THE GREEN DIARY :                        Colombia 2023. 1

Tarry Tours have come to Colombia:

Tarry Tours are Richard, Christoph, Tony and myself.

We have been successful travel partners since our first venture to Mexico in 2017.

Since then the four of us have visited Thailand, Laos and Cambodia – Ecuador and Peru – and Madeira – twice. 

Good wintering places.

Richard and I are childhood friends. I was 5 when I met him and he was 7. Our families were staying in an hotel in Kloof, Natal back in 1957; both families had moved there from Cape Town and Johannesburg and were waiting to move into new homes.

Our fathers worked in Durban.

We grew up in what is now KwaZulu-Natal and have remained friends ever since.

He is a Wallace-Tarry and that is why I call our group Tarry Tours. Richard has enabled much of our travel through the Home Exchange Programme, a wonderful way to live in foreign places for nothing and there have been some handy homes in Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo, Oaxaca – both in Mexico, Chiang Mai in Thailand, Quito in Ecuador to name a few.

And now we have come to Colombia.

Christoff speaks lots of languages, in the European way, but not Spanish.

First stop Bogotá:

View from our 13th Floor hotel room.

It’s a grubby city but a laid back and friendly one too. Besides if you visit this country there is no avoiding Bogotá. It is a hub.

We confined ourselves to La Candaleria  and only ventured forth to the northern suburbs where the rich and famous live in the  Zona Rosa, once.

The city backs onto the Cerro de Monserrate, a mountain ridge topped by a church which can be reached by funicular and cable car whence are afforded spectacular views all around.

It is a great setting for this historic city.

La Candelaria centres on the Plaza de Bolívar dominated by the cathedral, the Palace of Justice, the National Capitol and the Palacio Liévano. Much history played out here, some of it bloody. ‘Chequered’ is a good word to describe Colombia’s history. Fraught with civil wars, revolutions, guerrilla movements, drug wars and the actions of Imperial Spain and its surrogate the Catholic Church, it is a complicated one to follow – like the histories of most of Latin America and, indeed, all the Americas north, central and south.

We Europeans certainly have a lot to answer for! 

So we headed for the museums to have a lot of what we think and feel, confirmed.

There is a plethora of museums and galleries and we visited several but were most impressed by the Museo del Oro (Gold Museum) and the Museo Botero, a gallery dedicated to the works of Fernando Botero and his personal collection bequeathed to the nation.

There is a great deal of blood and horror. It is shameful. But the museum is brilliant.

stop now: Miró, de Chirico, Delvaux, Braque, Chagall – nearly finished – Freud, Henry Moore, Klimt, Dégas and Matisse. Phew!

Paintings and sculptures. Many of his own works are homages to certain artists executed in his own particular style. 

The collection is housed in a colonial mansion three blocks up from Plaza Bolívar but there is a modern annexe at the back housing the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República where largely contemporary Colombian art is displayed, ranging, though, from 17th Century religious art through to modern canvases. Another gallery attached houses contemporary, temporary, largely installation art works. Very edgy. I never understand them but still, interesting.

This is one of the best museums I have ever seen and certainly along with gold, the other best choice for us here in Bogotá.

There were other museums including the rather quaint Instituto Cultural León Tolstoi which seemed to be a hangout for aged Communists! Started in 1944 and heavily subsidised by the Soviet Government, it was meant to foster cooperation and cultural exchange but seemed keen to promote pre-revolutionary culture as much as Marxist dogma. We asked if there were still any Communists left in Colombia but received evasive answers. How it has survived the right wing era from 1948 through all the troubles, dictatorships, juntas and the powerful oligarchs is amazing.

Lower than Bogotá and breathing slightly easier.

But – San Agustín:

was happy to supply us with any number of these while admitting that it is a mystery as to how a largely hunter-gatherer community without access to sophisticated tools of any kind were able to lift the enormous stones, often weighing many tons, carry them up from the bottom of the Rio Magdalena gorge whence they originate, deposit them on the required sites, sculpt and shape them and place them on the levelled mesitas in specially created underground caverns – no decent digging implements, no blocks-and-tackle, no written language and no evidence of sedentary farming even, or any sort of economy to back up the endeavour. 

We have been to many archeological sites all over the world, in Peru, in Mexico and Egypt; to Angkor Wat, Petra and Ecuador, Stone Henge and others – menhirs and dolmens propped in peculiar places but never to a site where absolutely nothing is known of either the coming or going of a whole people.

On our last day Adrian, as we liked to call him, moved me much by saying that it was evident that whoever they were, material wealth appeared to mean nothing to them and that the spiritual intention of these sites and their emphasis on a natural balance in the world between nature and man, a knowledge of this balance, was the most important thing of all. Adrian was once part of the business world in Bogotà where he worked successfully for Microsoft but suffered an early crisis, giving up a lot of his material obsessions, returning to a simpler life at this time of environmental crisis. Perhaps, he said, we have something to learn from these tombs and the sculptures in them.

San Agustín. A special place. 

Next time, dear Friends, Popayan, Villa de Leyva and Mesitas. Plus THE ROADS!

No exams this time Friends. There will be three modules before the next tests.