Greetings from Mykanos.
It’s very lush and green here at the moment, the result of a lot of rain. It has rained almost every day and now it’s time for some sun to get the coffee cherries ready for the cosecha, which will start in September.
Mykanos’ location, right in the middle of the tropics, means that the rain is very heavy, but short-lived, and often is accompanied by very impressive bouts of thunder and lightning. It starts with hints of lightning followed some 20 to 30 seconds later by a distant roll of thunder, but soon advances, the gap between flash and bang diminishing until they coincide overhead with seemingly apocalyptic portent, before moving away to scare the shit out of people in other neighbourhoods. Sometimes the storm comes and goes and then returns, two or three times, before it disappears into the distance. One can only imagine the winds and weather systems that propel it around our particular bit of the Andes multiple times.
I missed a bit of it as I enjoyed a holiday in Bogotá while Adriano had a short spell in Madrid and London, attending to some family affairs and taking in the exhibitions of Francis Bacon & Lucien Freud at Tate Britain, and Pablo Picasso at Tate Modern. He particularly liked the Picasso, which focused on just one year’s creativity – 1932.
My time in Bogotá was spent working on my book, ‘Passion, Peril and Pleasure: Learning to grow coffee, and live, in Colombia’, editing and fine-tuning bits to make it a bit more compelling. Hopefully someone will find it of more than passing interest. We shall see.
The serenity of our apartment, even in a city of 8 million, was an added bonus as we are currently bedevilled by passing leviathans, rending the air with chugging exhausts, hissing and screeching brakes, and tremendous house rattling thumps as one of their myriad wheels goes into a pothole that they created near our front gate and are exacerbating each day.
You might remember that we had the nuisance of big trucks before when work was being done on the main road between Medellin and Cali, forcing them to make a detour along our part of the Pan-American highway, which in our neck of the woods is just a sinuous, steep, two-lane road, the corners of which can barely accommodate these huge semitrailers with their loads of imported goods, shipping containers, heavy equipment, inflammable liquids and newly felled trees.
Well, they are back due to a problem with the tunnel that takes them through a spur of the mountain, and seem louder than ever. This will all change when it is fixed, and when the new road building project that links Medellin with the coast is complete. Already the road that runs through Remolinas, the intersection that connects the roads to Medellin, Pereira, Cali to the south, and Quibdo in the west, has been transformed into a highway. Now they are creating a new highway from Remolinas to Medellin, boring massive tunnels through the mountains and spanning valleys with new bridges. When it is finished the big trucks heading to and from the coastal port of Buenaventura will bypass Anserma and us completely, cutting hours off transit times, and greatly increasing our tranquillity.
What is also greatly increasing our tranquillity is last Sunday’s Presidential election. It was between Ivan Duque, protégé of former President Uribe, and Gustavo Petro, ex-M19 guerrilla, ex-mayor of Bogotá, and candidate of choice for the (supposedly now peaceful and law abiding) FARC, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and Raul Castro of Cuba.
It would have seemed to be a pretty obvious choice but look at the US electing Trump.
A lot of people don’t like Uribe, but that doesn’t include us cafeteros, as he made our region much safer and enabled us to get on with our lives and business. It was his tough stance that convinced the FARC to sue for peace while they still had something with which to bargain.
There was a visual being distributed on social media which compared electing Duque to using a condom, saying you might not like it but at least it protects you from the venereal disease that is Petro. It reminded me of the French Presidential election in 2002 when we lived in Paris. The Left took their eye off the ball and Lionel Jospin was eliminated in the first round, leaving the second round to Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen. It was curious to see the Socialists, through gritted teeth, campaigning for Chirac, as the alternative was too horrendous to contemplate.
I don’t vote here anyway, but I live with someone who has very strong views and I am looking forward to seeing the back of politics for a few years.
Speaking of elections and the newly re-elected Nicolás Maduro, we were interviewing some women a week or so ago for the job of looking after Adriano’s father, who has lost the plot through Alzheimer’s and become quite a nice old man. One of them was a Colombian woman who moved to Venezuela in 1985 during the bad times, returning to Colombia two years ago to escape the bad times in Venezuela. She owns two houses in Venezuela, which she lets to tenants. Combined income for both is US$7 per month. With regard to the recent elections, in which Maduro enjoyed such an overwhelming victory, she was surprised to learn subsequently that she had voted no less than three times for Maduro, even though she has not set foot in the country since 2016, let alone a polling station.
I was also interested to note that the Miss America beauty pageant, sorry, scholarship programme, announced it was ditching the swimsuit section of the competition as well as the evening dress section. This was timely as I was reviewing what I wrote about beauty queen competitions in my book when the news broke. I was writing about Miss Colombia, but that is quite an accurate title. Miss America? The only contestants come from the U.S. Where are the entrants from Uruguay, Peru and Mexico, and Colombia for that matter? But then the Baseball World Series has no teams from outside the U.S. … and the Miss Universe competition is restricted to planet Earth.
What’s in a name? Quite coincidentally, a friend sent me this video, which is about America, football, and the much bigger picture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMobaS-n4Bs
As it says, America is already great. Now if they could just fix the U.S.
Love from him and me
Baz
