Wrap-up: Colombia (or, cool non-bird things)

Usually when I blog about a trip I try to offer some observations or insights that I've had about my travel or my destination, rather than just recounting where I went or what I did -- mostly because I don't generally feel inspired to document my trips that way.

Which is probably why it took me so long to get around to the 'Birds of Colombia' post, and why I'm struggling to think of what I could write here, in a wrap-up.  Maybe I don't feel that I have any particular observations or insights because the pace of the trip (lots of 14+ hour days) meant we had lots of experiences, but not a lot of time for reflection?

Nevertheless, just for the record, I'd like to share a few of the coolest (non-bird) things we saw.  

In no particular order.....archeology/history.

We visited the Gold Museum in Bogota on our first day in-country.  Bogota has the world's largest collection of pre-Colombian gold, not because pre-contact Colombia was the richest part of the Americas, but because pre-contact Colombians tended to bury their honoured dead with gold artefacts, and many parts of the Andes remained very very remote until the 19th Century.  By the time the graves were discovered, folks were at least sometimes interested in the history and aesthetics, not just the metal.

Here are a few photos:

The locals practised metallurgy. Some of the pieces were hammered out of gold nuggets, but many were made of gold alloyed with other metals (and cast using the lost wax process).

The other really amazing archeological site that we visited was Cerro Azul, one of a series of cliff faces containing rock paintings that date back about 12,000 years. (For context, the First Kingdom in Egypt was founded about 5,000 years ago, which is approximately when StoneHenge was built.  The Lascaux cave paintings are 15-20,000 years old.  The last ice age ended about 11,700 years ago.)  

No one really understands how these paintings have survived so long. 

The view from a high point on the cliff face. The jungle stretches out from here to the Atlantic.

Yes I look hot.  We had to climb 170m in 31C to reach the painted section of the cliff face.

The top was probably painted using scaffolding.  Amongst the many images are drawings that look like people climbing towers.

Many of the detailed drawings are kind of puzzling. Our local guide believed the square patches were skirts. Some of the animals appear to be pre-ice age megafauna. 

And now for some photos of additional non-bird fauna, and some landscape shots to give you an idea of the kinds of countryside we travelled through. 

The hills above Bogota

An oncima -- a wild cat the size of large domestic cat.  When the farmers at this 'eco-finca' first discovered the oncima it was eating one of their domestic chickens and looking very ill. It also appears to be partially blind.  The farmers decided that feeding the cat would be better both for the cat and for their livestock. Now it's often at the farm (although it sometimes vanishes for up to a month at a time).

Capybaras!

A giant anteater, which we saw in the extreme distance. Apparently a very rare sighting, even by those who make a point of searching out this animal.  Photo by (c) Adam Wang

Adam, the photographer.

Walking a road, looking for tanagers. (These brightly coloured birds tend to travel in the treetops in scattered mixed flocks, which is quite tantalizing!)

But it wasn't always sunny, and the roads were not always good.

The countryside as we were transiting between locations. The fields with big blobs are growing avocados. The little blobs are coffee plants. You can grow coffee for 7 years, and then you need to replant the field, which is what is happening in the brown field.

Grounds of the fancy rural hotel where we stayed for our last nights. We were the only guests!

And a fe more photos of Colombia itself:

As in rural areas of Mexico, moto-taxis are the public transport of choice for 'last mile' trips.

The main highways through the Andes are full of long tunnels. This one was about 4km long.

We were supposedly visiting in the dry season, but it rained a lot during our two weeks in Colombia.

Colombia is a major supplier of cut flowers, grown in greenhouses.

And finally, there was an election on while we were in Colombia, and I was initially confused by the election signs.  It seemed to me that the majority had been defaced by someone who didn't like the candidate. Here's a closeup example:

But signs like this were everywhere....

Eventually I figured out that they were simply showing you how to mark your ballot. :-)  Apparently in Colombia you place an "X" on either the party name or the candidate number to vote for someone. 

This concludes my blogging about our trip. It was amazing, if a little tiring. We're not sure if we'll ever return to Colombia, or if we'll do a dedicated birding trip again, but we had a wonderful time.

Random birds from Colombia

It's been several days since I last created a blog entry about my trip to Colombia.  What's up?  Have I run out of things to say?

Maybe!  Now that I've been back in Canada for more than a week, the experiences that I had on my trip are beginning to fade into the past. But I think it's more that I felt I needed to say something about birding in Colombia (the whole reason for our trip!), but when I started writing and looking for supporting pictures it quickly devolved into a list of cool birds. That didn't make for a very inspiring blog entry.

So I'll just say that the birding and the wildlife that we saw incredible. For context, when I said in my first Colombia post that we'd spotted 421 species in Colombia, you should know that my (eBird) total for Canada currently stands at 286 species. 

Not that maximizing the number of bird species that we saw was the point of the trip.  Our goal was to see cool birds (and cool things), and the trip delivered in spades. We saw and did incredible things every single day.  At the end of each day I'd ask the group "what was your bird of the day?", and each of us found it hard to narrow things down to 5 options each.

So, how about some pictures?

Brown Jacamar. Jacamars look like giant hummingbirds but eat insects instead. 

Horned Screamer. Turkey-sized bird that makes a ruckous. It also has a horn on its forehead (not so visible in this photo). 

Rufous-collared sparrow.  The only sparrow we saw in Colombia, and it's apparently technically not even a sparrow (it's a brushfinch).  Interesting that the ground-feeding bird niche is not filled by sparrows here.

Gold-ringed Tanager. Endemic to a small region of Colombia (which means that this colourful mid-sized bird exists only here, in the upper-mid elevations of the Colombian Andes.) Highly sought out by listers.

The super-cute Cinnamon Flycatcher.

One of the many different species of Toucan that we saw (Lettered Aracari)

Lacrimose Mountain Tanager on a feeder. (So named because the yellow spot by the eye reminded someone of a teardrop)

Chestnut-fronted Macaw (one of many parrot, parrakeet, and macaw species that we saw. Often poorly!)

Scarlet Ibis, with bonus out-of-focus snail kite at the end of the video.

Juvenile and Adult Tropical Screech Owls

Juvenile Rufescent Tiger Heron (you can't tell how they got the name if you happen to spot an adult.)

Andean Cock-of-the-Rock. Yes, this bird has a bill, which you can see if you look closely. (But only because this is a young bird. On the older males the face feathers are much denser, making the bill essentially impossible to see)

And I'll leave this post here!  Even though I've only reviewed perhaps 1000 of our 5400 Colombia photos, and have selected at random just a few of the bird photos that Harvey took. (Keep in mind that that we saw many more birds that we didn't get good photos of, for one reason or another).  I'll follow up with a post about other cool non-bird things that we saw later.

Cacao and Coca

So, cacao is the plant used to produce chocolate.  When we visited San Jose del Guaviare, we visited the farm of Wilmer Ramirez Riaño, who is literally one of the people who wrote the book on birds of the state. Wilmer grows cacao.  I posted this on facebook, but I thought it might be interesting to preserve it here too.

Cacao pod broken open to show the seeds.

Cacao pod growing directly from the trunk of a tree

Cacao flower

Wilmer kindly harvested a cacao pod for us so that we could try the seeds.  The white fleshy covering of the seeds was sweet/tart and delicious eaten raw (although it tastes nothing like chocolate).  Normally the seeds are fermented before being roasted and processed to become chocolate, but I crunched one of the seeds (because why not?) and discovered that it had a solid texture and dark taste that I could almost imagine was chocolatey.

Coca is another Colombian crop. Coca leaves are traditionally chewed by the indigenous people of the region to help with altitude sickness, and for a little boost similar to drinking a cup of coffee. But of course, coca leaves are also refined to create cocaine.

Coca was extensively grown in the Guaviare region during the years of the troubles, both by groups aligned with FARC / ELN, and by right-wing paramilitary groups. Local farmers were caught in the middle, pressured to grow coca even if they didn't support either side. In fact the father of our local guide, Wilmer, had to abandon his farm outside of San Jose del Guaviare when he refused to grow coca and rumours started circulating that he supported the other side of the conflict.  His life and the lives of his family were at risk. (After a year as displaced people near Bogota, they returned and sold that farm. Wilmer's father later bought land elsewhere.)

Wilmer's in the blue-grey shirt at the centre of the photo.

Other farmers made different choices in difficult circumstances. On our first day of birding in Guaviare, we visited an 'eco-finca', whose owner farms part of his land and preserves forested areas in the rest. He now hosts 200 visitors monthly (often in large groups) for birding, retreats, and environmental education programs.

Harvey's not sure about the peacock. The farmer had a number of exotic birds and beasts in his farmyard.

Many farmers like him grew coca during the troubles -- the money was good, and like Wilmer's father, you could get in trouble if you refused.  Of course, complying could bring trouble too. US-sponsored helicopters sometimes showed up to dump defoiliant all over your fields -- followed by a helicopter gunship shooting everyone who fled.  The assumption was that anyone associated with a coca field was FARC.  (Funny how only armed guerrillas don't want to bathe in Roundup, or might feel threatened by a helicopter spraying bullets and toxins).

As numerous Colombians pointed out to us, cocaine use is rare in Colombia. Without demand from the US (and other Northern countries), there would be no drug trade here.

So what was Colombia like?

The first question I was asked about our trip was simply "So what was Colombia like?"

Ironically, despite the 16 days we spent in the country, the answer is kind of "I don't really know?"   

After our initial day in Bogota, we spent our two weeks in Colombia in a 'birding bubble', travelling from nature reserve to nature reserve from pre-dawn to post-dusk every day. Our schedule was preset and our time was not our own, so my general observations on the country are limited to what I could see outside the car windows, what I could glean from non-birding conversations with our English-speaking guide (who was generally Not That Interested in non-birding topics), and what little non-birding life we experienced in restaurants and on the streets in-between birding activities.

So, what did I gather?

My initial impression was that Colombia was a richer country than Mexico, which we had just left.  The streets looked cleaner, the buildings better maintained, and there was less visible poverty on the streets of Bogota. 

View from our hotel window on Day 1

Downtown Bogota

Touristic street in historic Candalaria district of Bogota

More Bogota street art

But a quick google showed that this was an optical illusion.  Mexico's GDP is more than 4X that of Colombia's, annual average income in Mexico is ~2X greater, and the Gini Coefficient (a measure of how concentrated wealth is in each country) is worse in Colombia than Mexico (so you can't argue that Mexico is technically richer but only because there are a few really rich people artificially driving up the Mexican stats). 

What's going on?  I think a few things:

• We somewhat inadvertently booked a high end birding tour, which meant that our host company arranged for us to stay in luxury hotels in the best parts of town (our Bogota hotel was 2 blocks from the Canadian Embassy for example). In cities, our drivers were careful to avoid 'bad' areas (as we learnt in conversation with our guide in our last city, Pereira).
• It seems that wealth (and modernity) are more unevenly distributed between urban and rural areas in Colombia than they are in Mexico. In our recent travels through rural Mexico, for example, it's now unusual to see working horses (hauling things, pulling plows, being ridden as transportation).  That's not true in Colombia.  In fact, we actually saw a mule train being loaded with construction materials on our last full day of birding. This was treated as normal by our guide, as he simply made a comment about how much tougher mules are than horses.

 

Mule train being loaded

 

Moving cattle

• Cultural differences: Maybe cleaning up public trash and keeping a tidy house and yard is valued more highly in Colombia than in Mexico? Even the illegal houses built by the roadsides in Colombia appeared relatively well-kept. (Sorry, no pictures. I didn't think to take any!)
• There were things we didn't take into account in our super-brief and superficial assessment of the relative wealth of Colombia and Mexico -- for example, motorcycles flood the streets in Colombia, and in conversation we learnt that both of our 'main' guides (Ramon and Daniel) don't have cars -- they ride motorcycles as their main transportation. And using a motorcycle isn't just something young men do -- we saw people of all ages on bikes including mothers with young kids, entire families, older women...it's the default mode of personal transportation.  Motorcycles are much cheaper than cars.
  
  Motorcycle parking at the University we visited in Villavicencio. The lot was full of motorbikes when we arrived. These are just the few remaining as we were left after the work day had finished.

Other general impressions of Colombia?  Well, I didn't like the food nearly as well as Mexican food.  

The most distinctly Colombian food that we encountered was the arepa, a corn-cassava flatbread that accompanied almost every meal.  Arepas varied a lot from small fried heart-shaped appetizers (served with a mild tomato-onion sauce) to rock hard toasted lumps (served beside beans), to delicious cheese-filled tortilla-like breads. But overall, the arepas we were served were mostly pretty forgettable. 

Which also describes many of the meals that those arepas accompanied. Traditional Colombian food (at least what's served in restaurants) is meat heavy, and often seemed to consist of a relatively plain piece of meat or fish, french fries, some fried plantain, an arepa, and maybe a salad.  In the Andes region beans showed up, but these were generally served with a generous side or topping of chicharron (deep-fried pork skin/meat) and sausage. With plantain and maybe eggs and rice. Vegetables other than avocado were a rarity. 

On the other hand, the fruit and juices were amazing!  Breakfasts usually included things like fresh melon, grenadillo (a type of passionfruit), pineapple, and ripe papaya. Juices were a continual treat. It was normal to have 5 or 10 choices including blackberry, melon, pineapple, mango, mandarin, and maracuyo (another type of passionfruit).  The real standouts though were the exotic amazonian fruit juices: lulo and copazu.  Lulo is tart and citrusy, copazu is flavourful and impossible to describe (and is, apparently, a fruit related to the cacao plant.) I had copazu every chance I had, once I'd tasted it, which sadly generally meant forgoing a coco-lemonade (a coconut lime milkshakey juice, also delicious).

Snacks were also better in Colombia than they were in Mexico. In Mexico it's frustrating to try to buy snacks for a bus trip or a hike -- at least in grocery stores or convenience stores.  There your choices are chips or peanuts covered with a crunchy sweet coating, and maybe lime/salt uncoated peanuts. Granola bar / Kind Bar types of snacks are unknown -- the best you can do is a packaged cookie.   But in Colombia our guide was easily able to find nut/fruit mixes, mixed nuts, and peanuts!  Much nicer for a top-up on the go.

But other than the fruit juice and snacks, I'd much rather have Enchilada Suizas, Tacos, or a nice Mole than most of the Colombian food we tried. 

I'll leave general observations of Colombia there for now because this post is getting pretty long, and I don't have any photos to illustrate any of the food issues (note to self -- start becoming one of the bores who photograph everything they eat). Maybe my next post will be more colourful.