Colombia part one

My lifestyle has changed drastically from one of extremely well fed slave to one of extremely well fed queen. I’m now in the holiday portion of the programme and unsurprisingly it is very pleasant. 
I met up with Josh in Bogota and we spent a couple of days exploring. Saw some great Botero paintings at a gallery, who is Josh’s favourite artist. He has one of Botero’s fat, gormless faces staring out at him from his phone background every day so it was nice to see them in the flesh. (Or in the canvas I suppose). 

I got a haircut which went horribly wrong. I asked for a few centimeters off and I have ended up with very little hair left. He went mad with the scissors! Half way through I had a mullet so I asked him to get rid of the hair at the back to avoid that look but now I just look like a cute little curly haired boy. This is putting my aspirations to be post-appearance to the test. But very convenient re lack of maintenance at least. 
Josh and I make a concerted effort to avoid making friends in the hostels we stay in because we far prefer each other’s company to asking randomers how long they’ve been travelling for. When we got to the coffee region, however, our enforced isolation was broken and we joined forces with a nice Canadian girl, Mia, and and Argentinian guy, Manque, who we met on a tour of the coffee farms. 

At the beginning of the coffee tour you drink about 4 cups of different coffee so the whole thing is spent in a kind of high daze. We also drank tea made from coffee bean shells which was delicious. When we were at the coffee bean farm we went into the fields to “help harvest” and then saw all the various machines and people which sort the beans and shell them and dry them and decrust them and roast them and grind them. It is quite a laborious process. The farm also had a gargantuan pig and a litter of phallic piglets. I was particularly interested to learn that they ferment the pig poo to make methane gas which is how they power the oven in the kitchen. Excellent permaculture.  

Manque didn’t speak English so we were in Spanish the whole time which was great for language progress but he seemed to overestimate our abilities and spoke incredibly quickly and for long periods of time at a stretch which meant I understood only about 40% of the content. But I guess it’s better than the usual English/American thing of shouting slowly at foreigners as if they’re both stupid and deaf. 
The four of us went on a jungle adventure and clambered over rocks and up cliffs to reach a beautiful waterfall and stood under its massaging power and felt at one with the world. Then we shared four different slices of cake in the village square. A passionfruit cheesecake was a highlight. 

Eventually Josh and I tore ourselves away from the beautiful countryside to make our way to Medellin. The way people talk about Medellin you’d think it was Oz. Everybody is unequivocally obsessed with it. “Best city, best people, so beautiful, so fun” etc etc. And yeah, it was very nice and had a good array of restaurants and there is a remarkable amount of greenery in the city (in the rich tourist area anyway) and you can reach a beautiful jungle-like wilderness by taking a couple of cable cars up a hill, but at the end of the day, it’s still a city and it seems to me that often what people like about good cities is their proximity to nature, so you may as well just be in actual nature. Food’s cheaper when it comes directly from the tree as well. 
But this is just me – Josh loved Medellin and could have stayed longer. I spent a day going to the fruit and vegetable market, the botanic garden, and the cable car jungle park, and he went to various restaurants and coffee shops and read and wrote. Our various passions expressed themselves quite clearly. Josh also loved the owner of the hostel and spent hours talking to her about life and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and politics. We bonded with her when we accidentally checked into a party hostel full of 20 year old British boys and had to abort immediately. She moved us to a separate house and fed us chamomile tea in hammocks to help us get over the trauma of encountering our compatriots. 
At one point we were sheltering from the sun in a random government building and got chatting to a middle aged Colombian woman who ended up inviting us to her house for lunch. She was extremely nice and fed us soup and avocado from her garden and fresh juice and we chatted away very merrily but since then she’s been bombarding my whatsapp with YouTube videos and memes of Jesus and other various blessings. 
We left the city to go to a little town called Guatape which was most congenial. We rented scooters and explored around a big lake and up little tracks until we found a delightful ecohostel who welcomed us in for the night. They offered morning yoga and a big breakfast and had two hammocks next to each other for our post brekker reading and general discussions. Then we sallied forth on our vehicles and took part in a very calming church service at the local monastery. We were just trying to meditate for ten minutes in the chapel but we timed it wrong and half way through all the monks came in and started singing, which ended up actually being conducive to our peace. 

We had a spectacular lunch at a cafe in town run by an ex-pat from Bristol who’d left her office job in England after the 2008 crisis and traveled the world until setting up there making homemade food “hecho con amor” (made with love). We had to have three desserts, after our baba ganoush, soup, bread, quiche, salad and empanadas because it was all so bloody good. 

Now day is breaking after a night bus to Cartagena, from where we will start the coastal part of the holiday, joined by another friend of mine from uni, Iain. 

Permaculture

I write from the second part of a five leg, almost 48 hour bus odyssey from the middle of nowhere in Ecuador to Bogota, Colombia. I am keeping entertained by reliving the blissful moments of the past two weeks and by the constant stream of vendors who get on and off the bus selling coconut water, fresh juice, corn tortillas, yucca bread, hot banana cake, and more. I would be doing the local culture and economy an injustice if i didn’t sample all of their wares. 
I have just left my third consecutive volunteering stint and I really had to rip myself away. If I weren’t leaving to meet a most beloved friend, who knows when I would have been seen in public again. This time I was working on a permaculture farm for an Argentinian guy called Leo who moved here four years ago after living eight years in Europe, doing a year trip around South America and realizing the importance of protecting nature and creating a self sustaining food haven. 

Summing up permaculture is hard because it consists of many principles, but to put it as succinctly as possible, a permaculture farm will need as few as possible resources from outside to function, will fully sustain all who live there, and also will be very little work. Working a huge monoculture is hard because you and your machines have to do everything yourselves: till the soil, plant the seeds, distribute the fertilizer, distribute the pesticides, harvest, replant etc etc. The wilderness needs no chemical fertilizers or pesticides to thrive, so the aim is to copy the natural balancing of the ecosystem to create a productive food system for humans. 
For example Leo plants nitrogen fixing plants around the place to harness nitrogen (a key element for all plants) from the air and distribute it through the soil, he puts all the dead banana tree leaves and trunks over the plant beds to decompose, the pile of poo and sawdust from the dry toilet is left for six months and gradually dries into nutrient rich soil, and various other fertilising techniques. 
The huge diversity of plants and insects means that no destructive species thrives excessively and you have so many different crops even if you lose one to a particular pest one time, you still have 99% of the farm still producing, unlike the usual farming situation which is the opposite. 

Leo’s aim is to create a “forest garden” which is basically an edible woods. He has 85 different species of fruit trees, all planted in the correct place to provide shade to plants and bushes on the lower level which don’t agree with direct sunlight exposure or more spaced out to let the sun into those plants who need that. Trees are a very self sufficient form of food producers because they just keep on fruiting and fruiting unlike cereals and grains which need replanting once harvested, and bushes and shrubs and vines can live in harmony with them. You want to have a well designed natural chaos, producing food from root to leaf, home to all kinds of microlife, insects, animals and birds. My head is full of the constant symphony of daily bird song and nightly insect chant. There were also howler monkeys in his forest but I kept failing to hear them. 
The work was farcically hard. At times I felt like a slave from ancient Egypt because we’d be pushing incredibly heavy boulders through the river with all our might and then rolling them up the river bank, while trying to avoid getting crushed by them. His farm is separated from the road by a river and we needed to build a wet-season-proof platform and ramp out of stones, as well as widen the river so it would get shallower so the car could cross. This involved carting bucket load after bucket load of various sizes of rocks from boulders to gravel from the river bed to its new home, as well as hours and hours of shoveling mud and sad and stones and carting them across the river in buckets to deposit on the side of the river we wanted to build up. We’d work from 8 til 12 with a quick break to eat about three bananas and then for another two hours after lunch and nap. My body was very confused during the first couple of days about why it was being pummeled so mercilessly, my fingers and hands were covered in blisters, the outsides of my legs were chafed from the heavy buckets hitting them repeatedly and every muscle ached and pulsed. But I have never felt so good. 

​​
Working outside surrounded by more shades of green that I could describe, feeling the freshness of the water against my skin and seeing it glisten over the shiny stones, seeing the gradual progress of the ramp and platform in correlation with our physical efforts, working together to move stones that were too heavy for one person, knowing that having tired arms at that moment is just a temporary feeling of physical discomfort and will be balanced out by the pleasure of falling physically fatigued into bed at the end of the day, and in general to be working on a farm that I believe in and care about, was truly heavenly. Sometimes while I was digging my hands into the river bed for another round of gravel I would laugh out loud in joy and gratitude that I got to be there. 

​​
And if you think I’m gushing excessively already, just wait until I get started on the food. For breakfast we’d have ginormous bowls of oats with mashed and heated bananas, half normal banana (although actually far superior to any banana bought in a shop because they’re organic and picked that day/week from 20 meters away) and half maqueño, which is a different variety of incredibly soft and sweet banana, with chopped papaya, mint, and occasionally passion fruit or almonds. All from the garden. For lunch and dinner we’d have rice with garden ginger and dill, yucca (a potato like root) and some sort of salad – I spent many a blissful moment harvesting baby tomatoes. I found a huge explosion of them quite far away from the house in the wilderness part of the food forest and spent ages lifting up the spreading vines, then spotting a dash of bright red and claiming my prize and being unable to go back in because I kept finding more and more and couldn’t stop filling the bowl. We also ate loads of leaves from various shrubs and bushes and even trees. He had a moringa tree, which is a major superfood, curing a ridiculous amount of ailments and bloody expensive in the supermarkets, and we’d hack off a branch and spend an hour or so plucking the little leaves off and into the bowl. A nice meditative pre dinner activity. 

And the figs. Oh my god the figs. I used to think that if I could have homemade bread for breakfast that’s all I needed in life. And now I say homemade bread or fresh figs. The fig tree was getting very productive during my last few days so I would eat about four or five incredibly sweet and soft and fleshy figs per day and the unbelievably delicious nature of them made me think that at the end of the day, despite all the evil shit out there, the world must be a good place because figs exist. 
There was a moment when I was sitting in the passionfruit vine gazebo area after lunch one day when a hummingbird came along and whirred around me from flower to flower and I got so overwhelmed by how beautiful it was and life was and how peaceful and happy I was that I burst into tears. Then I started laughing because I was being so absurd so it turned into a weird kind of happy sob. I’m either losing it or finding it. 
I’ve learned so much about nature and food production and sustainable farming and am very inspired to start a life like this. Apparently when Leo bought his land four and half years ago it was only $800 a hectare…and we were eating like kings with loads to spare off just one hectare. (He has 19 more that he’s keeping as wild forest). He wants me to come back next year and I think I will, after going back to the other farm/spiritual retreat for a few months. Can’t get enough of these places. Pending any new information/revelations in the meantime. 

Apart from working in the river I also transplanted plants, planted corn and yucca, chopped down a papaya tree with a machete because it was the wrong variety and would cross pollinate with the good ones and ruin their genes (although irksomely I can’t actually say I chopped down a tree because papaya is actually a giant herb. Its trunk is hollow), rescued a passion fruit vine by cutting off its dead roots and surrounding the stalk in new sand and soil, as well as harvesting countless types of fruit, familiar and new. Also I caught a fish with my hand! I was picking up rocks and pulled out my hand with a small fish in it. It looked at me gaping and confused and I looked right back at it with the same expression. We let it swim around in the bucket for a bit before releasing it. It’s been a dream to catch a fish for ages but I always imagined it would be with a rod. Very happy to have actually caught caught one. 
There was a German girl volunteering with me the first week, who was great, and an American guy the second week. He was 22 and an ex college football player and I unfortunately had prejudiced preconceptions about what kind of person he was going to be but I was proven utterly wrong. He was amazing. On his last day when we were floating in the river cleaning the dirt and sweat off after work and talking about my plans to be in Asia later on in the year he did a little spasm and said “I just nearly threw up joy for you” and I laughed and laughed because in my opinion that’s one of the cutest things anyone’s ever said. He said it was a physical reflex. I’d like to nearly throw up joy for someone too, so if anyone has particularly happy news, please share!