchen garden and fruit trees -- citrus and avocado and zapote.  He showed us the greenhouse for drying the coffee -- though at the moment it was drying beans -- and the equipment for fermenting, hulling, and roasting coffee.

Guillermo's coffee

Colombia Journeys 2

Pictures

The Uvital-Medellin Chiva

Nico and abuela cracking palm nuts

Which is Gordo and which Lindo?

Colombia Journeys 1

Medellin

Monica, on her mother's side has 15 aunts and uncles - on her father's side even more.  Her maternal grandmother alone had 9 brothers and sisters, and the number of great aunts and great uncles and their descendants (her parents' cousins) is uncountable.  Still, even with vigorous colonies in Florida, California, New York and elsewhere, the family epicenter is Medellin.

Lunch at the Tias Gallego

So, too, it was the base of our visit.  One of Esperanza's cousins lent us her apartment for our stay, and the Tias Angel, (pronounced "AHN-hel") where Esperanza has been staying - looked after us.  We traveled outside of the city, but always circled back to Medellin.

Outskirts of Medellin

The park of lights

This city of over 3 million people, is strung along the center of the Aburra Valley, about 5,000 feet above sea level within one of the northernmost strands of the Andes.  It has the usual Latin American urban problems -- poor barrios of displaced people, pollution, traffic and crime, as well as a few extra ones, like its recent history as a staging ground for international drug mafias and gang violence.  But it is also a city anxious to put that notoriety behind it, to make the worst barrios livable, and to give its middle class a world-class city to be proud of.

Outside the Palacio de la Cultura

The sprawling family is built of engineers, doctors, bureaucrats - though memories of days as plantation owners still echo.

It's not that family members are wealthy - except in comparison to the comunas, but we saw the city mostly from that class elevation.  There are places not to go, because they've been ruined, and places to go because they showed the culture of Antioquia or they were clean and modern like the new metro.

The city is filled by their memories and their landmarks, although it has long since grown beyond them.

One day, with cousins, we took the Metrocable up over the barrios to Parque Arvi.  As we passed over the hillside barrios, you could see how they accrete like coral.  The newest dwellings hodge podge and a single story with roofs of tin held down with rocks or bricks.  In the oldest neighborhoods the buildings have acquired 3rd and 4th stories, and the pragmatic city had laced in sidewalks and schools and paved the roads for fleets of creeping buses, motorcycles and pushcarts.

On our way down, as we passed above the barrios and Saturday evening got underway below, there was the thousand sounds of humans - talking, shouting, laughing, selling.  People out and about as though they didn't have television to keep them inside.  Kids flew kites from the rooftops and more than one decorated the cables upon which the gondolas run.

Medellin, Mother and child(ren), by Botero

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It's been over 20 years since Monica last visited her relatives in Colombia.  The boys and I have never been.  But the tias have been saying to her for a while that she has to come visit because they'll all be dead soon.  So tomorrow we head down to New York to stay with friends and then first thing Monday morning we fly to Colombia for three weeks -- our big trip for this year.  I'm not too clear on what we'll be doing exactly, but spending time in Medellin and in the fincas outside of town.  We'll spend time with profusions of aunts and uncles and cousins, and I'll wish I'd studied Spanish like I'd planned, and I'll have myself a cultural experience of some kind or another.

I'm not taking my laptop, but maybe I'll be able to post now and then . . . We'll see.

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