Greetings from Mykanos.
I have just returned from Bogotá, where the weather was 15ºC, varying between sunny and light clouds. Here, in, the bush, it is sunny and 26ºC. Nothing remarkable about that, it is usually thus, and in fact is uniform throughout the year. Bogotá is known as the City of Eternal Autumn, and Mykanos is in the heart of coffee country which enjoys a yearlong ‘media clima’ or medium climate.
Meanwhile it has been 52ºC in China, in the high 40ºs in Europe, particularly southern Europe, coming down to 30ºC at night, and there were multiple wild fires, which I call bush fires, in Greece, Italy, Spain, Tunisia and Algeria, causing the biggest ever Greek evacuation of people from Rhodes. And in the US, as well as experiencing big fires in California, 90 million people were on heat warnings, in the face of predicted dangerous temperature levels that might last for weeks. “We are looking at temperatures in the ‘oneteens’,” said a US weatherman working in Fahrenheit rather than Celsius.
I can only feel very blessed to be living here at the latitude and altitudes that really do define Colombia.
I was particularly aware of this during a short odyssey we undertook to the north of Bogotá as we drove up mountains and down into valleys, across plains and through rainforest. On the way we encountered: a cathedral 200 metres beneath the Earth’s surface carved from a salt mine; a lake of 55 square kilometres, situated 3,000 metres up in the sky; the Rio Magdalena, Colombia’s mightiest river; the site of the decisive Battle of Boyaca in 1819 that secured the liberation of the continent from the Spanish; and the longest tunnel in the Americas. We went from the heat of summer to the chill of winter, often in the space of an hour or two.
The Salt Cathedral is in the town of Zipaquirá, close to Bogotá. We knew of it, knew it was a huge tourist attraction, and a place of pilgrimage, but had never been motivated enough to visit. Thank goodness we took the opportunity to do so.
The halite mountain of Zipaquirá has been mined since 1815 and, as mining is dangerous work, in the 30’s the miners carved a small sanctuary from the rock salt in which to pray for themselves and their safety. It was expanded somewhat in the 50’s to host a large cathedral and walkways, and again in the 90’s adding chapels and sculptures and a processional pathway linking the Stations of the Cross, which alone took five years to carve. The main body of the cathedral holds more than 3,000 people during Sunday services, all some 200 metres underground. Artfully and dramatically lit to illuminate highlights and reveal its massive scale it provides an astonishing and mesmerising experience.
In what seemed to be a roll call of superlatives we visited Villa de Leyva, a beautifully preserved Spanish colonial town whose Plaza Mayor is the largest square in Colombia. Moreover, the plaza comprises 14,000 square metres of cobblestones making it the largest cobbled square in South America, and along with the cobbled streets surrounding it, one of the most potentially mishap prone environments imaginable. I always remember a Walt Whitman style warning I saw stencilled on a walkway at Lake Michigan in the US: ‘Slipping, tripping hazards present’. It came back strongly as we dealt with the cobbled streets and squares of Villa de Leyva, especially at night.
The next superlative was the Laguna de Tota … Lake Tota … which is the largest lake in Colombia. At an altitude of more than 3,000 metres it is some 600 metres higher than Bogotá, giving it daytime temperatures around 15º, which drop to near freezing at night. It necessitated warm ponchos, which is staple wear for all the locals. The lake is 12 km long and 7.2 km wide, and we circumnavigated it via the road that traces its shoreline and soon saw why this area is the onion capital of Colombia. The year round growing conditions are perfect, as they are for potatoes elsewhere, for dairy herds at the slightly warmer temperatures, and for citric fruit, avocados, stone fruit, maize, sugarcane, grapes and olives … and of course, for fine arabica coffee.
As I write in my forthcoming book, if there is a market for an agricultural product or crop, either export of domestic, there is a location in Colombia that can provide ideal growing conditions year round.
Speaking of my book, ‘Better Than Cocaine: Learning to grow coffee, and live, in Colombia’, publication is on track. Editing is completed and we now have a cover design featuring an illustration by Adriano. I will keep you informed of progress as launch date approaches.
Another superlative encountered for the first time involved our trip over La Linea on our return journey, from one chain of the Andes to another. La Linea … The Line … is the highest point of the Cordillera Central (Central Chain), where we are situated and the Cordillera Oriental (Eastern Chain) that accommodates Bogotá.
In either direction the road was perilously steep and dangerously narrow, and wound sinuously up and down the near vertical terrain. The multitude of semitrailers, loaded with shipping containers being transported between Bogotá and the main Pacific port of Buenaventura, often had to swing across both lanes to negotiate corners. The accident rate was four times the national average.
Now that has changed. Our trip though over La Linea was along a multilane highway that took us through 25 tunnels and over 25 bridges … the tunnels penetrate a succession of peaks that are connected by a series of bridges that traverse massively deep valleys. The longest tunnel is called La Linea and is 8.6 kilometres long; the longest tunnel in the Americas.
It took 14 years to complete and opened in 2020. It was a first for us and the comparison with the previous journeys was unbelievable. It is probably the only straight-line road in Colombia but that multilane line goes like an arrow through tall mountains and across deep valleys.
It was as big a surprise as the Salt Cathedral, and like the Salt Cathedral it is the unimaginable outcome of vision, expertise, determination and endless effort. I wonder, however, unlike the Salt Cathedral, how soon people will forget about what an amazing achievement it represents and just take it for granted it as the road over La Linea.
And that … becoming blasé … all too often is the bottom line.
Well, the top line in this case.
Love from him and me
Baz
