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.

Our birding trip to Colombia: endurance edition

Harvey and I returned to Canada on Sunday March 1st, after a whole month travelling in Mexico and Colombia.  I wrote 4 blog posts about our first two weeks in Mexico. So, why no blog posts for the last two weeks?

Short answer: OMG. Birding trips are exhausting.

Harvey and I have done day trips with birding guides in Mexico, Germany, Canada, and the US. Our longest continuous stretch was a 4 day specialty birding trip in Germany, where "4 days" meant two solid days of birding preceded by a meeting day and a wrap up morning.  

Our Colombia Birding trip was 14 solid days of bird-watching, preceded by a day tour of Bogota and a slower wrap-up morning before catching a plane.  The latest start time for those 14 days was 6 am and we got back to our hotel rooms as late as 9 pm.

The birding was incredible.  Between the two of us, we observed 421 species of birds in Colombia (90% or so of which we saw, not just heard).  Each of us had 327 'lifers', or birds that we saw for the very first time on this trip.  Many of those birds are spectacular.  I can add more of Harvey's photos later, but here are links to internet photos of few of the most memorable:

• Hummingbirds: 
• White-booted Racket-tail: The male of this tiny hummingbird species has a long tail with a 'racket', just like the impressively large MotMots, which is endearing all on its own. But racket-tailed hummingbirds also have fluffy white feathers on their legs, giving them fluffy white trousers!  Hands down the cutest bird going.
• Violet-tailed Sylph: On hummingbirds, the colours that you see are 'structural', created by light interacting with the physical patterns of their feathers. That's why you'll sometimes see an astonishing flash of bright metallic pink when the light catches the throat of an Anna's Hummingbird just right, while at other times you just see the throat patch as being 'dark'. That's why photos of this stunning bird don't really do it justice even if it's easy to see its dramatically long tail.
• Purple-throated Woodstar: When I first spotted this beautiful little bird I mistook it for a huge bumblebee moving from flower to flower on a large flowering shrub.  Nope, despite its striped rump it's definitely a hummingbird.
• Tanagers:  In Vancouver, our only tanager is the bright and beautiful Western Tanager.  They have a few more in Colombia (apparently 179 species?)  We did not see anything like all of these colourful birds, but we saw more than 40.  Which seems negligent of us, but many of these spectacular bird species live only in very specific areas. They also tend to travel in groups high in the forest canopy, making them hard to spot.  
• Rarities: Andean Potoo!  Potoos hunt insects at night and spend their days entirely motionless, relying on their excellent camoflauge for safety.  Honestly, in person they look exactly light tree branches, lichen spots and all.  The Andean Potoo was thought to be possibly extirpated from the region near Bogota until our local guide, Freddy, found this nesting bird last year. 
  
  (If I posted the zoomed out version of this photo, there's no way that you would be able to pick out the bird. From a moderate distance, it looks entirely like a broken off stump.  The nest is a hollow on the top of the post. Freddy showed us photos from last year of a baby poking its head out from his Mom's belly, and thinks that the bird shown here is sitting on an egg).

Over the next few days I'll be posting additional thoughts (and photos) from our time in Colombia, but I thought I'd give you all a quick update now that I'm back in Canada (and a little less jet-lagged).