Greetings from Mykanos.
Spring is springing in Europe and Autumn is falling in Australia, but here it is much the same as ever. We have, however, been having regular rainfall, which can be a nuisance in Bogotá but is exactly what our coffee trees need. We are just about to get into La Traviesa, the small coffee season, and a week or so ago the trees all flowered, kicking off the start of the beans we will be picking in the La Cosecha, the big harvest, which starts in October. Each flower will become a coffee cherry, inside of which grow two opposing seeds, or beans.
We missed the flowering as we were in Bogotá for a week or so attending to some things, and the flowers are only there for two days at the most, but Horacio sent photos accompanied by glowing reports and prognostications for the future.
In the meantime, the present was posing problems of its own.
On Sunday afternoon, while we were in Bogotá, thieves broke into the apartment and our bedroom at Mykanos and nicked two flat screen televisions, satellite decoders, remote controls and an unopened bottle of Zacapa 23 year old Guatemalan rum, which happened to live next to the satellite box.
Albeiro, our agregado (caretaker), who had been busy attending to the animals, saw one of the villains fleeing the bar/outside kitchen with the small sound system that provides the music for dinners there. He disappeared through the fence at the top of the ridge behind the kiosk. There is a public path there, which, in one direction goes up to Marapra, the top of our farm, and in the other, crosses the road and then climbs up the mountain to Anserma, coming out just near the town cemetery. Administrator Horacio, who had called the police, went to Marapra and sent son David to the cemetery, to see if the thieves emerged. The police called Horacio. They too had gone to the cemetery and apprehended three local, well known, ‘ne’er do well’s and druggies who had emerged from the path. They were drinking but had no contraband. Could they be the ones? Horacio asked what they were drinking. Ron Zacapa 23 Años.
They were duly arrested and under pressure revealed where they had stashed the stolen goods for later collection. All was returned and installed before we got back from Bogotá, except for the Zacapa rum, which the police kept as evidence, along with the empty box from whence it came and which the thieves left in our bedroom. It was undoubtedly the only bottle in town and I think the police found it the best tasting evidence ever.
We have now heard that the guilty trio are at liberty again and have robbed two houses since ours. The problem here is that if the crime is under a certain value, the police have to let them go. That doesn’t mean however that they will go scot-free forever. This is Colombia after all, and they might rob the wrong person’s house; someone who doesn’t share our absolute respect for human life and wouldn’t hesitate in a bit of Do-It-Yourself justice. In a similar case a couple of years ago, involving plantain being stolen from one of our farms, the police apologised about not being able to help but added that if the perpetrator’s body were found floating in a river they would not be interested in investigating how it got there.
We drove back to Mykanos on Maundy Thursday, or Holy Thursday as it is known here, which being a holiday meant that the vast majority of big trucks were off the road, and we had contingents of soldiers at various points giving us a thumbs up as we did the same to them.
We also encountered a couple of Pare-Siga’s (Stop Go), the equivalent of ‘flagman’ stops in Europe and Australia, where traffic is restricted to one direction, alternatively, to accommodate roadwork. The difference here is that when vehicles are stopped to wait their turn, there is a procession of passing vendors selling drinks, fruit and snacks of all sorts.
These days the vendors tend to be Venezuelans, and I don’t want to sound superficial or lascivious, but the better looking they are the more they seem to sell. We bought some peaches from a spectacularly handsome boy who almost blinded us with his gleaming white, perfectly regular smile. We admire their industry and enterprising spirit. We have, however, since learned that some of them are being too enterprising, stealing fruit from trucks stopped in the queue and then selling it to other stationary vehicles further up or down the line. The truck drivers are getting very pissed off with this, and it could prove a good way for young Venezuelans to lose their perfect smiles … permanently.
We returned to particular abundance. In the huertas (vegetable gardens) we had aubergines, fennel, mixed lettuces, basil, dill, spinach and spectacular green tomatoes, all of which came from seeds bought in the UK (Thompson & Morgan) when we were there last November. We have more basil and chives in pots on the big upstairs terrace, along with orchids, heliconias, assorted flowers, grasses and palms. Adriano has been planting trees assiduously; fruit trees, flowering trees, eucalypts, palms, and in this climate and soil they are growing almost before our eyes.
And so of course, are the families of our feathered friends. 12 new ducklings hatched two days after our return and Adriano couldn’t be happier. The only trouble is, as he said to me this morning as we watched the goose family (all 18 of them) posing around the edge of the big pond, he would feel guilty dispatching one for the dinner table as he knows them all too well.
Another thing he knows all too well is the town of Supia, where his mother was born and grew up. It is an hour or so from Anserma along the road to Medellin, the Pan-American Highway. Adriano used to spend many holidays there at his grandmother’s house when he was a child.
It is has always been a hot town, in both senses of the word. One refers to the ambient temperature; Supia is in a valley, surrounded by towering mountains, and therefore much warmer than Anserma and Mykanos. The other refers to its safety. During La Violencia, the 10 year civil war that ran from 1948 to 1958, Supia was a dangerous place to be, with many deaths, and it remained very “wild west” until relatively recently.
We drove there last Sunday to visit some of Adriano’s relatives.
Adriano’s grandfather had a general store in the centre of town, in which Adriano would help when staying there, and above which his uncle still lives. The store now sells home wares, and is still in the centre of town adjacent the produce markets, which take over the street on market days. What has changed is the immediate vicinity. There are cantinas next door and across the road; on all the four corners of the intersection in fact. Behind the beaded curtains that protect the identities of those inside, there is loud music blaring, laughter and raucous talk, much drinking, and continuous flirting with and propositioning of the ‘coperas’ or working girls, who sell drinks and themselves to increasingly inebriated customers.
It was like being in a real Colombian country town, with ‘chivas’ (open sided highly coloured local buses with hard bench seats) loading up with people and Sunday shopping, horses tethered in the streets, police monitoring the drunks and chatting with the girls, deafening music blasting from many different sources, and general mayhem.
All very different to what I remember from my first visit to Supia in 1990, but then, I assume, so am I. Certainly older, much less a stranger in a strange land, and I would like to think a bit wiser.
Funnily enough, while we chatted in the street with Adriano’s uncle I was receiving a lot of flirtatious looks from the girls coming and going from the cantinas. Not much chance for them I’m afraid. Some things haven’t changed at all.
Love from him and me
Baz
