Greetings from Mykanos.
Happy New Year!
That is a very traditional salutation to mark the transition from an anything but traditional 2021, to a hopefully far more positive 2022.
But if we thought we would wave Covid goodbye as we turned the page on the calendar, we were sadly disappointed. Omicron seems ubiquitous and rapidly expanding. One hopes it is not just another stepping-stone towards Omega, to be followed by whatever alphabet they adopt for later strains.
Vaccination has made the situation a bit more tolerable but we cannot start to pretend things are anywhere near back to where they once were. Vigilance is necessary if we are to regain some semblance of normality.
Lynne in Brisbane, who knows a thing or two about matters medical, offered this wise advice.
Key to avoiding Covid. 1: Stay home and avoid shopping and social events as much as possible. 2: Social distance when forced to be out. 3: Hand sanitise often and liberally. 4: Masks, and wear them properly. 5: Alcohol, drink whenever you don’t need to work or drive.
The first two are easy when you live in the bush, three and four are a bit boring but make perfect sense, and number five I have been doing since before Lynne was born. These days it’s mostly Jameson Irish Whiskey, Chilean Chardonnay and Carménère, and Argentinean Malbec.
A reasonable amount was consumed over the ‘festive’ season, as we observed time honoured traditions. The Dia de Las Velitas was again celebrated by just four of us; Adriano, me, Adriano’s mother Rosa, and Alvaro, our Man Friday and most other days. It’s the candle festival that signals the start of Christmas proper. December 7th honours the eve of the adoption of the Immaculate Conception as dogma in 1854, and December 8th is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.
One tradition we omitted for Christmas 2020 but reconstituted for Christmas 2021 was making natilla, the traditional Colombian Christmas treat.
Natilla is made from maize, milk, and panela (unrefined cane sugar) with coconut, raisins, cream and other delicious additions, and making it involves stirring it over a wood fire for hours as it mixes and melds, and then pouring it into containers where it sets into a sliceable or spoonable pudding.
We were assisted by friends Fabio and Andres, and Alvaro of course, and made masses, as it is really the only way to do it successfully. In normal times it would be consumed in great amounts as dessert at the workers’ Christmas party, but that is something else suspended in these times of Covid. Instead it was distributed to friends and workers and colleagues and their families to have at home.
Christmas Eve … Noche Buena … is the most important part of Christmas here, with the 25th a day on which to relax, go down to the rivers and barbeque and picnic and swim, and generally have a good time.
We went for a ‘paseo’, or outing, and drove to Ansermanuevo and Cartago to see the how the locals were spending Christmas Day. In the UK extended families are locked inside watching The Great Escape or Love Actually and trying to avoid fighting with each other as they recover from a huge lunch and the Queen’s Christmas broadcast. Everything is closed and there is no public transport.
In Colombia everybody is out, drinking, promenading, flirting, flaunting boobs and bums, competing on who can have more huge gashes in their jeans or who can wear the shortest skirt, and generally being visible. Too few masks on the young I am afraid but then what is the point of making oneself look gorgeous and then having it concealed behind a mask. Music blared from every bar, coffee shop and cantina, couples were dancing in doorways and between tables, which were festooned with bottles of beer, aguardiente and rum, both empty and rapidly emptying. Quite a few people looked a lot worse of wear. It reminded me of Christmas Day some years ago when Venetia and Jeremy were visiting from Walcha in rural Australia. In the afternoon we drove to the nearby town of Guatica. It’s not a big town, and sits in a valley, and the small plaza was full of cars and jeeps and people, along with some horses. We had beers in a bar that faced into the plaza, sitting at a table near the open entrance, with couples dancing salsa and other rhythms between the closely packed tables, on a floor liberally covered in discarded peanut shells.
As a waitress’s swaying hips sashayed past to deliver beers to a nearby table, Venetia managed to shout over the music … “Quite a bit different to Walcha!”
We had a light meal in Cartago, at a table in the plaza in front of the church, watching the locals posing for photos in front of the amassed Christmas lights, as excited kids in new jeans and trendy t shirts zoomed around on their brand new roller blades. Mindful of friends and family in Australia and the UK, and the many Christmas lunches and associated rigmarole we had shared with them, Adriano insisted I celebrate a time honoured tradition … donning the silly paper hat that comes in the Christmas cracker. We had neither crackers nor hats, so for a brief time, with great reluctance, I endured wearing a paper serviette across my forehead to the mystification of nearby diners.
Not all traditions are worth the crepe paper from which they are fashioned.
One thing that does seem to becoming a tradition of ours worth repeating is buying farms.
In December we became the proud owners of Finca Santa Fe, around six hectares of coffee and plantain at Playa Rica, an area that gets its name from a large farm of the same name bordering our new property.
It has a traditional cafetero’s house with a flat roof that houses a ‘secadora’ … a coffee drying terrace. It is exposed when the roof is rolled forward. Where it differs significantly is having a swimming pool, something we did not know about when we bought it having only surveyed the land rather than the accommodation. The pool is of no interest to us but it is a much-coveted accessory, which might mean that we can rent the house out for family weekends to townsfolk who seek pool, barbecue and country house for get-togethers.
The best news is that we are already picking coffee and plantain, both currently much in demand.
The other good news is the opening of the Tesalia tunnel which links the main road to Cali and the Pacific port of Buenaventura, with the main road to Medellin and north to Barranquilla, on the Caribbean coast, and the Atlantic. The tunnel goes from near Remolinos, the intersection with the road to Belen where we staged the ‘Paro Cafetero’ or ‘Coffee Strike’ back in 2013. The tunnel took more than five years to construct and runs 3.5 kilometres under the mountain range on which we sit.
It is part of ‘Pacific 3’, one stage of a huge infrastructure project that is linking the key cities and ports of Colombia with wide flat roads that run over huge bridges and through long tunnels. Eventually it will give the Panama Canal a run for its money, with containers being trucked rapidly between oceans. Suddenly, in a land of mountains, valleys, rivers and seriously sinuous roads, it’s possible to travel in straight lines.
The benefits for us are immediate. The semi-trailers laden with big shipping containers have stopped using the road that goes past us (the time honoured but seriously outdated Pan American Highway) and are going through the tunnel and along the new highways instead. There is still the odd truck driver who is trying to avoid paying the ‘peage’ or toll for using the tunnel highway but it is a bit like, for those of you familiar with Sydney, going from North Sydney to Circular Quay via Gladesville to avoid the Sydney Harbour Bridge toll.
It’s much more tranquil here now without those behemoths trundling past, and much more enjoyable driving down to the valley and back up again without being stuck behind one as it labours up the mountain, or encountering and trying to avoid one going in the other direction around a hairpin bend on which the semi always swings wide to avoid falling off the narrow road into the valley.
There are lots of ups and downs to accommodate but we are slowly benefitting from encouraging progress. A bit like 2021 I suspect.
Love from him and me,
Barry
