Coffee Country (or In Search Of Juan Valdez)

Could this be Juan Valdez himself?

To begin with, a couple of confessions:  Number one, I don´t drink coffee, or at least I´ve only drank a few cups in my lifetime.  Three, to be exact.  Three cups in fifty-nine years. This has been something of a claim to fame for me.   Every so often I would recount the dates and the occasions for each, which would drive a few of my friends and at least one of my sisters half nuts.

After being in Colombia for two weeks, however, those dates and occasions now have to be updated.  In fact, not just for one time, more like a dozen -- hell, I´ve practically been binging on the stuff.  It was that darn almuerzo they have here -- lunch, I´ll blame it on lunch then.

Almuerzo or lunch is the big meal of the day in Colombia.  It´s generally three courses -- soup, salad and some kind of carne or meat, served with fruit juice of a tropical blend.  All in all, it´s probably equivalent to American supper.

Yet it wasn´t the food itself that caused my downfall, it was what came after the meal.

With my plates pushed back and me working away with a toothpick, invariably some smiley waitress would arrive with a teeny cup smack in the middle of a saucer.  I´d look at it -- the cup was the type you pinch the handle with two fingers and the woman seemed so proud...as if she were saying, you think the food was good?  Now try some of our coffee.  You'll see what really makes us famous.

At any rate, that's how it started.  Just one little cup...I mean, who would ever know?  They talk about la cultura de cafe here, the culture of coffee, and now I see why.  The stuff is delicious.  An entire lifestyle is based upon it.  And a tad afterward sets off one of these big meals just right.

Almuerzo or lunch -- at Bahareque in Cali

Now to my second confession, despite the title of this post I didn´t spend much time up in coffee country.  The weather´s the blame on this one.  I intended to stay longer, but the rain and mist and chill up high gave me other ideas.  With the clouds and all, you couldn't see much scenery in the mountains and to hike about on the trails and such you were sloshing through muck.  So I bailed for the lower altitudes, in particular to Cali, a city in the lowlands known throughout Colombia for salsa dance. 

As for Cali, my four days there can be summed up with a few experiences:

• While walking an area rife with music and gaggles of people on the street one night, the doors of a club burst open like those of an Old West saloon, and a couple gyrated out onto the sidewalk, arms flailing and bodies contorting to the rhythm of salsa.  Evidently the club couldn´t contain their exuberance any longer.  Without skipping a beat, they looped around outside, to the enjoyment of everyone, and swung back inside.

• In drastic contrast, of the fifteen or so people who stayed at Cafe Tostasky that weekend,  four were robbed or threatened of being robbed, with me being one of them.  A guy with a knife relieved a trekker from Ireland of her camera; a rogue cab driver extorted about fifty dollars from a mother and son from the U.S.; and a teen wielding a stick with nails jabbed through the end, truly a nasty looking weapon, demanded money from me.  (As for what happened, let´s just say that despite my age I can still get down the road!)

The city of Cali -- dancing and danger

Not to be negative on a place, but to report is kind of my duty.  What am I but your humble correspondent anyhow?

Unlike in Medellin and Manizales and Armenia, all cities I´d visited, Cali had a menacing quality, an aura of threat about it.  I´m not saying don´t ever go there, just go there with both eyes open.  Which is what people do who visit there.  The lure of the dance draws los turistas there in droves, for instance, and from what I tell it´s worthwhile to them. 

To keep it in balance though, this was the only place in the country I´ve felt unsafe so far.  Compared to de altura, the highlands to the north, Cali is a place of heat and humidity, and a lot of mosquitoes.  After three or four days you get a feel for a place, and the feel of this place, for me anyhow, was not good. 

As soon as I could, then, I headed back north.  The climate there is more bearable, and I´ve never been much of a dancer anyhow.

Local color in Cali

Colombia's monsoon -- the view from above