Reputation is everything and Caquetá, located on the eastern foothills of the Northern Andes, has a pretty bad one. It’s bad name is entirely founded in the violence which began with the arrival of the rubber industry, initially with the genocide of the tribes that live in this part of Colombia and then the baton was handed to the various guerrilla groups who still have a strong presence in the region today. Caqueta was not heavily occupied by the early Spanish incursion so there are no pretty white towns to be found, only bustling little commercial hubs, buzzing with motorbikes and shops selling everything from the latest fashions to agriculture products. Its life and landscape have been carved out by industrialization, after the rubber business died out, the cows arrived. The land was steadily stripped clear of rainforest from the mid 20th century to what is now a vast savannah of grass land that runs from the edge of the mountain range, peppered with little patches of forrest, where amazingly the biodiversity of millions of different species still thrive. Despite Colombia’s recent pledge to stop deforestation at the COP 26 climate summit, in Caqueta it continues to be a real issue. The relative lawlessness created by a mix of fear and incompetence within the justice system means that those land owners who need more room for their cattle, burn and then clear the forrest that is left, while other industries continue to pollute the rivers.

Tourism is in its infancy, really it has barely been borne. Most Colombians fear this area because of its violent past but equally its hard to arrive there by road and there are only a handful of flights each week on small 50 seater planes which makes it one of the more expensive destinations to get to. Lonely Planet do not even list Caqueta as a place to visit, it’s blanked out on their map, yet Caqueta is known locally as the gateway to the Amazon, its literally the edge of the forrest. Caqueta is mostly populated by recent Colombian settlers but the forrest that runs from the mountainsides and beyond towards the Amazon are settled by tribes; for the tourist it provides much more comfortable conditions to see many of the animals you have to sweat buckets for inside the Amazon basin. With all the resistance both physiological and economic few Colombians visit Caqueta and international tourists are a rarity like an animal on the WWF endangered list. On going to visit the Museum of Caqueta, located in Florencia, first I was told it was closed for the day, as the guy who operates it had gone home. However as luck would have it, he decided to pop back so he opened up what is a large room on the top floor of a badly maintained municipal building. The visitor’s register showed the last visitors were over a week ago with around a few dozen people visiting each month. It’s really a collection of bric a brac, there are reproductions of pottery, Amazonian tribal items mixed with more modern colonial clothing and tools, almost exclusively newly made and not actual historical artefacts. As you delve deeper you find a large collection of mechanical and electronic items from around the 1970’s onwards such as typewrites, televisions, tape recorders and gramophones. Moving swiftly on, and it is swift, you arrive at the local history section which is a collection of hand grenades, improvised bombs, army uniforms and a short history of the violence alongside the most important people murdered in the area. There are no labels on items, you wonder if anything is catalogued, but equally there is nothing of value inside the collection. Surprisingly there is one shelf dedicated to the awards that the museum has one including the coveted Great Pirarucu! The mind boggles as to what other museums exist in the area that might have achieved the status of runner-up!

The museum sets an accurate tone for how far tourism has developed. You get the feeling that a little central government or NGO money has found its way here but only really to try and spark something into life. The result of intervention of this kind which is always fleeting leaves a merry band of enthusiasts but with no real professional skills or understanding of the wider market. Luckily I managed to tap into the nascent tourism experiences through a chance meeting in Bogota a few weeks prior to my trip, where I met some NGO workers who have contacts in the region. Through a series of referrals I finally arrived at the source of one project that is called Uruki, a small group who are trying to develop eco-tourism around a manantial, a natural spring. Through the same group I was hooked up with the local bird enthusiast who runs trips to his brother’s farm, near the much troubled town of San Vincente de Caguan. Both experiences, like the museum are not in demand, I was the second tourist of the year to travel with Jorge, the ornithologist and only a handful of people have visited Uruki this year as well.

Jorge Muños is one of those rare humans who gives so much to the world he inhabits. His principle work is as a doctor and he dedicates all of his spare hours to the pursuit of birds; every weekend he can be found cataloguing the hundreds of different species in and around Caqueta. He trains young recruits, as well being as active as prudently is possible in the campaign against deforestation and the pollution of the natural habitats of Caqueta. He has lost friends to the fight as those that stick their head above the parapet in the attempt to restrain man’s impact on the environment are still regularly murdered, especially when they clash with commercial interests. We discussed how ineffective the local authorities are in protecting the forests and rivers, partly because of the ground they have to cover but mostly because they are completely incompetent, lazy public workers on the gravy train with no real interest to get into conflict with any criminal who is likely to reply with a deadly response. Controlling this region through violence has been the staple tactic for over 100 years, local community leaders and municipal leaders were regularly murdered alongside other targets such as educators and journalists.

The violence comes from all sides. Jorge’s godfather was murdered in the small town of Puerto Rico by the army after he was mistaken to be part of the guerrilla. The paramilitaries took their turn, but now the conflict sits with the narco gangs who have splintered from all groups, as well as the illegal miners and the wealthy land owners who treat God’s earth as their own piggy bank. Scars of the conflict live on inside every family and are visibly noticeable on roads which are pitted in places through munitions that exploded years ago and have been barely patched up and not fully repaired. Jorge’s father was also kidnapped, he told me the story of how his family had to sell everything, including taking out bank loans to pay off the FARC in order to get him returned,. From there his family built back the cattle business they had before and now his brother runs a farm as his father, still alive at 87, enjoys his winter years in retirement.

Despite the darkness, Jorge shines a light. He does not express any anger or rage when discussing the past, he recounts stories in a very matter of fact way. His passion for ornithology brings him a natural peace and his enthusiasm overflows when a rare bird or bird only found in the region appears. He has a talent to know where each species can be found and whistles or more often uses the recorded calls of an app called Merlin, produced by Cornell University in the US. With a detachable speaker that he connects to his phone using bluetooth, he creates some distance between the human observer and where he wants the bird to land. It is not a precise art and often takes some time but the bird whisperer as I called him, normally delivers, the only exception was when a group of falcons decided to circle around for a period which prevented a smaller bird, a tanager, from arriving for fear of its life. Jorge locates a position in a tree or an open area where he indicates that the bird will land and in time it does, making it easy to photograph the feathered friend. It shows how with a little technology and half a life time of know how, St Francis of Assisi can live again, through a man that is clearly at one with nature and and man that has developed techniques that allow interactions and people to share considerable time with a species often observing it face to face.

Apart from birdlife, all other life thrives in the little forests that sit of the foot of the eastern mountain range of the Andes. The easiest mammals to observe are the monkeys, we saw a good number of different species such as the common spider monkey, but also the more interesting saki which has the wooly coat of a sloth but the mobility of a primate. A type of wild boar roams the jungle pathways, we did not see it but we certainly smelt it; a whiff, that turns the aroma of the jungle into a gents toilet. In reality inside the jungle its pretty inhospitable, apart from the mud, you are bitten, stung, buzzed at, chirped at, screamed at by mostly the macaws whilst all the time you are sweating out a good deal of water and salt with the intense humidity. But it is within that environment that there is so much biodiversity. Jorge has recorded hundreds of bird species, in one morning he recorded 70 different species inside the Merlin app. You can only begin to imagine what exists and is yet to be documented in the Amazon as we were only within a space of just a few hectares.

Talking at length with Jorge he lamented a little the changes that have happened since the peace process has taken hold. Whilst grateful that the authoritarian control that the guerrilla and other groups forced upon the community has now mostly gone, he points out that the deforestation is now much worse as the civil and criminal authorities of both the state and central government are next to useless to control it. Before people who wanted to burn and clear the forest needed permission from the armed groups, now people can burn at will with no consequence. The much maligned town of San Vicente de Caguan is now hopping with trade and life, it is growing at a steady pace and Jorge feels completely safe there. We drove around late into the night and there is no sign of fear, curfews or controls that once were part of daily life.

This part of Colombia received a lot of investment in terms of military presence and also the roads are in the main pretty transitable as well as being free of charge; most of the country has a series of tolls every fifty or so miles, here there are none at all on the main thoroughfares. Some enterprising communities have built their own roads that connect small hamlets, they are called veredas and they charge a toll, but Jorge compares this to the alternative which are impassable mud tracks so he is happy as are others to contribute to this alternative governance, completely contrary to law, but something that works. It shows how there is a gaping void of authority between the ending of the tyrannic control of armed groups and the new control of a semi-democratic governing regimes of the state.

Another positive Jorge points out is how with COVID 19, much needed funds have finally arrived to his hospital in Florencia. They did not have any ICU units and now they have 20. The hospital is being transformed with new testing equipment not just for PCR tests but others that arrived with the technology necessary to deal with the pandemic. Before patients with critical condition were sent on 5 or 10 hour road journeys with a family member to Neiva or Bogotá. Without a family member the patient could not be transferred to a suitable hospital with facilities such as life saving equipment or an isolated room with germ free conditions.This was horrendous as many died on route or if they survived the journey often the family member who went with them was left destitute with no accommodation or money to survive the days or weeks in a strange city far from home.

In a contrasting experience to exploring the wildlife with Jorge, I spent some time in a local community project called Uruki, which is a small barrio in the hillside of the city of Florencia. The community is made up fo three groups, the Uitoto, Coreguaje and the colonialists or whites as they are referred to, effectively the modern Colombian. The project within the community is to try to maintain a sustainable woodland as well as harmony between the 3 groups. The Amazon tribal groups of the Uitoto and Coreguaje are not inside their native lands as they have all been “displaced” by one group or another that operates within the interior of the Amazon. One of the representatives of the Uitoto is a man named Raul. He greeted me exhaling a dust of green coca leaf floating from his mouth that he seems to consume the whole day. He grows his own coca plants, he has various varieties; he dries the leaves and then with a large wooden pole and a meter long casing of bamboo he pounds everything down to a fine powder inside his giant sized pestle and mortar. The powder is so dry that he also consumes a “tabaco” which is a black tar like paste, a bit like marmite. This has medicinal properties but also encourages the production of saliva which is essential to balance out the dryness of a couple of table spoons of powder every hour.

Inside Raul’s little market garden he grows all sorts of different shrubs, herbs, spices, chiles and as part of the community project he has a small collection of orchids. Each plant has a medicinal purpose, some are for renal conditions, others for an upset stomach, but many are used to treat cancer. His version of Amazonian medicine is heavily infused with a confused spirituality that he has had since adolescence. He was orphaned, I suspect by the guerrilla but he did not say, maybe he simply does not know. He doesn’t know his birth name and was brought up missionaries in Putumayo before finding his way back to his ancestral routes. His approach to medicine is based on 4 key plants, coca, tabaco, yuca dulce and jacin or something that sounds like Jasmin in English but is a different plant. These four plants are the plants of power, the principal plants that need to be understood and treated in a certain way as if abused each can lead to problems. The obvious example of this is the coca plant!! He has various rambling, part ancestral yarns about each one, how each plant was delivered by a mysterious stranger or the god Mo into the community. The reason I emphasize the idea that everything is partial is that his ideology is littered with Catholic dogma. He talks of one true, all powerful god, but then he branches into the powerful elements of the forrest and the water who are most likely gods within his real ancestral culture. He talks at times like a parable from the Bible, carefully repeating the core concepts of community, such as dialogue, listening, patience and the eternal quest of knowledge.

His religious and spiritual development stops pretty sharp when it comes to women, women cannot consume coca as it is a feminine element inside his theology. If a woman were to consume the plant then she would become confused and disorientated. He tells us he becomes confused and disorientated in the presence of women if they join the tribal meetings, he cannot concentrate; he tries to gloss over his misogyny by inferring that the women are naked, which of course they were many moons ago but not in his life experience where the missionaries put a stop to that! He talks of sexual distraction but it’s really an internal fight of someone who is very conscious of the “colonial” mentality where women have a more central role in society, Raul is also living under the rule of the colonialist, not his tribal rules. Many Uitoto live in their own lands and under their own laws in areas known as resguardos, they would certainly not try and explain or appease in any way their beliefs but Raul is not from either world, orphaned, then displaced from his early life to the edge of what is to him a metropolis.

In the mixed up ideology of Raul you begin to understand the beauty of the project of the community which is to try and develop language and ways to express ideas that allow completely different cultures to live together in harmony. It’s a microcosm of the challenges that people face in Colombia, a certain historic diversity but also such strong and often violent individual experiences that shape a very disjointed country. The more time anyone spends in Colombia the complex tapestry of life unravels itself a little. Just the story of Raul, firstly born into a tribe, then orphaned, then formed by missionaries, then a period in his tribal life, then married to woman from a different tribe, then displaced by a violent group, then thrust into a modern day city after years of living in the jungle. Just one of those experiences is hard to contemplate, but now that same man is part of a project to fuse disjointed communities, two distinct tribes and the modern day Colombian (who is created from Spanish, black and indigenous genes and ideas). The mind boggles but with carefully chosen language and patience a blended philosophy can be sustainable. One good example is medicine. Raul talks of his medicine as only being preventative, his plants are mixed with prayer to help his patients. He talks of when this fails and diseases take hold then the modern day medicine has its purpose which effectively in his mind is some type of surgery. There is a harmony that makes sense to everyone from all communities if each branch of health and healing techniques can be compartmentalized and appreciated for their intrinsic values and nobody disrespects anything as bogus or contrary to their philosophical or scientific beliefs.

Interestingly enough the challenge around sustainability of the environment without the community is with the Coreguaje, who will clear land for the planting of yuca or other staples. One initiative they have developed is a focus on the production of copoazú, a fruit related to cacao which grows readily in the Amazon. The deal is simple - if the Corequaje provide an ample supply of the fruit and promise not to destroy the forest to grow other plants, in turn they receive a steady income which makes things a little more sustainable all round. Its too early to know if anything is really working and there is very little traction with any eco-tourism related to the project but they do get a lot of plaudits and government visitors for the initiative as an all round idea that ticks many boxes that are in the list of fundamental challenges for Colombian society in general.

The last element of the project is with orchids, they call them orchids for peace. Many of the people involved have their own little orchid collection of ten or twenty plants. However Mary has managed to collect over 150 and receives regular visits from national and international experts who are both observing and helping her develop the collection; Mary is hopeful to fulfill a planned invitation to Kew Gardens in London to share and improve her knowledge of orchids. On regular visits into the rain forrest different species are gathered and taken into the homes, some grow in the soil but many are parasites or air plants that grow on small wooden stumps or attached to trees in the many gardens. Mary has plans to commercialize her garden and has a number of orchids for sale, each fully grown plant is around 12 USD to buy. The same group are trying to grow vanilla, a non native plant but again something that for a low yield has quite a high price. The Uruki project is incredibly small and in a national and global terms not even a drop in the ocean, but in its own way it shines a little light on what can be achieved on the edge of the Amazon forrest, a key part of the long term future of the planet.

Caqueta has a strong sense of autonomy, it’s a long slow journey to Neiva, the nearest principle city of the Huila, the neighboring state and then several hours more to Bogotá. You get a sense that much progress has been made and the society despite some overbearing capitalists and drug runners, now operates with some sense of normality. It is a beautiful part of Colombia, with access to the heart of the biodiversity that Colombia often boasts about in its tourism adds but under delivers to nearly every single visitor to its shores. It’s a gigantic melting pot of recent internal migration. Of the many residents, the style of talking is very much a mix of phrases and accents from Cundinamarca and Antioquia, Colombias two most populous states. All of that is mixed with several different indigenous groups, some still autonomous but many integrated into the society, albeit on the fringes. For those that love to arrive at places before they get over run, this should definitely be on the list. It may take years for it to forget its past, but when it does, those who currently fear it (the majority Colombians), will finally take the plunge and the international tourists will follow. I am sure one day it will become a key eco-tourist destination, where Jorge, Raul, Mary and others can let the diversity of the gateway to the Amazon do all the talking as visitors will be amazed and marvel at the diversity, all the time with the sound of the squawking family favorites of the macaw and the toucan echoing in their ears.

There are not many remote places on the planet and I was given the impression that the extremity of the Colombian Caribbean coast that borders Venezuela was one of them. The guide books tell you to take a tour and the tour companies have extreme in their names, supporting the idea that it is a real, out of the way, adventure. On the first day heading to Cabo de la Vela this is not the experience, it is time consuming to move around despite there being many well paved busy roads, thanks to both the light and heavy industry that punctuates the area. However it is not until you move further north to the most extreme tip of South America, known as Punta Gallinas, that the true off-road adventure starts.

La Guajira is the home to the Wayuu people, like many other Colombian indigenous groups they live a semi-autonomous life. After you leave Riohahca the largest frontier city of Guajira you will immediately see “communities” that are no more than a handful of extended families living in mud and wooden structures; also common are tiny bungalow homes and out houses built of breeze block and concrete, collectively they are locally known as rancherias. The lines between a traditional lifestyle and the adoption of modern technologies, for ease of use, are heavily blurred. You will see cemeteries, Christian crosses and churches populating the area as you drive from sandy, unmade roads to more familiar concrete or asphalt ones. It’s striking the amount of plastic by the roadside, making you feel you are on the outskirts of an industrial refuse site where small plastic packages and bags can often seep out of a large dump and litter the surrounding environs. In this case they are mostly plastic bags, flapping in the heavy breeze, pinned to the thorns of shrubs or cacti. Not one community would win the best kept village badge, in fact, you feel like there is a total disregard for nature. The litter is coming from the Wayuu, there is nobody else there and no sign of any roadside dumping. It is odd to see such little pride and such a disconnect from the environment, but as you travel further along the road you find more and more dichotomies between the idea of a people in touch with the land and the industrial presence of an invasive developed society.

The first large settlement along the road from Riohahca is called Manuare. There you will find the artisan extraction of salt from sea water. Large pits or ponds with steep sides are filled with salt water that is pumped in and then left to evaporate, dried out by the sun. Once dry, men literally shovel the salt into wheelbarrows which are then carted off to the refineries in other parts of the country. It is a labour intensive job in the sheer heat and humidity of the almost all year round sunshine that this part of the coast experiences. The guide said the majority of Colombia’s salt comes from the area, other areas in Colombia have more rock salt, so perhaps he is referring to sea salt, but I did not press him to clarify. The size and scope of the operation seemed very small, a quick sweep of the head showed nothing more than a few hundred meters in the distance, with only a handful of current piles of unrefined sodium chloride. It is though noteworthy as one of the few towns where work is in abundance.

From Manaure you head up to Cabo de la Vela along a concrete road which runs alongside the railway track. The track only has one function, which is to carry the coal mined in Albania up to a specially designed port for the carbon product to be shipped out of Puerto Bolivar. For this reason it feels less like an off the beaten track adventure as you travel along a broad man made road, running for tens of kilometers north, wagons chortling past as you go, filled with coal on the way up and nothing on the way back. This part of the industrial landscape is not supporting the Wayuu; I saw a security guard peddling alongside the tracks and nothing more in terms of local workers. This  project is high investment, resulting in highly damaging contamination to both the picturesque scenery and the planet in general. It is not sustainable for the local population as they are not involved in any part of the industry and it is not sustainable for the planet; the case in point that la Guajira is one of the most waterless places on earth for most of the year. Recent droughts which are really a way of life have been extended making it imposible for many to survive without heavy state intervention.

Cabo de la Vela is a nothing town, its modern function is to support the handful of daily tourists that stay no more than 1 or 2 nights. As you can arrive to this point with a normal vehicle, many Colombians come and hang their hammocks under wooden shacks dotted along the beach. We actually did the same but with some local families coming from further down the coast nobody could sleep well, as this far away paradise was turned into an open air Vallentato and Reggaeton dance hall. Apart from the landscape of undulating dunes and vast planes of dried out, flat bottomed lakes, you never escape the wind. Here in Cabo its an excellent place to kite surf as the waves are not more than a meter high and there is a constant strong breeze. There are a number of kite surfing schools, so if you like sleeping in a hammock to a lullaby of loud music then this is the ideal place to pass several days tugging on a your personalized sail that drags you at high rate of knots through the coastal water.

Despite not being too far from industrial centers, Cabo is not served with electricity; not from want of trying but it is because the lines and transistors have collapsed. The guides say its because they have been stolen and sold on, but it looks like there has been a lack of maintenance, everything is rusted, with the constant torrent of wind powered salt water being  driven into every part of the apparatus; the bottom line is limited lighting hours as all electric supply comes from personal generators. The amusing scenario for those blasting out music through high amp outdoor speakers is that they also need to produce their own electric power to do so, dancing the night away surrouned by the odour of gasoline. The irony of all this is as you move further up the coast only a few kilometers there is a large wind farm, the first stop on the second day of the tour. It makes sense with the high winds, but also with the all year round sunshine bonanza solar could easily power local hamlets that are dotted across the whole of la Guajira. Sadly though instead of seeing technology that could transform the lives of those that live near any sparse underground water source, you see hamlet after hamlet of kids and mothers begging by the roadside.

The tracks made by previous vehicles guide the 4x4s across the dusty, sandy planes, but they always run past a group of rancherias associated with an extended family. Each family sends out children and women to block the road with everything from crude cobbled together string draped with colored pieces of cloth, to old motorbike chains, to tires, to dried out branches or  heavy rubber chords. It's a constant stop-start to go further north, every few minutes the driver decides if he is going to play the repeated game of chicken where you don’t slow down and at the last minute the flimsy barricade is dropped to the floor. The wheels and hubs of all the cars are wound with bits of cloth and flimsy rope where the kid dropped the rope too late and the car took their makeshift toll booth with them. The toll is not usually for hard currency, but cookies wrapped in plastic bags, water and sometimes a lollipop. There are a few billy goat gruff type tolls, more like check points where serious heads of families (men) demand about 70 cents for the vehicle to pass. Here the drivers stop, hand over the money, wait a while and then move on. We also encountered a group of drunk Wayuu, who flagged down the car and positioned themselves on the bonnet until a fee was paid so that we could go on our way. For a tourist in their own private vehicle this system of begging for money with a little menace would feel like a shakedown, but it is the principal way that that Wayuu get hard currency or innutritious junk food into their diets. The government also provides significant handouts which according to our guide are rarely distributed evenly.

The kids grab at whatever you offer through the window to pass by each checkpoint, the women tend to snarl or grimace, sometimes muttering something aggressive as you pull off. The serious family heads argue for several minutes and talk about lack of respect. Whatever each experience is, the overall feeling is of a people with their hands out, a people that seem to do very little each and everyday but wait for the world to give them what they will as they pass by. It is hard to imagine what happened in the first months of the pandemic when no money, food or water was passing through these inhospitable lands. There is no electricity, there is very little drinking water, there is just sand and a few low hanging shrubs and trees that litter the landscape of cracked lake beds that fill for just a few months of the year. The coast there offers an abundance of fish, goats seem to survive without too much need of the planets resources and the two form the main protein element of the Wayuu diet. The fields of cacti are used to construct homes but also produce a fabric that is employed to make hammocks and bags. The colorful items are sold across la Guajira for a handful of dollars but can be exchanged for hundreds of dollars to an unsuspecting tourist in Cartagena, Medellin or Bogotá. These goods are the only visible product and livelihood for many Wayuu, the women doing all of the work.

The machismo lifestyle of the Wayuu does not stop with their minimal contribution to the income of the household, many spend a good deal of their time drunk. The Catholic church’s teachings have been bent out of shape as alongside what is deemed to be a christianized society, Wayuu men can take several wives. In a landscape that produces so little. where only the cactus produces an edible dragon fruit style consumable, the men are producing several children each without any real means to support them. The government interventions create a mixed up world, effectively by law the Wayuu live under their own rules in areas defined legally as resguardos by Colombian statute. For this reason bigomy is allowed and criminal justice is meted out by local leaders and not by the government apparatus that completely fails the rest of the country. The image of a child with their hand out, the image of a child chasing after a vehicle, banging the door when they receive nothing is the image mirrored across the recumbent vistas. Despite being on the cusp of so much industrialization, even with wind farms a few kilometers from towns, nothing seems more bleak than a child educated only to beg.

Putting the lack of social cohesion to one side, the journey north from Cabo de la Vela is nothing less than spectacular. Hour after hour you are struck with sweeping, uninterrupted views. Mountains mark the edge of the vista, but they do not limit the expanse that seems to be never ending. The real limits are the sea line, where high winds crash the climbing waves into the shore; in many places the wind is lifting the sand to form spectacularly high dunes. As you arrive to Punta Gallinas the dunes surrounding that area are high enough to board down into the ocean below. Crude light houses have been constructed on top of pylon towers with a simple solar power light. They seem like pointless structures for the 21st century and offer no real architectural brilliance that you see in many US and European light house constructions. There is no sense of history, there are no ancient or even old constructions that have not been made by mother nature. The wind that whips up a storm, the short but heavy rainy season has crafted every structure that you see, all is from nature’s hand not man’s.

The sheer remoteness and the pristine, impecable, sandy beaches rival anywhere in the Caribbean. It seems odd that this hasn’t been exploited, it maybe to do with local indigenous politics or more likely because of the high winds that never cease to blow. Even further south, a day away by car in Riohacha, most trips to the beach are accompanied by at least a zephyr if not a strong gust that will whip you with sand particles as you try and soak up any rays. In these most northern beaches, as picturesque as they are you would spend most of the day chasing down your hat. One amusing incident took place where a girl's hat was stolen by the wind, only for a young guy to set off with a full-on Usain Bolt action. He stamped, jumped and grappled with the hat, but like a scene in a cartoon whatever he did the wind would take it a few inches from his grasp, to the point that after 500 of meters of chasing he lay prostrate in the sand, beaten and unlauded for his partial efforts. Nature is definitely the winner and the starkness of the environment is a reminder that if humans do not come and tame a place then it is truly wild, the natural beauty of very little or nothing familiar to sustain human life, something dry, inhospitable and daunting is a wonderful contrast to the rich lush rainforests that are no more than a few hundred kilometers from this off beat corner of Colombia.

Ten years ago I met Pedro Yaure, an indigenous member of the Tikuna tribe who has lived his whole life in and around Puerto Nariño the Colombian part of the Amazon. He was a young man, hyperactive, always busy and for the a few days he was our guide and companion who showed us a small part of his world. Myself, a Chilean girl and a Dutch guy, together we roamed around the jungle, Pedro made musical instruments out of plants; we ate grubs and termites; painted our faces and snorted “tobacco”, a local plant mixed with ash and other elements that gives you strength. Pedro actually uses the “tobacco” or rape as it is known as pick-me-up when he has to carry out heavy-duty tasks such as carrying large logs from the interior of the jungle. With his friends we went out on a canoe to see the pink and grey dolphins and one night he left us abandoned in the jungle while he went off to fish, sleeping in hammocks surround by what felt like a billion or more mosquitos. As we walked back to the village the following day, after not getting much sleep, Pedro showed us a plot of land that he said was his, there he was going to build his house and have guests stay. Thanks to the wonders of Facebook we kept in touch all these years and last week I returned to see how my old friend was doing.

He had built his house a few years after my first trip and subsequently built a second house alongside a kitchen/living area that is separated away from the two buildings. He is now married, to no less than 3 wives and has had 2 children, one from his first and “main” wife and a second from a wife who takes her turn to be visited. His third wife, yet to bear a child is only 19, he visited her while we were there, early one morning to take her out on one of his daily fishing trips. He told us that she was complaining about the lack of attention and as she likes to fish he killed two birds with one stone; I am not clear if there are romantic opportunities at 5am on the river, but he did return with a handful of small piranhas, with very little flesh, that made a pretty pithy lunch that same day. Having maxed out on the number of wives allowed by the Tikuna, he does not hold back on chasing other women with a mixed degree of success. The macho lifestyle is alive and kicking within the tribes of the Amazon and there is very little resistance or fuss from the women. With 24-hour discos in the hamlet, the most notable named “Mister T”, there is plenty of opportunity for the local men to couple up with more than their official quota of wives. With the influx of tourists as well, and those “Eat, Prey, Love” fans who are looking for a different experience, from time to time the local men can vary their dalliances with more exotic options.

Pedro had lost his youthful sprightliness in the ten-year span between visits but his enthusiasm and knowledge of the jungle had not abated. His project to build his house and guest house “Yaure Lodge” has been completed, he is now a father and with the income from tourism he has started to travel further afield within the interior of Colombia. His day-to-day routine has remained the same, he rises early to fish, he is a tourist guide in the day and at night hangs around like a teenager on a street corner looking for whatever action he can find. The years have been incredibly kind to Pedro in regards to his physical appearance, he has not aged much, in fact his father who is 80 does not have a grey hair on his head and I doubt that there is an obsession to use Just for Men or other dyes so far from our Instagrammable world. His lifestyle and healthy diet contribute to his ageless looks and it seems if you research a little the studies that are taking place, scientists are revealing how healthy the Amazon tribe people are compared to the western counterparts. My wife asked about the health of those living in the community and Pedro’s (main) wife, Dolly told her that very few people die of cancer or heart conditions, normally people just get old and those that die prematurely it is because of an accident or fight between neighbors. She said that pneumonia is a bigger threat, especially to the young, as they do not have any local medicines that can combat this. Logically the biggest threat to life are the creepy crawlies that roam literally everywhere, Pedro had recently had a close shave with a snake when hiking with two German girls. He showed me the teeth marks in his wellington boot as much as a warning that my Gore-Tex hiking boots would be no protection against the realities of what we might come across during a night trek that we went on one evening.

Walking through the jungle in the pitch black, with no moon for company we only had one torch between us; Pedro updated me on the changes that had taken place, not only in the last ten years but also throughout his life. We did stumble across a hunter out looking for a class of rodent, but in general Pedro told me that the local people don’t hunt birds and the larger mammals such as tapirs anymore. The infrastructure and commerce has improved so much that for 4 US$ you can buy a chicken (local Colombian chickens are more like 7 US$). Tins, rice and many other food products are hauled up river to feed the masses and this availability of food means that apart from growing some fruits and yucca on his land, Pedro can supplement his daily fish haul with other products with the minimal of effort. Gone are the days of hunting with the blow pipe, the macaw can now fly without threat as an accord between the tribes and the government has brought in protections against many of the animals and birds that live in the rainforest.

Pedro told me how his life had become more complicated, how he struggled for many years to be tied down not to just one wife but multiple. It cannot be because his sexual freedom was any way inhibited but more that he had to focus on giving time and energy to others, instead of being independently able to roam. He said he didn’t want any more children and it seemed in part because of the responsibilities of family life and his wanderlust to see more and undertake adventures; this had been driven on in the last few years as he had started to travel away from the Amazon for the first time. We talked a little about social justice and how the local tribe controls delinquency. Most of Colombia has a series of areas carved out called resguardos where local leaders are able to administer their own civil and criminal law, distinct from the state government and penal codes. Here it is no different, each group has their councilors who oversee the management of the social fabric of their village and surrounding environs. I asked him what the maximum penalty was as in other places it can be 100s of lashings with the dried leathery penis of a bull or simple banishment, but for the Tikuna it is to enclose someone inside a trunk full of biting and semi-venomous ants, with thousands of bites it can kill or severely debilitate the person for months. Pedro himself very much believes in the maxim that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, his rationale was that the pay was so low for those that are active in government that even if they start out ok, they will eventually use their influence for favors or worse to siphon off any money that they have to manage. He cited his sister as an example who had entered as a councilor and left years later as somebody dishonest. Pedro himself talks of a life that is connected to nature, that is honest and wholesome, apart from what we might see as his philandering. He is angry with Bolsonaro (the current president of Brazil) and his burning of the Amazon, he refuses to use electricity from the grid as this is mostly powered by fossil fuels, so he has installed solar panels to run some very low watt bulbs during the night. His house was built from wood that he himself collected under license with the promise to repopulate any timber that he had to fell. He fishes by hand, with lines and not nets, there is a sense that everything he does, through a broadly agrarian lifestyle he does with the presence of mind of sustainability; he insists he will teach his son the same.

It is hard not be cynical about the modern Amazon native that you run into on your albeit limited ravels, despite the very human and open nature of Pedro. Ten years ago as tourism was in its infancy in Leticia and Puerto Nariño, the two largest dwellings on the Colombian side of the Amazon triangle, all of the natives had shed their traditional garbs and lived in houses with water, electricity and sanitation. On my first visit we were pretty much the only foreign folks making it up the river that day. The boat duly sank, we dove into retrieve our luggage and I think some days later the boat company went back to pull out what was left of their livelihood. The only other faces on the Lake Tarapoto were small brown native ones (not actually a real lake), a part of the river where the pink and grey dolphins would surface and sometimes leap from the water. Now the day-trippers roll into Puerto Nariño, with their all inclusive tour that stops off for the selfie with a squirrel monkey and then in 50-100 seater monster cruiser they head upstream to scare the dolphins and the poor tourist who is still old school in a small wooded canoe. There are so many dolphins that one or two will always oblige the tourists with their presence, the pink one makes the minimum of effort to surface, so you will only get a brief glimpse of them. The grey ones however are more playful and some will leap from the water completely. Unfortunately they only make one leap then submerge, so it is very hard to capture them on the camera; those that do well, are those that run a video continuously and get lucky as to where they point and shoot.

With the rise of tourism and I understand from a few locals the growing drug (cocaine) trade a lot more money can be seen in the small villages that run along this small section of the Amazon. Many of the houses are now painted, the locals are wearing last season’s fashions and the shops and business are well stocked with products from the central parts of Peru, Brazil and Colombia. The prices have gone up, last time we paid about 3 bucks a head for the dolphin sightseeing, which went out on a canoe with no cover. Now the boats are slightly larger, with a tarpaulin roof and a small motor. Pedro was our guide (again) and said the gas prices had risen in his effort to explain why the cost is now 25 dollars a head. To be fair the boat was a lot sturdier, before there was no motor, so this time we travelled for several hours and not just around 30 minutes. But life has changed; with the volume of tourism, instead of just you and the local fisherman you will now pass tens of different river craft, from the smallest fishing canoe to the large cruisers carrying the industrial size package tourist. You will not get more than a few minutes to yourself anywhere around on the “lake” as there are hundreds of people all doing the same thing now.

As we left and the plane pulled up out above the runway we were immediately reminded of the vastness of the jungle. Streaks of brown watery flows are prominent for a few minutes but after a quick half turn from the engine it’s just a sea of green. The Amazon forest just goes on forever and as much as you think you might have experienced a part of it, in reality you have not seen anything. It’s hard to imagine man can even make a dent in this ecosystem, even if he is destroying tens of soccer size pitches every day, it is really just a drop in the ocean of trees. To the traveller who thinks he has seen the Amazon, he hasn’t, he has most likely just seen a few half-way house natives and he has perhaps wandered a mile or so from the riverbank. On my last day I met Victor who said he takes people for 5 day treks, so with him you could maybe get 10 or 20 miles into the mainland, that would only leave a few thousand more if you were to traverse even a small part of it; it is impossible to imagine how many days that would take. Ten years ago I did manage to move through about half of the Amazon, on a ramshackle, flat, iron table of a boat that chugged up from Iquitos to Puerto Maldonado (Peru) in around 10 days. Again this isn’t really seeing much as the carpet of green that hugs the riverbank wherever you are is such a small element of the whole place. I did see “real” Amazonians, the naked types that are living the way they have lived for centuries, not dressed in jeans, t-shirts, short skirts and using Chanelesque make up, like those that most tourists will meet on their jungle experiences.

There is for sure a “real” Amazon experience and it is certain in the two visits I have made that I have not come close this. What is now a live theme park experience of thousands of daily tourists looking for dolphins and monkeys with the minimum risk of contact with mosquitos is really what most will come to know as their intrepid adventure. There are literally 1000s of tribes that live independently with little contact with the outside world and there are those that have either not been “discovered” or have no relationship with what we would consider a modern lifestyle. There are only a few people that are really exploring the Amazon, the biologists, the sociologists and I am sure the odd intrepid adventurer who has teamed up with Victor or another native to go a lot further and deeper into the mass of green and pass some time with those natives who rarely see a foreign face; the other reality is in the times of fierce rubber trade many outsiders would have been in the Amazon, deep into forest with the natives. In the museum in Leticia you can read about the abuse and slavery that existed until about 100 years ago. I felt as I was leaving and after hearing from Victor that my experiences were not much different from the madding crowd, that if I was to truly understand more about life, more than just the idea that you can build your own home and replant the timber, I would need to walk for days and days, if not months to gain a deeper comprehension of the Amazon. It is and we hope will forever remain the largest forest on earth, home to millions of people who still live off the land, paint their faces and maintain a lifestyle truly entwined with the habitat in which they dwell – I was left opining if only I had seen more of that instead of the circus act which is the modern day Amazon experience.

The positive agricultural face of one of the most fertile countries on earth is the vast and important coffee industry of Colombia. It is part of the national character and something that fortunately puts a much more positive spin on Colombia’s place in global society. It also is an essential backbone to Colombia’s internal agricultural infrastructure; an export product in which they lead the world in quality and once were a strong second in the world in volume. They have lost their second spot as they have not allowed capitalism to dictate their approach to production. Brazil and Vietnam, a relatively new entrant into the mass market, now dominate producing vast quantaties of the more robust version of the plant, harvesting with machines and manual strip picking; this has driven down the price of coffee even though world consumption continues to grow. The Colombian coffee producers are not driven by a few super farms, with the central business model of high investment and high volume, instead they are driven by families who have handed down single digit hectares from generation to generation, people drying their coffee on laid out plastic at the edge of highways. There are of course some larger outfits of around 100 hectares plus, but they are few and far between. It is neighbor helping neighbor and in the farm I just visited a solitary man trying to sustain himself and the small community around him with his 13 hectares of coffee bushels, nestled in the Santandarian hillside.

Once we left the tarmac road around 1 hour out of Bucaramanga, the capital of Santander, we began to climb up. The best conditions for coffee are around 1500 metres above sea level and we were starting from around 500 metres. The unmade road followed the serpent like river, twisting from left to right. Santander is better known for its cacao production than its coffee and this was evident as the beautiful husks of red, purple and yellow hues could be seen populating the roadside, all the way up until we were near our final destination. Other states in Colombia are more productive when it comes to coffee simply because they have vast tracts of land at the desired altitude, often you find coffee growing in the middle of the mountain range but here is was almost at the top. As we arrived at the property there was a small sign about sustainability and the Rainforest accreditation. The farm does not have a grand entrance, in fact quite the opposite, a flimsy barb wired gate that on unhooking collapses like a rag doll to the floor. As you enter you are hit with the strong pungent smell of the fermentation, a smell you find in the distilleries and vineyards of the world where other grains and grapes are being processed. The farmhouse is simple, perched on the mountainside with a view to the seemingly infinite mountain range and beyond.

Apart from some family smallholdings our host Campo Elias is managing the only significant volume of plants in the area; he has the ideal name for any farmer, his name does what it says on the tin!! Born in the hotter area of Socorro, Santander a colonial town on the main highway out from Bogota, Campo Elias studied in Bogotá, where he met my wife’s aunt, which 40 years or so later led to me coming to his farm. With many of his work force barely literate Campo Elias stands out in his community as a learned and wise figure. He is though with his learning a very humble man, living mostly alone with much time to reflect on society and how it is being changed by technology. He is an agricultural journeyman who has owned and run cattle ranches in Los Lllanos, Meta, tried his hand with an orange orchard and finally ended up with an Arabica coffee farm which he started around 10 years ago. On our first night we spent a good hour discussing the vampires that he fought off many years ago on the hot plains of Meta where he managed hundreds if not thousands of cattle. Initially this confused me, thinking that he was a little off the wall as he insisted the Mexicans had the most vampires, which I questioned - surely there are more in Transylvania. Then finally the word bat was introduced into the conversation which made me more at ease that I was not going to be whisked away that night by any foul play from the local ghouls. It was fascinating to hear how in the half moonlight they would wait for the bat to strike, then it would be full and unable to fly for a minute or so, at which point they would try and capture it and force poison upon it. Then it would return to its resting place, to share some of its feast with other bats, thus wiping a few out to reduce the size of the colony. The main risk from the bat was not killing the cow but giving it rabies and for that reason it was not a welcome visitor.

It was not the menace of vampire bats that led Campo to his current vocation, but more his desire to change his habitual climate. The cattle business is generally managed on the flat and that means in Colombia the low-lying plains and not in the mountains, which in turn means pretty hot without much breeze. His stepping-stone to the coffee farm was a number of years with an orange grove a little cooler but not much. Finally opting for the cooler climes of coffee he is able to enjoy warmish days and fresh nights. He lives alone which gives him ample time in the evenings often sitting in the darkness listening to the hum of the machine behind him that is drying out the coffee. The standard coffee bean that is sold to the bulk shippers through the Colombian Confederation of Coffee Producers does not need to be treated that well. It can be flung on the floor, trodden on, dried in a machine and bagged up without losing much of its commercial value. The price and livelihoods of the Colombian farmers and their workers is moderated by two factors, the NYSE price for 1lb of coffee, under contract C and the rise and fall of the value of the Colombia peso; its ironic that the US who produces no coffee dictates the price using the ancient concept of the lb (pound) when the whole world is weighing their product in kilos. The better beans will make it into the premium blends found on the world’s supermarkets and the lesser quality ones will end up as coffee granules inside Nestle jars. Most of the worst beans of all won’t even leave the country, you are allowed about 2% of those in each 125 kg sack, they end inside the cups of the majority of Colombian coffee drinkers, ironic, but most Colombians do not consume the good quality coffee!

One of the many miracles of Campo Elias is the calmness in which he runs his simple production. He orders everything using small scrappy notebooks, keeping count of amounts, drawing a line through names and numbers when pickers are finally paid for their voumne based work. He does not try and force the community to do more or less, he does not get frustrated by the natural psyche of human behavior which is animated when they know the days harvest will be in the most abundant areas where they can easily pick 120-150 kilos and is less enthusiastic when it is the day of the older plants with beans almost out of reach and sparsely littered around a rambling bush. On the good days 50 or so people will show up yielding 6000 kilos in one day, but on other days 1000 kilos will be the reward as interest and earning potential wanes. Many of the workers come from the small village a 20-minute walk from the fields. As well as labor they can offer vehicles to move the heavy sacks from the more distant corners of estate, transport comes in the form of jeeps but also the donkey is paid 10 bucks a day for his efforts. Oddly for an estate owner Campo Elias does not own any of his own vehicles, he neither keeps livestock; only 3 cats and 2 dogs are there to accompany him through the cool nights.

Surrounded by progress and competition from the outside world, inside the inner workings of Campo Elias’ life he is content with his approach to production, which compliments his philosophies. He believes, probably wrongly, that the genetic revolution has reached a point from which it cannot go further. He sees the writing on the wall with over production and techniques that are driven by capitalism to drive down prices and commoditize everything to the point that is unnatural, a force against nature rather than working with it. His risk taking though is at a minimum, he cultivates mostly the hybrid version of the Arabica called Castillo, it is much more durable that other sub species, but he does have a small amount of Bourban, a species that produces a yellow fruit instead of the standard red berry. It is interesting as the fruits are called cherries which makes sense as most are red, but loses its meaning a little when the final product is the brownish yellow Bourban. Campo has implemented the basic machinery required to automate the production of volume. He has a machine to strip the husk from the fruit and then the machine to dry it. This allows him to process close to 400-500 kilos a day in the high season, which is essential to avoid over fermentation or any rotting of the beans. The machines become the mini obsession in the harvest season as any damage can have catastrophic effects, they have become his surrogate children that he has to nurture each day. Robinson, who is ever present in the processing of the coffee but also checking on the machines, aids him in this task. Any major damage could be a few days without production as a 4 hour return trip could be needed to get parts or things repaired, so an unaccpetable minimum of one day will always be lost.

The irony of the Colombian market is that in comparison to its volume rivals of Brazil and Vietnam which are both miles out in front these days, the Colombian production technique of picking, which not only has one of the highest labor costs is one of the more precise that is around. Traditionally each plant is picked a number of times in each harvest and as the ripe fruits are dropping from the bushes the flowers for the next season are seen on the same branch. They employ a classical harmony of the human taking what is ripe, returning a few weeks later for the other fruits and being careful not to damage the leaves and flowers so the next bi-annual harvest will be as strong as possible; this practice is not universally shared. That coupled with the more highly prized production of the Arabica and not the Robusta gives the Colombian product a slight edge on price. However the majority of coffee is not treated that well and Colombian volume is driven by small holders where there is not enough central organization to really produce a super premium product en masse as they process their beans any which way they can without any significant quality control. Entering the market however is the new marketing obsession for “single origin” products. This is allowing Campo to work with his son Daniel and his friend Andres, a man hoping to revolutionize the coffee market one farm at a time.

Andres visits the farm once a month and works with a number of women to separate out the higher quality beans. Everything is then dried in trays stationed above the ground and covered by plastic roofs assembled in the style of an open greenhouse; this is in contrast to the standard throw everything in one bucket and sweep it around on the floor and in Campo’s case throw it in the drier for half a day. The natural drying in trays has to reduce the humidity from around 30-40% to 10%, this takes about 2 weeks, at which point the selection process begins again as the drying area is cleared away with the bagged up beans, ready for the next batch. The selected beans account for about 30% of the production of the crop, so 30% are really truly premium, handled with care and shipped with love by air to a number of US based roasters. The premium value for this coffee is around 30-40% higher however a good deal of the margin is wiped out by the cost of the handpicked selection process and the shipping. With more volume from other farms Andres hopes to get enough to cover the investment in logistics for sea shipping where the minimum required is to fill a full container, at the moment he doesnt have that volume. He also hopes to “age” the coffee once it is sacked up. The premium approach does not kill off the embryo of the bean so it can have an extended life, enriching its flavor, the traditional process is murdering the embryo and therefore losing some of the delicacy of the flavor.

Coming from the outside world looking in, I can only see a natural healthy beauty to the approach taken by Campo and the surrounding villagers. The work is not back breaking, the plants are the perfect height to pick the fruit. In the fields are tens of different species of birds flying around, all with different songs or intonations, adorned with pretty colors that cover most of the chromatic range of the rainbow. The days can be long and especially arduous when it rains as you slip and slide around the hillside moving from bush to bush. Spirits are kept high as yodeling calls are made from one picker to the next, sometimes ten metres away sometimes hundreds of metres away. As they shout little in jokes to each other, make comments about food, being hungry, being faster or slower than someone else, the day passes more quickly. From working only half a day my hands were not cut or scratched which can be common with farm work. I remember once just rolling some bails of hay in New Zealand, with each bail full of thistles and other prickly plants after just a few hours it was agony. There are some biting insects and stinging caterpillars that might smart if you graze them but generally the workers are well wrapped up with only their hands and faces exposed. The toughest part for me was putting only 30 kilos on my shoulders and walking up out of the fields, feeling like you are in the world’s strongest man competition trying to get your load to the finish line. Exhausted I made it, but for the hardened farm hand this is not such an odyssey as most carry sacks of 60k twice a day in order to make a reasonable wage for their efforts.

The coffee industry is protected by the government in Colombia. It is responsible for the livelihood of more than 500,000 families so if it were to diminish it would have a serious social impact. The cost of production of each load of 125kg is around 700.000 Colombian pesos and below this point the government will subsidize the price to ensure that most decently managed operations do not go under. The price today for the regular quality product is around 820.000but as recently as 2011 it was as high as 1.1 million pesos, a time when the margins were more than healthy. This you have to realize is not about a big fat owner making more money in the good times, but whole communities who even though they may be working several months for someone like Campo will also have their own production of a hectare or two. Despite the safety net for the industry as a whole the majority of families themselves are not inside the common social structures that provide guaranteed health care and pensions. Your best bet for a pension in the Colombian countryside is to have children as they will look after their parents in their autumn years. Whilst everything has fragility in nature, Colombians are taking a sustainable approach to coffee agriculture, there is the risk of a sweeping plague or international global changes that can creep up and destroy their way of life, but for now it is stable. The coffee plant offers a dignified, hard working and fulfilling life. People are paid a living wage, nothing to allow them two package holidays, a car or even a washing machine, but enough to maintain a family and a house set on spectacular landscape accompanied by incredibly varied bird song morning to night. With Campo Elias a man a who cares more about the society around him than for himself, you hope that this small part of the mountains in Santander can find a niche with its new production of single origin, specialty coffee, so that the world that is so far away can get a sense of the wonder a beauty every time they take a sip of their coffee. If you are what you eat, surely you would be a better person if you knew where what you consume comes from and how globalization with sustainable, hand picked products, managed with care and love can not only change your consumption habits but support the lives of honest, happy folk, yodeling in the fields thousands on miles away.

Macarenia Clavigera. It’s a plant that only grows in one part of the world, in the savannah plains at the heart of Meta, which itself is nestled in the middle of Colombia. When I arrived in La Macarena I asked Diego, who shuttled me around town on his motorbike what livelihood the town had to offer the people. He told me tourism and the mafia. We whizzed through a street with a coca plant inside the 5 by 5 blocks that make up the small, dusty town. Later we would taste the leaf and he would tell me that it has a sweet taste so this was not the bitter, industrialized version that is grown “commercially” in the surrounding jungle, just 30km away. Everywhere you go, there is a large military presence; since 2004 when the army arrived in the area (for the second time) hundreds of soldiers have been killed . With the shifting history of power and control of the narcotic production in the surrounding countryside, they are needed now as much as ever. The traditional power structure and fight was clearer a few years ago. The last pitch battle with the FARC, according to one solider that arrived 14 years ago, was in early 2017. Now there is a potpourri of new pretenders, consisting of ex FARC soldiers and others looking to take the cocaine business forward. The remoteness of the area, with only basic roads to travel to the nearest cities makes it a sensible place to carry out illicit activities, but equally the Pacific coast offers similar geographical seclusion with the bonus of being close to the sea where you can more easily ship the cocaine to its final destinations. A farmer who manages a heard of cows told me that when he has to sell his animals he walks for 15 days to Villavicencio, the center in Colombia of the bovine market; you can only imagine the logistical challenges of shifting packets of illegal merchandise on a similar route and then you are still hundreds of miles from the coast with more police and army checkpoints to pass to get to the boats of Buenaventura.

Around 4 to 5 years ago with the increased army presence on the ground, coupled with heightened activation around the peace process, the tourists started to return to the region after a break of 20 to 30 years. Very little tourism existed before that, not just because of the remoteness of the area but because it wasn’t much before then that the plant life in the river was discovered and documented by scientists. The plant is named after the town of Macarena (itself only 64 check years old) coupled with the Latin word clavigera, meaning club (to beat someone with) or key bearer; this makes no literal sense at all. However the park guides tell a different story as even though clava as a noun in Spanish also means club, clavar as a verb means to nail or hammer, which makes more sense as the plants are connected or nailed to the rocks from which they get their lifeblood. The mineral rich sedimentary rocks of the riverbed contain iron, aluminum and other minerals, which the plant draws out through its roots. Combined with photosynthesis it creates a very deep red colored plant that bristles in the currents of the river; the more light the plant receives the deeper the red; the plants that dwell in the shade of the trees are quite pasty in comparison. Evolution is in its finest hour here, with the exact ingredients required to create life, something so unique that it doesn’t exist anywhere else; attempts so far to cultivate the same plant in other climatic and geographical conditions have failed. It is like a recipe, it needs just the right amount of movement in the river, the exact amount of minerals in the rocks and the mix of rain and sunlight to thrive. When the rains dry up a little, normally in November, then so does the plant. Once the rains stop the plant flowers and then retreats for another year, waiting until June to bloom again.

The principal place to see the local attraction is in the river complex of Caño Cristales. Here the crystal clean waters are a beautiful site in themselves. From the town of La Macarena you take a boat a few minutes down the river to an unmade road. From there you can cycle or take a car to the entrance of the river complex and start to hike around the different crystal clear, narrow rivulets that branch off like a pianists fingers throughout the flattish planes. Small waterfalls with red carpets of color drape over the precipices to create the perfect photographs for the tourists, but in reality many parts of the river in the area are flooded with a palette of crimson shades. There is another plant, a distant cousin to the red protagonist, which is a green, weed like plant that grows with lesser intensity. It is not really highlighted by the guides and with a quick search of Google nothing is really mentioned about it there either. The richness of colour from the red and green plants that dominate the river bed are completed by other factors, not quite creating a rainbow as advertised by the tourist board but it is a site to behold. The rich minerals of the rock have been broken down into small yellow and white pebbles. Other existing sedimentary slabs still hold a dark brown or black colour; there are also many references to something blue, but I did not witness anything of that color in the water, perhaps references in wikipedia are referring to the sky. The incessant flow of temperate water has grinded out deep and shallow holes which create the perfect canvas for the red, pink, white, yellow, brown and black painting that nature has crafted with its oils. Oil of course also being in great abundance, it is literally screaming at man to come and extract it; the hydrocarbons can be seen not only in the river but cracking up through much of the earthy surface. So far the government have held off from allowing permits to drill here as it would surely kill off everything that is unique about this corner of the world.

The surrounding countryside plays host to other tourist plans for those that want to extend their time in the area beyond a day drip to Caño Cristales. The substantial Guayabero river is one of Colombians many arteries which runs far and wide around several different regions of the country. Along the river banks many different species of birds make their living, as well as monkeys such as the spider, titi and howler. Just outside the town of La Macarena you can hike up for a few kilometers and survey the vast plains below. It is very much out of Africa, the vast savannah grasses run for as far as the eye can see, but they do not provide the habitat for any large mammals, you will not see any lions, tigers or bears. The reason is man. There were tigrillos, ocelots in English but with the arrival of the army for the first time in the 60s they systemically hunted the large cats as well as their cousins the jaguar and the lynx; the bespectacled bears were also driven away. Their cat skins were a valuable prize and the social conscience in that bygone era was at a minimum. You can still find the odd snake, we saw a black mamba as well as deep brownish colored one locally called the casadora or hunter (Phrynonax poecilonotus for any snakeophiles out there). Of course I found out later that we didn’t see a real black mamba at all, it was only the guide being over cautious as we passed a baby black serpent wriggling in the sand. The mamba negra is only found in Africa, however whatever it was it could well have been dangerous as around 200 people in the area die from snakebites every year. I asked about antidotes to the venom and they are not stocked in the local area despite the prevalance of the dangerous beasts. The short tourist video you are forced to watch before you enter the parkland area does recommend a closed shoe and long trousers, which even for the briefest of visits are a good precaution to take with the lack of medical resources close at hand.

On leaving I was left to wonder just how sustainable the tourism is in the area. I doubt Exxon will be moving in soon, but the violence is still prevalent on the fringes of society. One evening Diego told me a few minutes before he picked me up to play pool that he had just seen one guy hacking into another with a machete. The argument was over the lack of legal papers for a small truck he had bought, there was a clash of blades, the seller of the vehicle eventually losing control of his weapon allowing the buyer of the truck to have a few clear swipes at his chest and arms. Later that night,  the impounded vehicle sitting outside the police station was sized up by a few ex FARC personnel who are now running the show. Diego’s father was part of the gangs of the eighties and nineties as well his uncle who lost his fingers for a transgression of the rules. It’s not a miracle that Diego is involved in tourism that offers a different path to his dad and uncle, but it is only sustainable with a massive military presence in the area. In the whole of Colombia I have not seen an advertised tourist area with the quantity of soldiers that are stationed here. If you are not woken at 4am by a rooster or the mooing of a cow, you will be disturbed by one of the helicopters that tours the city day and night.  The package tourist, who make up the majority of those that come for two or three days are oblivious to what is still bubbling beneath the surface. It will require a commitment for the foreseeable future to keep the area clear and safe for those that are yet to visit. On the one hand this is good example of how Colombia has opened a small window for the tourism industry to allow forty or fifty people a day to see something unique, the biodiversity of the Colombia is only second to that of Brazil. Much of the country is still locked up, too dangerous or difficult to enter, even though many parts of Colombia are listed by UNESCO as having outstanding value to humanity. On the other hand for anyone that is a little more independently minded, in La Macarena and Caño Cristales you can see the challenge of Colombia, a battle that is far from won and how if they can begin to square the circle of the violence just how much beauty and prosperity could be unlocked in the future.

Around the world and throughout history humanity has found different ways to bury their dead. In the heart of Colombia, high up in the mountains of Cauca, one the more central states of the country, is a small village called San Andres de Pisambalá. Littered around the countryside are hundreds if not thousands of burial chambers, with an array of different carved entrances to cellars that have been chipped out of the igneous rock in top the mountainside for as far as the eye can see. The current residents of the area are part of the Nasa descendants (also know as Paez) whom the archaeologists and anthropologists believe are not related to the groups that constructed the tombs; their culture has been obfuscated by the arrival of the Spanish, the Catholic Church and more recently the Pentecostal sect of Christianity. Any group that survived the Spanish onslaught of murder and pillage, or the many that died out through nasty little bacteria and viruses such as the common cold and influenza should be commended. The story goes that the land of Tierradentro was aptly named as the Spanish could not believe that the Nasa people, who they tried to dominate, kept moving further and further inside the interior of the land, up mountains, over ridges and into forests. Tierradentro, the name of the archaeological site means “Inside Earth”. There is no irony lost in the name of the Nasa, in a land far, far away their mission is to get off earth, whereas the Nasa tribe in Colombia are very much wedded to the planet, specifically their lands and history of an agrarian lifestyle.

The tombs are accessed through a wonderful day out, where a picnic lunch and sturdy walking boots are required. To see the majority of the open tombs it is essential to stretch your calves and do a few squats as even though the people that built them would not have measured much more than a metre in height the steps they carved are in elaborate shapes and are often widely spaced. You don’t need to be a gymnast to enter, but it does help to make sure you have warmed up the essential tendons as you descend and ascend around 50 times in the whole day as well as walk 15 kilometers up and down steep, slippery hillsides between each site. The tombs are scientifically known as hypogea, they vary in size, shape and decoration. Many have deteriorated only leaving their form and others are full of entertaining carvings and painted walls. There is no record of elaborate jewelry being found amongst the bones and the beautiful artistry associated with Egyptian tombs is not present either. In fact the experience is more like uncovering a series of artworks that you might see by one of the more talented kids in kindergarten, faces that could have been crafted out of play dough and simple patterns painted in the red, black and white that adorn the walls. It is estimated that the tombs were created from 600-900AD so comparative art forms from around the world, before this date that you might find in Egypt, Greece or Rome, or slightly after in something like the Bayeux tapestry, despite their lack of perspective in drawing, offer much more to the development of language and more insight into the history of events from their respective time periods than can be found here. The caves, which show ingenuity in their architecture, size and shape, do not contain any real imagery, colors or insight into the life and society of those that crafted them.

Most of the tombs are half lit allowing the visitor to take photographs without flash. I felt no sense of awe or mystery despite the strong sense of time passing, mostly emanating from the musty smell and dampness that wafts out of the entrance of each tomb. It is the sheer mix of humidity and water that is in the region that makes it is a miracle that any design is left to adorn the walls, the majority are just green algae covered burial chambers but some still have some images and decorations. From tomb to tomb there are cartoon like comical faces, nothing in proportion to real life, everything stretched, with a similar spirit to Botero’s larger than life paintings and statues but only two dimensional and using a color pallet of 3 different mineral dyes. There are also many patterned designs, simple tartan patterns, crosshatched and angled. The designs of the stairwells are something to behold, deep, jagged steps but each with its own architectural form and more often than not in a spiral shape from the earths surface to the base of the tomb. The tombs themselves however are not the only interesting jewels in this evergreen part of the planet.

The joy of this archaeological gem, listed by UNESCO for its intrinsic value as a record of Pre-Colombian societies in the north Andean region, is the journey. In the height of the civil disturbance in Colombia the only safe way to arrive was by helicopter. A grassy knoll with a bricked out circle still remains and is perhaps used today by government VIPs. For the average Joe without access to a chopper you have to arrive by bus, the nearest airports are 4-5 hours away in Popayan or Neiva. It is preferable to arrive via Popayan as it is a beautiful white city with a historic center with UNESCO recommendations for both its culinary history and over 400 years of Easter week celebrations that allegedly are more consistent and impressive than those from the Spanish city of Seville from whence their tradition originated. From either airport you need to cut through the mountains to arrive at San Andres Pisambalá. From Popayan the experience can be slowed from rock falls and waterfalls over the highway. Some flood the road with obstacles that need machines or man to help you pass. Coming from Popayan you will pass by many indigenous communities, coming from Neiva less so. The route from Neiva is lower in altitude and the landscape is more arid. From Popayan the lush green, imperious mountains with constant cloud sitting over the forests will accompany you for most of the route. Arriving is really a small part of the journey of discovery. The real journey starts en route at the base of the village where you enter the archaeological area through the museum entrance.

To understand fully the undertaking of the ancient people and appreciate the vast mountain scape you need to consider a trek of 8-10 hours. The first site is only a 10 minute hike upwards, about 1/3 of the way up the mountain to an area named Segovia. This site contains most of the tombs and for those who just want to tick the box along with the museum this is sufficient to get an understanding of what was built and then decorated by the communities of the first millennium. In Segovia there are 20 or so tombs, each with a different structure of stairways so each descent requires a different strategy. The site has been shored up with a concrete covering over the stairwells making it easier to descend and ascend, but the steps are not made for the average human sized leg but rather someone that might measure 3 meters or more. You can imagine those who traversed in and out did so by clambering up and down and not with a comfortable upright pose. The modern day guardians who are the park wardens assured me though that even the largest and portliest homo sapiens of the third millennium do manage the journey in and out of the tombs. This first set of tombs is probably the best preserved set so it is understandable if time is short or you are not fit enough for an all day trek that this is the end of the of your journey. However for those with a stronger wanderlust the journey continues further up the hill to the second set of uncovered graves, called El Duende. From there you continue up and down, along the mountain to El Tablon where the guardian statues have been placed, standing to the attention of the tourist camera in a small troop, far removed from their original role of guarding the dead. Another down and up, across a river, with a couple of bamboo trunks laid vertically to keep your feet a few inches above the water, you arrive at the last of the nearby sites called San Andres. From there only the two distant sites remain, but equally the real journey of discovery begins.

If you head to El Agucate (the avocado) then you will begin to appreciate the beauty of the surrounding area. You have to conquer one mountain to descend to the bottom of the popularly named trendy vegetable mountain much loved by Hipsters. It is named for its shape rather than its orchards of avocado trees. The slopes all around are covered in coffee plantations, the crop that yields the highest income to the local farmer; other things such as beans, fruits and sugar cane are grown but in much smaller quantities. With Colombia’s appalling infrastructure this durable crop can be picked, dried and shipped without any risk of affecting its quality. This is after all the center of Colombia so getting this from the field to the port is incredibly expensive and inefficient compared to some other competing areas of the country and the rest of the world. Even with the coffee prices going through the floor in the last few years most of the indigenous farmers can still scratch a living with their hectare or two of crops. Whilst those that built the tombs would have never consumed a drop of caffeine, this new generation of locals whose forefathers would have beaten off the Spanish soldiers and their diseases, are celebrated with a golden statue of the “Cafetero Indio”, located in nearby Inza. This region is one of the largest areas where the indigenous population are producing their own coffee and exporting it through a cooperative to the rest of the world.

As you walk up and up, past the bamboo combined with clay constructed houses and refuges you find yourself half way up the mountain that protects the village of San Andres. Then you descend to start the climb of one of the highest points in the region. It is around an hour of sheer uphill trekking, where each resting moment is rewarded with a more complete view of the region. Jairo, my guide, stopped at one point to scrump a few oranges from a tree whose prime purpose was to provide shade to the coffee plant rather than yield refreshment for the passing laborer or tourist. Jairo who is Colombian’s version of the oriental camel refused to drink any water the entire day, so it was a relief for me and I am sure his kidneys that he decided to consume a couple of oranges, which if juicy is your thing, you won’t find anything more worthy of the adjective. They were so full of liquid that they were impossible to consume without expressing a good part of sticky liquid over your chest, legs and feet. The divisions between each segment only existed in principal, there was no pith apart from that between the peel and the fruit, so it was possible to eat it more like an apple than an orange; peeling away the skin and then just biting off chunks at a time. The only waste apart from the skin was the odd pip. It is a far cry from the pithy, dried out versions that adorn the bowls of north American and European kitchen tables. I would not say that each orange had enough water to replenish all of that expunged by the walk, but it certainly kept Jairo going for the rest of the day.

With 2 oranges in our bellies we were powered up enough to arrive at the top of the Aguacate mountain. From there the sweeping vista was completed by the sun making its first early appearance of the afternoon. Towns and villages can be seen from every angle, kids playing football tens of kilometers away, church spires, row upon row of coffee plantations and the company of birds soaring at eye level. The tombs buried in the distant mountain from the towns are not as elaborate as others. One interestingly enough contained a snake, not a beautiful carving or design on the wall, but a live reptile. Jairo said that it must have fallen in by mistake as it did not have the size or dexterity to get out. For a moment you could imagine your self in one of Indiana’s temples of doom, but the doorway was not closing in and the little slithering monster froze with fear at the feet of the daunting man above. As these tombs are less visited the tomb keeper a man who was almost deaf made the most of this time with human company. He did not need to keep them safe with a lock and key as other guardians do with the tombs closer to the main park, everything was left open to explore. As we saw him on our approach from the distance he chirped something across the mountain summit and insisted that we enter each hole, promising grand delights that were not really there. The tomb of the sun, was a simple carving of a circle with dashed lines of rays, one other tomb was damaged so you could actually leave through a collapsed part of the mountain and another that contained some more elaborate pattern than we had seen in the previous hypogea. As we joked around, having to shout and stare directly into the face of hard of hearing supervisor, the vultures closed in above our heads. Nearby in the ravine was a dead horse, which had attracted hundreds of the flying carnivores all tucking into their afternoon snack of rotting flesh. The smell made you wretch and it is something you can imagine used to be a feature of the human tombs, all of those hundreds of years ago. Now only the musty smell of damp moss prevails, long gone is the flesh from the bones of its inhabitants and indeed long gone are the bones themselves.

On the journey with Jairo we talked at length of the indigenous society to which he belonged. With the new constitution of Colombia in the 1990s the indigenous groups were given more autonomy over their societal structure as well as defined areas of land, called resguardos. Each group and each resguardo can make their own criminal and civil laws, but they still have the support of the state with a number of handouts to support those that fall through the social cracks such as unemployment, somehting very different from the core of Colombian society who get no such benefit. In this particular area, especially further north in the mountain range a lot of coca is grown and so there is still the presence of the paramilitaries and left wing groups. Jairo played down the violence and history, saying that he never new of anyone being killed in the height of the troubles, but from a little investigation this clearly was not the case, and today only a pretty good stones throw away from the UNESCO site, local indigenous leaders are regularly being murdered on a weekly if not daily basis. The peace process has promised a lot to the tribes of these mountains in terms of security and safety but they are still being muscled around by the criminals that use their productive lands for the production and movement of cocaine. In contrast with the conflict of the armed insurgents there is also a conflict with the church that decided many years ago to convert the groups from their traditional rituals and rites to those of the Catholic mass and the one true Christian God. The beautiful adobe walled eclesiastical building of San Andres Pisamabalá, that had once donned a traditional thatched roof, today stands draped in scaffolding. The reason being that a few years ago 4 of the local Nasa community decided enough was enough and one night they torched the sacred building of the Christians as a message to the local priest. I quizzed Jairo about this and he told me that they had warned the community that they were fed up with this alternate view of how they should worship but unfortunately for the building nobody told the priest, so there was never a two way dialogue to try and prevent the planned tragedy. Some in the village don’t speak of it, they prefer to refer to it as an accident, but Jairo was quite clear that even though there may have been some local support the 4 were duly punished for their crime.

Punishment in the entire region is swift and entirely forgiving. It is in a sense a physical version of the Catholics insistence of the repetitive chant of hail Mary, where once you have pledged your penance for any sin the slate is wiped clean or if you prefer whipped clean. In all cases where crimes have passed a cursory or perhaps more in depth investigation results in a lashing from a dried out and stretched bull’s penis. Even murder is punished with the same instrument, the only difference being the number of repetitions of the whip. For those that continue to transgress there is a punishment swap between groups where the offender is sent to another nearby group of the tribe, where they have to work for several months or years to pay of their debt to society. If you persist to be a pariah, then the final punishment is exclusion, effectively propelling the individual into the wider Colombian society and a more traditional penal code that might eventually catch up with you. Jairo told me that nearly everyone in his area had been punished at some point or other, the most common violation of the norm being adultery. There is very little sense of progressive liberalism and Jairo gave away his macho philosophy that really all women were to blame for such vices. I pushed him a few times on the theme but he was adamant that it was wiles of the female species that tempted the poor men to succumb, with both ultimately paying the price. In politics and in day to day life the Colombian woman in general and equally in this particular sub group are not retiring wall flowers. The current leader of the area, known as the governor, is a woman. She is serving a one year term and many of her lieutenants that form the governing council are also from the fairer sex. Each person who has political and judicial responsibilities is sent for a 3 month crash course in how to investigate incidents as well as generally be a decent human being. This is all paid for by the overall group that span the northern Cauca mountains, a course that Jairo explained allowed him to assist the governor for his term of one year on the council. It is a far cry from the formal justice system of Colombia, which is completely broken through bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence. In a sense as we walked up hill and down dale between the tombs, I felt the system in which Jairo lived, albeit a smallish hermetic bubble made much more sense than the chaos that the rest of Colombia has to live under. It is much easier to manage a smaller society, where everybody knows everybody else’s business, with its simplicity and swift justice, there is much more honesty and less vengeful feeling than exists in the wider community.

As the journey came to a close we descended back down the mountain. Jairo continued to tell me about his life and the life of others, he also continued to snack on mother natures offerings, such as the sugarcane and wild blackberries that were growing all around. We arrived back at the museum a good half an hour before it was due to be closed, only to find that it was closing already. There was no real logical explanation given, perhaps the management wanted an early supper or more likely the hours were more flexible than those advertised. We managed to get into one exhibit where they had only displays from the Spanish colonial time onwards, in  one room there was an old set of stocks. Jairo had not seen them before so I explained why and how they were used. He then explained that similar punishments were still used today in his village, where those that are accused or found guilty are dragged in front of the community and tied up in public. It is only for a few hours and not as inhumane as the sturdy wooden clamps that were on display. Returning to the village just before the sunset meant that the day I had started at sun rise with a hearty breakfast in the hotel had come to its natural close. The cycle and rhythm of life here in the mountains of Cauca is one that is only broken by the invasion of tourism and the cocaine gangs that continue to snipe in shadows. Years before, 1500 years in fact, the natural cycle of life was perpetuated around the tombs of their ancestors, places that were more than likely tended to on a daily basis by the families of those that had passed on. Decorated with simple designs, but forged into solid rocks that have lived on much longer than the society that brought them into being. The variety of crops and even the mainstay of life, the coffee plant, are all very different now from the days when the tombs were central to the lives of those that farmed and fought against nature as well as each other. The struggle continues for the new tribe now, to rid themselves of outside forces, so they can live within their own rules and as peacefully as their gods may permit them to do so. I doubt that will happen anytime soon, however Jairo and the other people I met shared a great sense of peace and contentment with all that the mountains yield and for the harmony that can be found within them.

In Colombia World Cup football means life and death. Literally. In 1994 Andres Escobar, a Colombian player was murdered after scoring an own goal in the group stages of the competition. In 2018 the social networks lit up with death threats for Carlos Sanchez as he received a red card that also led to Japan’s goal and his dismissal from the field. Threats such as if “Andres Escobar was killed for scoring an own goal then Carlos Sanchez should be killed and urinated on”, were easy to find on Facebook and other forums. Reviewing the statistics from a study carried out by the University of Los Andes, the premier university in the country based on global rankings as well as local reputation, they show that on days when Colombia play, violent injuries increase by around 50% from fights and other incidents that break out at football related gatherings. With the violence also comes death, at least 9 deaths were reported related to World Cup activity in 2014 and the most shocking day in history was a 5-0 victory over Argentina which won’t be remembered for the best ever result against such a high profile team, but for the 76 people killed and 912 people injured during the following celebrations across the country. Even the home coming bus is not safe, with the 2014 open top bus tour savaged by “fans” resulting in 42 injuries, 250 arrests and various threats made to the bus driver.

Reading through various Colombian articles about the root of the problem there is much agreement as to what causes the issues, with the majority of deaths occurring in Bogota. The common reference is that Bogota is a fractured society, not having maintained a strong identity as opposed to the costal regions and the second largest city Medellin where they have. Many discuss the lack of respect and cohesion as a reason that the diaspora of what has become Bogota just don’t care about each other and are therefore predisposed to be more violent. Colombian articles about this World Cup, discuss the pride and passion of the fans and talk of how it is one of the unique events that brings the country together. How Colombia with such a broken and complex history of violence for a few weeks every 4 years finds a common identity and passion around the nation. Obviously each country around the world has its own story but there is a failure to understand or identify that the same platitudes apply to nearly all countries, where each has its own politics and differences and in these weeks, where a team does well, in that country, be it England, France, Colombia or Belgium, they all see a collective pulling together in celebration and pride. In this World Cup there has also been an over spill of violence in England and France where celebrations have turned into looting and rioting, not common in such countries, although hooligan related events have been a bug bear for the English many years.

The extreme celebratory violence of the World Cup here in Colombia did not affect me personally and is not the underlying reason that the atmosphere soured and the final stages were ruined. The core issue was the England v Colombia game. Colombians have a strong reputation for being externally happy, often named as one of the world’s happiest countries by self-analytical surveys such as Gallop; they are also very welcoming to foreigners. As an expat living in Colombia when you travel around and spend time outside of it’s capital Bogota, you are generally welcomed with interest where the first question time and time again is, are you in love with Colombia yet?  There is a genuine pride that you are in their country and a belief that it is both positive for you and them; the guiding principal is that you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t believe it was a wonderful place. Chancing my arm with the accustomed positivity I watched the game in Medellin, in a craft beer pub run by a happy go lucky Colombian who ditched his legal career to brew and serve pints. It was just me, with about 30 Colombians, where I felt comfortable to shout for England without any reprisals; arguably something that would be much more risky for a Colombian in a London or a Mancunian boozer. True to form I spoke with the Colombians around me who were in good humour up until the penalty decision. There was a sharp interchange between myself and a Colombian girl about justice and from that point on I toned down the comments in order to not just antagonise her but a then grieving group in general. Once the Colombian goal went in I smiled riley and accepted the likely fate that England would be exiting this round as the game drifted to penalties. The Colombians though where not so sure as they believed Ospina to be a fairly average keeper when it came to saving penalties, based on his diminutive size. England won, I paid the bar tab and left. It was not the place to celebrate. My perception of the game was that Colombia had done very little, England had controlled it for the most part and the last minute goal was a little fortunate for Colombia.

Colombian people vote themselves to be one of the happiest in the world. From my experince they are certainly the most welcoming.

Then the messages started to appear, in my Whatsapp, social media and through conversations. Colombia had been robbed, Fifa had been bribed and the English had cheated Colombia out of the cup. Even a petition, signed by over 300,000 Colombians was started for FIFA to overturn the result as it was such a travesty of justice, so obvious to everyone, that the only right and proper thing to do would be to replace England with Colombia. The petition stated two clear mistakes had not been identified by the American referee, who was allegedly completely against Colombia, paid for by England and part of the conspiracy to stop Colombia in the tournament. The first was the penalty where Carlos Sanchez climbs on the back of Kane, it was “evidently judged wrongly” according to the author of the petition Juan Diego Garcia, a law student from the Catholic University of Colombia. The second issue was that Bacca “legitimately” scored and again the “referee judged in the wrong manner what he had illegitimately considered to make the goal, as there were 2 balls on the field of play, something that the television cameras proved, was not judged correctly”.

It’s completely understandable in the moment that you might have these opinions, surrounded by family and friends, these incidents flash by, tempers rise and fall and there is very little time to analyze accurately what happened. It is harder in Colombia where the TV coverage show very few replays and there is no halftime analysis as breaks are stuffed with adverts and not pundits reviewing the game. Maradona did the same thing only to recant a day or so later, probably as he had a chance to see what actually happened. However it's unlikely that there was a more clear cut penalty in the entire competition. In the 8th, 26th and 53rd minute the referee warned the Colombian players for pushing and shoving in the penalty area before the corners or free kicks were being taken. It was shortly after the final warning that just 2 metres from where the referee was standing Carlos Sanchez pulled along by the tussle that he himself initiated was seen riding on the back of Harry Kane. It was clear cut and therefore VAR had nothing to do. Although in reality it did have something to do. The correct decision may well have been to award three red cards to different Colombian players for initially putting their hands on the referee and then subsequently digging their boots into the area of the penalty spot. Three minutes passed of verbal and physical harassment of the referee as well as several attempts to create an uneven penalty spot before the shot was finally taken.

Constant pushing and shoving in the penalty area that the referee warned the players about. It was only in the Colombian end as Colombia only had the one corner from which they scored in the whole of normal time.

The second claim about the Bacca goal is something only somebody watching their very first few games of football would be confused about. The game starts and stops on the referees whistle. You cannot play after the referee has blown his whistle. If that was not the case then Barrios would have conceded a penalty when he head butted Henderson; as the ball was not in play it is was not a penalty even though the incident was inside the penalty area and it was deemed a foul. Two balls were on the pitch. Pickford kicked one off but it hit the hoarding and started to head back towards the pitch. As Maguire was focused on this and stopping the ball returning to the field, Young oblivious to this threw the ball in to play. The referee saw what had happened as the Colombian winger collected the ball; he blew the whistle to stop play. Against the rules, Colombia continued to play and then put the ball in the net, the English players had stopped playing when the whistle was blown. It is not confusing, there was no protest from anyone as it was all quite obvious and the game carried on in a spell where the Colombian team participated in a rare phase of good, attacking, clean play.

Many Colombian fans don't believe the referee made the right decision. He consults with VAR about the penalty after 4 minutes of harrasment and pushing from the Colombian players. Result: a clear penalty

Reviewing the comments after the game from the Colombian coach Peckerman and their captain Falcao, the perspective in the mind of the Colombian players and management, that they projected to the public, is something quite bizarre. Peckerman said the following:

“There were a lot of penalties with Panama, with Tunisia. This hurts and you have to put yourself in the skin of the players. These events make football more complex. When there are so many fouls you (the referee) have to look for equilibrium so that the game can flow. I hope that I am wrong, but I am sure in the next game they are going to be more careful. I hope this doesn’t happen again as it was very obvious.”

In relation to the penalty

“We have a lot of confusion. It seems to me we are confusing this type of play. It’s a difficult situation. We have put in a lot of effort and we were brave, but we lacked a bit of depth. It was very hard to enter the game with much rhythm, because we had a fear when the ball was in our penalty area.”

“The elimination is a penalty missed. The game was drawn. They are a team that could not win on the field of play and win by penalties. The game was very rough. The whole world knows that is the case. You have to look for a way to defend the ball, knowing that it will be like that. It was an uncomfortable game, knowing that it was always around the sensation that he (the referee) was going to blow the whistle.”

“This was a brave team, that had fought a lot and had progressed. It did not give up against any rivals because of their names and reputation they have. For that I hoped to pass this round, because we have fought with the wind against us from the beginning. We have overcome the difficulties and again we are given a situation difficult to accept. The players deserve to pass the round”

And Falcao says the following:

‘To tell you the truth, the process leaves a lot of doubts. He only spoke English, some bias was certain. Through small calls he was pushing us [toward] our goal, that was clear for me.’

‘The referee disturbed us a lot, in the 50-50 plays, he always made the calls in favor of England. This situation was undermining us. He didn’t act with the same criteria for both teams. When in doubt he always went to the England side. It’s shameful that this happens in the round of 16 of a World Cup.’

Obviously with hindsight of re-watching the game later it is easy to point out the failings of the comments of the coach and captain from the aftermath and emotions in the moment. Arguably with a stronger and a more streamlined VAR process Falcao would have been sent off. The referee blew for several fouls on Falcao but not as many as he committed. There was only one 50-50 challenge in the whole game where the decision went to England, it was a simple toe to toe challenge that looked worse than it was, deep in the England half and the referee penalised Colombia. The English yellow cards were given for very minor fouls, whereas some of the Colombian yellow cards were given where red would have been the norm. There was one incident where Stones appears to graze Falcao’s head with his boot. There is no quote afterwards about this and at the time although Falcao rolled over and over a number of times there was no visible damage to his head; not the same as the Henderson case where you could see blood on the face from Barrios’ head butt. It is possible that Stones made no contact at all, as the Colombian theatrics were a theme of the whole game and the leader of that was Falcao himself. Falcao finally received a yellow card after the umpteenth indiscretion as he harassed the referee over a decision that Falcao got completely wrong. Maguire went down in the Colombian penalty area and did not plead for a penalty. In fact, he signals to the referee there is no contact, yet Falcao screams after the referee for a yellow card to be given to Maguire for simulation; Falcao quite rightly was given the yellow for his constant harassment of the officials. This really sums up the confused state of mind of Falcao and Peckerman during and after the game. The evidence of the number of fouls and yellow cards they were given only reinforces that there was probably a clear strategy from the management to disrupt the game in the exact way that Peckerman describes in his own comments. It is as if their own tactic backfired on them and then the referee became the scapegoat, even though he did exactly what Peckerman and Falcao wanted, to slow down the English rhythm of the game.

Only a yellow for a head-butt that drew blood. It's hard to say the referee was strongly against Colombia on that evidence.

The comment about being wary of the referees whistle is also misleading. Despite Barrios getting the yellow card in the first half he went on to foul several more times and did not receive a second yellow. There is clear evidence that through Peckerman’s very comments the bias was actually in favour of Colombia and the wind was very much with them and not against them with the decisions of the US referee; not receiving a red card for a head butt being the most obvious, but more subtly the constant fouling was left unpunished with yellow and red cards, although to be fair Peckerman's argument is that the referee should not blow up for fouls at all as it ruins the flow of the game. Peckerman spent the whole match alongside his coach who Sterling accused of shouting abuse throughout the game. He may not have been aware of the deliberate shove and then the cheeky smile afterwards as he got away with trying to incite Sterling as he walked off, but he would have been aware that his own coaching staff were trying to disrupt English players on the pitch.

One great contrast of the first half was the battle between Sterling and Mina. Sterling only 1.7m tall and Mina 1.94m tall. Sterling won most of the battles but two incidents sum up the way Colombia approached the half. At one point the enormous frame of Mina mounts Sterling, visually creating a horrible mismatch that you might see in a school yard piggy back race. Then just before the end of the half, Mina has both hands on Sterling pulling him down, as Sterling grabs Mina’s shorts to get out of his grip, Mina throws himself dramatically to the ground. A VAR review could well have given Sterling a penalty and Mina a yellow card for simulation. Instead the fortune lies again with Colombia as nothing was given.

On the local expat forums the Colombian’s simply repeated the same faulty arguments that the referee was biased and the game was stolen from them. Taxi drivers, friends, family, acquaintances were not tongue in cheek when they complained about the rough English side and the injustices that Colombia had suffered. And so it went on and on, until the relief of the Croatia game that England lost, was widely celebrated as justice for their own defeat. Never have I witnessed such a mean spirited side of the Colombian culture, such a hateful, vengeful side to their character, which is not explained in any guidebook or any of the psychobabble by the Colombian media that are trying to deconstruct their passion for football. It became unpleasant to be around anyone, even bring up the World Cup. The realization that we had one more game to play just made it worse. When the ITV.com streaming failed again as I was forced to watch the Colombian channel RCN to see the Belgium v England play off. It was excruciating to say the least. The same nonsense that started with the commentators on the day of the Colombia game, that then permeated through the coach and captain and then into the psyche of the public was still ever present. On a normal day it is very hard to listen to what can best be described as town criers that perhaps once played in the equivalent level of the 10th rung on the English league system. It is not by contrast a case a listening to ex-world cup winners or ex-golden boot scorers within the likes of the BBC or ITV commentary panels. I wondered as the deluge of a stream of consciousness poured out whether I should just completely mute the sound, but it seemed like a penance, a message that I had to suffer until the very end; the full Colombian anger and frustration until it was finally 90 minutes. Apart from the complete lack of understandings of the basics of the game the thing that most riled me was that every time Kane got the ball they would say he was Harry the “sucio”, dirty in Spanish. Then after about 30 minutes I am not sure if one of them Googled the translation, the commentators started to say it in English, Harry the “Dirty”. For a moment I thought maybe they were trying to be clever and make a reference to the great series of Clint Eastwood films, but not once did they actually say "Dirty Harry", so I could not even credit these footballing imposters with the slight amount of wit that would have made their catchphrase a little more plausible. It bordered on the bizarre. Harry Kane would be fouled, pushed or clipped to the ground, they would then literally say there is a foul on Harry the “Dirty”. Reviewing the Colombian v England game, Harry Kane made one innocuous foul in the entire game so it is beyond the understanding of a basic footballing brain to fathom how they came to the conclusion that they did.

The final headlines that I read about talked about justice for Stones which were brought about by his press conference where he quite rightly said Colombia were a dirty team. He went too far saying they were the worst ever but they almost certainly carried out team orders to try and incite, foul, act and generally wind up the atmosphere as best they could. The English commentary on the game concluded it was done as they were the lesser team, I don’t believe that being more familiar with their players, but they definitely for whatever reason did not play well on that day. A whole 46 minutes passed before they had their first shot which was a tame pass to the goal keeper from the outside of the box. And then their second shot was after 81 minutes when Walker gifted Cuadrado their clearest chance of the whole game. Colombia played badly and the blame should lie with the captain and coach, the former like a whirligig of emotional abuse who showed nothing of his footballing talent and the other a calculated tactician of dirty tricks and spin.

However the headlines were believed in Colombia and they satiated the appetites for cold revenge, not just for the comments by Stones and not just for an awkward camera angle that appears to show English players celebrating in the faces of Colombians, although they were not, but because of The Sun. The Sun in their wisdom published on the day of the game a cryptic headline about Shakira, Coffee and other Colombian stuff, clearly making a reference to cocaine. It was this after all the arguments were debunked that everyone finally came back to, that it was a disgusting insult to Colombia that they are spoken of in these terms. In the local media, in their own articles the frustration of going out at this as a stage was very much seen as a hope to project Colombia away from the realities of being the largest cocaine producer and one of the most violent and corrupt societies in the world. The idea as one journalist put it was to shift the ice breaker of a conversation with someone unfamilair with Colombia to be about football and not about Narcos.

But for me the Colombian’s blew it. Not just in the footballing sense but in the moral sense as they showed their very worst side, the very heart of what corruption is which is do something wrong and then try and say your adversary did it and not you. In a country where it is all too common that people in power are corrupt, the reflex is to say the same in every situation one deems to be unfair, hence in this case we lost, it's not our fault, FIFA are corrupt. There is no doubt that the English did not play the perfect game, with all the chances they created out of a positive approach they did not connect and score in open play. It is also clear as Southgate put it that they have wizened up. When Henderson was head butted he went to ground, there was no need to do so, his injury was only a cut lip not concussion. These things are regrettable, but not in the same league as miserly losers, full of angst, poor wit and bile until the end of the tournament. People outside of Colombia would have seen much more than the frustrated comments of Falcao, the man who literally brought nothing to the tournament, they will all sadly read about how some of the greatest players in the world tried to cheat and frustrate their opponent and in such a novel way that it will be hard to forget that Colombia on that fateful day thought they were involved in Gardener’s World, planting new ways of cheating by scuffing the penalty spot, instead of being the legends on the highlights of Match of the Day. It is sad that the first thought that comes to an English hack editors mind is Shakira, coffee and cocaine, but it is sadder that the reputation of a great team and a great country has again been tarnished and the image of an ugly, violent and corrupt culture being reinforced. For that there are only Colombian footballers and their fans to blame.

The final word should be left to The Sun, after a complaint from the Colombian ambassador about the headline before the game they published an apology of sorts the following morning:

"The front page of yesterday's Sun may have given the impression that Colombia is well known for its cocaine trade. This was unfair on the Colombian people, who are far more embarrassed by the way their cheating, fouling, play acting, mean-spirited national football team played last night. We are happy to set the record straight."

The 300 km square meter desert, bounded by the three rivers of the Magdelana, Villavieja and Cabrera, in the Colombian state of Huila is a geologist’s wet dream. There are also riches to be found for the paleontologist with plenty of fossils lying around the arid yet fertile land. The sheer variety of natural formations in a compact area means that a couple days can be taken to walk through the different planes, narrow rock formations and hilltop vistas in order to fully appreciate nature’s work in this part of the world. In order to start your journey, you can arrive directly from Neiva, the nearby capital of the state, or you can take a more adventurous turn through the twinned town of Aipe, that is only separated from Villavieja by the mighty river Magdalena. There is very little of interest in Aipe, it has the normal town square, bustling with activity, which leads you directly from the Panamericana main highway to the banks of the river. At the riverbank a number of small vessels are traversing the river constantly, they take everything from sacks of rice to the simple tourist from one side to the other. The journey across the river is swift and uneventful, for around 1 US$ you are not taking a cruise.

The arrival to Villavieja by river leads you up a dusty track into the town. The town has its charms but is by no means the most architecturally rich colonial outpost in the country. Surrounded by paddy fields, Huila is the center of production for rice in Colombia, with so many green shoots sprouting up all around it is difficult to understand that you can be so close to a desert. Whilst the town of Villavieja is considered by locals to be part of the desert complex you have to travel for around 10 minutes by road to get to the first part of geological interest. As you reach the peak of the plane, rising out of the small town from where you came from, you arrive at what initially seems to be like a miniature carved out planet. Over time or perhaps in one sudden shift the surface of the earth eroded to leave a new design of towers, dunes, hillocks and rugged banks all constructed out of a fiery red iron infused soil. If you have ever visited a miniature version of a town that is laid out by the architects envisioning a future society or perhaps the more morbid comparison of the map before and after in the museum of Hiroshima, you may feel you like you are standing above somebodies vision for a planned landscape, perhaps how they might craft something liveable on Mars. After viewing the land from above you can also enter below, walking through narrow passages and labyrinths that open up into broader areas on the Martian surface. There is life on Mars, mostly in the form of cacti, that bear a mini dragon fruit, completely edible and with a similar taste to its larger commercially sold cousin. Trees with gnarly, heat-shriveled trunks also pepper the plateaus. Fauna is present in the form of a bee; my guide, Guillermo, said it was a Africanized bee which Google will tell you is a bastardized version of the small buzzing insect, introduced by a genius to Brazil in the 1950s. It has merrily buzzed its way up north and spends some of its time burrowing football-sized holes into the earthen banks to make its nest. Apart from father time and the “killer” bee the only other principal destroyer of the region is the hapless human. As tourism is in its infancy there are little signs of human destruction such the installation of small tires filled with red dirt to make walkways and protect the restaurant from collapsing into the plain below when heavy rains set in.

The local tourist, those driving in from Bogota, Cali and Medellin are still lacking the insight into the ABC of environmental protection and you will see them casting aside sweet rappers and clambering around wherever the mood might take them; the local guides of the region make stark comparison between the appreciation of environmental impact from the foreign tourist compared to the local one. Thanks to a program by the local community the litter is picked up once a month, if not, the Martian surface would soon have the ignominy of plastic and paper waste everywhere. From casual conversation the majority of the Colombians who were visiting over the long bank holiday weekend seemed to be in awe of their natural patronage but equally lost in its simple surroundings. None of them that I spoke to left their home with a map, guidebook or a powered up GPS device in order to have any sense where they might be, instead relying on the word of a local to guide them from site to site. The idea of planning, buying a book or searching on Google for the most basic of information is usurped by the far simpler anti boy scout approach to leave completely unprepared and make it up as you go along. The salvation of the local tourist, if they are to see more than a small proportion of the wonders of the landscape is to book one of the large, cumbersome, overnight coach tours. Where you will leave at the crack of dawn or just after supper if you are coming from further afield, drive all morning, or perhaps all night, to be whisked around the sights while the sun is up, eat a goat inspired lunch and then as night falls head back to wherever you call home. The cultural strength of this tour is that they will employ a guide such as Guillermo and will therefore see the alternative landscapes to the Martian city just outside the town of Villavieja.

Indeed you do not have to travel much further up the road for the landscape to change completely, not so much in form but in color. The Martian reds, turn to grey and light brown as the mineral composition of the ground that contained strong traces of oxidized iron are shifted to only be made up of calcium, potassium and magnesium, as well as some other trace elements. The same towers, undulating dunes and solid banks can all be seen and traversed, but with less tourists and contamination as few make it beyond the realm of the red planet. The area of grey and light brown is known as Los Hoyos (the holes), it is little more cavernous than the red designed landscape, perhaps because it is less visited by the homo sapiens and therefore retains more of its original form, which to the layman like me feels like it has been crafted out of floods over thousands if not millions of years. Where water once flowed now human steps now tread, walking up and down the riverbed and touching the banks that once contained their flow in order to maintain equilibrium as you rise and fall traversing the landscape. Some of the shapes are a little different here. One notable display is a series of ghostly like figures, huddled closely enough together to form a small army. They are not carved out of the cracked mud like you see in the red part of the desert, by have been finely crafted over time into the igneous rock that stands tall above the crusted surface of the land.

In between the red planet and the greyish one, the lands are divided by a mirador (golden view), which allows you to see the full spectrum of the planes that lie at the center of the state of Huila. You can of course see countless fields cultivating rice in the far distance, but there are also solid sandstone formed shapes from the viewpoint they locally call Las Ventanas (the windows), for the 360-degree perspective on the environs of Tatacoa. Here with a little imagination you will see grandiose beasts rising from the arid floor, such as an elephant or a crocodile that nature has kindly sketched out of the rock formations over millions of years, something to keep those that would rather be at Legoland or Disney amused for a few minutes before they down another Coca-Cola and head off for their lunch. However this view is not to be scoffed at, it is ideal for the late afternoon where you might see cows or goats ambling along in the valley below, taking in their last meal of the day before they relax and chew on their cuds as they drift off into a somnambulant daze as the star filled skies then take over the imagination. If you are lucky you might see more exotic fauna such as ocelots, but the average visitor will mostly see the domesticated beasts on the ground and wonderful birdlife such as swooping eagles and hawks above.

One analogy of the breath taking view across the panorama from the “windows” look out is that the scene before you can be described as quite biblical. This has been taken up literally by a film production who have erected three crosses on the top of one of the hillocks. It is the latest tourist attraction with the crucifixes low enough that more nimble folks who want to get a selfie of themselves in a near death like pose can hop onto the cross and spread their arms, as once the Messiah was forced to do by the nails of the Romans. Whilst it clearly is just a bit of fun and Guillermo believes they are likely to stay, it does provide more seeds for the imagination of the scenes that could have played out over the years. The skies often bruise at night as the clouds roll in over dusty mirages that are kicked up by passing 4x4 traffic, create something that feels like creation itself. A genesis moment of how the land, this land of the Tatcoa desert, could have been created in such a brief moment of time by a power much greater than science alone can imagine.

There is as night falls a flood of activity towards the area with two small dome like structures knows as the astronomical museums. On nights where the skies are clear, plastic chairs are laid out in rows so that the budding Patrick Moore’s of Colombia can get their first taste of the night sky. With modern light pollution the moon and Venus are about all a young city dweller in Colombia might have seen if they had taken to time to crane their neck upwards when it wasn’t raining. The sites are a little over promoted as they claim to be one of the best places in the world to see the night sky. This might well have been the case when they were first constructed with their early visitors, but now, each dome is surrounded by beautifully lit cars parking, street sellers promoting their well lit products and the top off the ideal ambience you have a couple of bars near by blasting out Latino hip hop beats in the form of reggaeton. All of this changes more than a little the celestial mood as you gaze upwards and see what is left of the starry night; the light pollution from the surrounding area is not allowing the viewer to get the full experience that perhaps led Stephen Hawing to fully appreciate the brief history of time.

Moving further up the road again, past the “the windows” viewpoint, past Los Hoyos you will arrive at a wonderful site called the “Los Xilópalos”. If you haven’t run into a goat herd by now, at this point it will be almost impossible to miss one. The starting point and makeshift car park is just outside the farm of Don Miguel, perhaps the nicest man that lives in Tatacoa (according the author and accounts by locals). He has remarkably pale eyes for a man who has descended from the darker skinned end of the gene pool, his thick curly hair give this away. We actually ran into Miguel as we set off on the 2-3 hour walk around the area Xilópalos, featured for its tree trunk fossils lying around the dried out floor of the desert. He was returning home with his herd that had just been stretching its legs, as we were going in the opposite direction. I naively asked him how many goats he had, to which we received a reply in the form of a longish poem, not quite as long as the Ancient Mariner but more like a couple of sonnets that broadly described the spirituality under which the people of Tatacoa lived. The poem explains that there is no merit in knowing the quantity of your livestock, be it a goat, horse, cow or sheep, all you need to know is what color your animals are so you can identify and care for them. The underlying reason is that it is not necessary to count your wealth in numbers, you only need to see visually what nature offers and appreciate and love that, it cannot and should not be quantified. And for those that are worried about larceny, the poem kindly tells them that a serpent or some other grizzly fate will strike down anyone that steals from their herd; therefore why again do you need to know exactly what you have numerically. Life on the desert plane, outside of the tourist influx is one of tranquility and at peace with all that nature has to offer. Despite the harsh conditions at certain times of the year there is only the type of land that the big developers would never have interest in; enough water and foliage to manage livestock and enough sunlight to power solar panels to keep things cool and lit. And for those that are without, like Doña Ligia, who lives a mile or so away from Don Miguel, the community has donated a solar set up so that she can live in her mud inspired home with all the comforts of the inventions early 20th century.

The landscape around this part of the desert is completely different from that closer to the town of Villavieja. It is midway to a town named Baraya and instead of the collapsed earthen layout it is mostly crafted out of rock, with a much more igneous feel to it but still mixed with sedimentary formations. There may well be metamorphic rocks but my seventh grade geography lesson did not provide me with the tools to fully recognize this formation unless it was marble, the only example the textbook ever gave us! So here the harshness of acidic rain, the sun and the tempests have had to work harder to grind out the passageways, caves and tunnels that you walk through. At one point in time there was a forest of different trees, which were one day captured inside what you imagine must have been a fierce eruption, spewing out ash that mollycoddled and then preserved the trunks for the paleontologist (and tourist) to see years into the future. Walking through what feels again like a river bed, but this time limited by solid igneous rock formations the floor is littered by parts of trunks that would not have been the tallest and mightiest of trees like those that go to war in Lord of the Rings, but modest size timbers, maybe 15 or 20 meters high. On closer inspection you can see the parts that were planted in the surface and the beginning of roots distinct from those parts that were higher up the structure. You can see different types of tree from the color and formation of the bark. Other fossils can also be found, scattered around the old river bed, where now only a small rill carries the cleanest of mineral rich waters that create a sticky, muddy mess, that is guaranteed to laden your walking boots or trainers depending on what type of tourist you are. Parts of the ancient ancestors of turtles, terrapins or perhaps tortoises are easily found, its impossible for the layman to know which as in Spanish there is only one word for all three.

Walking further along there are much narrower parts where you need to breathe in a little to pass through. We happened upon a dead snake that the guide thought had perhaps been killed by a stone, an apt sacrifice as it lay in the passage that is locally called the culebra or serpents pass, not for its notoriety to murder the reptile but for its snake like, winding shape. Here the igneous rock has a beautifully formed grey, smooth surface but for some reason the watery hand that crafted it has left large bulbous parts that would make void the challenge to the professional rock climber as there are so many small ledges that they almost purposefully resemble the beginners climbers wall you might see inside a human built training venue. They are not touched or created by the human hand apart from one outstanding example. As in the vast desert plane from the “windows” view where you can see the sandstone crafted zoo of animals, a deft human hand has carved into the protruding bump the head of a baby goat or perhaps a snake, neatly scratched into the hard surface the eyes and cartoon mouth. This stands at the exit of the serpent’s path as a more comical and apt intervention than the graffiti scribbled hearts of one or two lover’s trysts that do not complement the majesty of their surroundings. It is likely in time as the more adventurous Colombians travel beyond the initial tourist attraction that the entire pass will be littered with boy loves girl or other messages, but for now it is more or less as nature intended it.

Rising up out of the snaky walkway, passing by a half collapsed, bat free cave, you arrive at Doña Ligia’s house. It is marked on the official route of the walk and she is not unaccustomed to prying visitors taking photos of her property which was built by her own sweat and toil over what appears like a millennium but practically was only fifty years. Using the traditional techniques of creating adobe through mud and strands of what could be wheat but more likely rice or local grasses she has glued together four walls that although cracked and ant infested still stand proudly today. The walls are topped with a rusty corrugated iron structure, a modern day shortcut to the more traditional palm woven over wooden beams that you can often find in Colombia. On one side you see the community donated solar panel with enormous battery back and on the other the plastic-rapped refrigerator. Littered around the property are tools of yesteryear such as a maize, or whatever you like, grinding machine, beautifully crafted in stainless steal, perhaps made sixty or seventy years ago still grinding into flour whatever Doña Ligia needs for her breads, pastries or more commonly eaten arepas. Around the property are small dogs, a donkey and a herd of goats. Again I asked, how many, this time I received a smile and a shrug of the shoulders, nobody it seems has the inclination to count their livestock. A small baby goat can be bought for 15 to 20 US dollars. It is unclear to me who would buy them as the fashion for food in the town has shifted to chicken, fish, pork and beef. Goats are only really on the menu these days for special occasions when they are still roasted in the fine, dome-shaped ovens that many construct on their properties. These ovens are constructed using local earth to create a cistern chapel inspired dome that sits on a square base made of local igneous rock boulders. The temperatures will easily reach 300 degrees inside, powered by felled wood that is quickly dried by the harsh sun before it is burned. They look like traditional Italian built wood burning pizza ovens, perhaps with a slightly higher more semi circular shaped dome as they are built to receive a whole animal rather than a slither of bread topped with tomato sauce. In the nearby restaurants, the most famous and aptly name El Rincon de Cabrito (the baby goat corner or kiddies corner if you prefer) you can enjoy a delicious lunch of roasted baby goat with pepitoria, an accompaniment prepared by boiling rice with the visceral parts of the animal such as the heart, liver, kidney and tripe.

Having no use for one of Doña Ligia’s kids or even the fully grown horned parent we moved onwards and upwards towards the property of Don Nato, a man that perhaps lived around fifty years ago or maybe two hundred depending on whose story you want to believe. As you walk across the moon like surface, with a large distribution of solid black boulders, passing some cacti and short grasses, you arrive at the only remains of the property of Don Nato, which is the base of his ancient oven. His mud constructed house has long been taken by nature, or perhaps by Doña Ligia’s family and all that remains is a long and intriguing story of the man, the legend that was once the father to three beautiful daughters.

Don Miguel’s father who passed the story to his son recounts a version of a stoic indigenous man, who whilst not being rude was so taciturn that he would not converse beyond a good day. As love has its mysteries he was presented by fate to a “foreign” woman, that could just mean not indigenous but in the context of the story also means beautiful. Miguel tells the story as only a farmer could, of how its important to breed your young and that was the exact task that was the focus of the union between the indian and the traveller, the result being three stunning daughters that he then raised, fed and educated (Miguel says “formed” like they were made out of clay from the surrounding earth) and were seemingly the desire of all young men around. Don Nato being incredibly anti social did not want or desire any attention for his daughters but unfortunately his wife was not of the same disposition. When he went to market the girls would walk down what is now known as the beautiful girl’s pass, a passageway so narrow and deep that at points not even one foot can be laid flat on the ground. If indeed these girls did clamber through the tightly knit walls they did not do so in fancy shoes, but either bare foot or with something so rugged it is hard to imagine it was available to such a family in those days. Anyway the fact they did not own a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes did not stop one of the daughters finding a lover at the end of the passage, who in turn managed to get her pregnant. The young lover taking full responsibility for his actions fronted up to Don Nato, to ask for her hand, only to be chased out the house by the machete wielding father who wanted to skin him alive. There the story ends, some say they moved away, others say that nobody bothered them again for fear of their lives. Either way there does not seem to be any relations left to tell the story of their mother, grand mother or even great grandmother; so perhaps it was such a long time ago that the story that has passed from generation to generation and family to family has as much myth as fact, but who wants to live in a world of only factual history anyway!

In leaving the narrow pass named after the legendry girls, the landscape opens up again into sedimentary rocks that are literally lined with gravel that would have been deposited by a fast flowing river or perhaps a larger mass of moving water such as an ancient sea. It is hard to imagine the sea came so far in land, but in a recent visit to the museum of the Panama Canal there is a wonderful moving graphic of how over millions of years the continents of the world shifted through the ocean and join together as we see them today; so its not really a question of thinking of a retreating sea but more of how the land that shifted to where the sea once was. Around the rocky surface a small river flows, the Africanized bees are busy making their honey and short grasses flourish amongst different flower and fruit bearing trees. We eat some berries from one tree and pass on the mini dragon fruit snacks which are nice to try but not interesting enough to eat time and again. The land pulls the weary traveller up to the roadside, passed the herd of Don Miguel and there ends the journey of rocks, fossils and legends. As we were leaving the property of Don Miguel I saw a car parked in the entrance to his house. I asked him how many goats he had to sell to buy the car, he replied the whole herd. It is possible then to quantify something in this land that time has shaped so beautifully, so distinctly from other parts of the planet, but I suspect it is impossible to imagine or realise just how much time has passed to create what the tourist will see in their brief moment in the desert of Tatacoa.

Searching Google for the least visited or least known UNESCO sites throws up a lot of very remote geographical regions, such as the sub Antarctic which you can easily imagine to be very expensive and complicated to get a passage to.  Mompox does not appear in any list, there are challenges to arrive but they are mostly due to a lack of 5 star shuttle services, that the less adventurous traveler prefers.

I’m sure it would be completely wrong to say Mompox is the least visited UNESCO site but it is definitely going to be near the top of the sites that are in the list based on their architectural value. The entirety of the list that a Google search returns shows many places for their geographical significance and not architectural prowess. Sifting deeper you can find many locations you have never heard of; in total there are around one thousand places deemed worthy by the UN, but they all “seem” to have a steady stream of visitors. There is indeed a stream of visitors to Mompox but it is not steady. From a romantic point of view you could argue when the river silted up over a hundred plus years ago and the commercial vessels no longer arrived, then with it the town slowly stopped receiving anyone at all. But with the advent of the plane, motor driven boats, cars and even helicopters it is easier to arrive in Mompox today than it would have been at the height of its commercial life.

There are times of the year when the Colombians descend upon the five-street town. Easter or holy week as it is more commonly known in Catholic parlance is one of those moments. With rich traditions related to the church, colorful processions and more myths and legends than a Hollywood producers studio, Mompox for a few days becomes the centerpiece of Colombian cultural life. But it is not for that it is given UNESCO status, it is for the extensive array of houses that have stood the test of time and for a town that functions to some extent as it always did. A town that offers shelter to the residents in its houses and is still not converted into a museum punctuated with hotels, souvenir stores and screaming school kids on cultural identity visits.

So being one of the least visited makes it special for those that visit? Well yes and also no. The yes, as you can visit a site without pretention, without stress of bumping into things that shouldn’t be there, namely hoards of tourists jostling for a selfie in front of you or a drone whizzing past your earhole. But no if you start to understand the dynamic of the town, how the public schools have to divide the school day by three, i.e. a child only studies for one third of the school day to fit all the kids into a rushed and basic education, you start to wonder if it had a few more tourists it might be a bit better off. A town that has so many riches, a town nominated as one of the most important architectural examples on the planet struggles to offer its residents a place in the modern world. It is of course a symptom that is not only found in Mompox for Colombians, in general Colombian fails to compete on the world stage with everything from security to education, however it is more marked in place that has been elevated by the UN to such a special status. The purists of the world would say it’s possibly a good thing. Look at Venice, who lives there anymore? The city does not function as anything more than a sinking museum piece to be gawped at, albeit an incredibly beautiful one! Mompox is still full of stories, songs, poetry and life of the people. As the sun sets the seven church doors are used as goal posts for games of soccer, the squares are bustling with vendors selling the local cheese and other sundries, at the weekend food stalls pop up and only locals are eating, talking and just living the life that would have been played out by their ancestors before them. In the world of mass migration Mompox is filled with families that are really from there, for centuries and not just blow-ins that populate the majority of the cities of the world.

The magic of a town like Mompox for the modern visitor is in its serenity, in its tradition and it’s lack of ambition and failure to attract tourism. As the sun rises each day, the birds start their daily routine of searching for insects or fishing by the river bank. The lone tourist can stroll along and literally not see anyone else other than a few people with their antique style brooms, something you might see Harry Potter fyling on, sweeping up the foliage that has descended from the trees over night; they are not picking up plastic food wrappings or gum off their shoes. The sunrises and sunsets are not long drawn out affairs as you might see in exotic destinations further from the equator, they are sudden, so any array of colors that might appear are only ever fleeting. The magical realism, a catchphrase adopted by the tourist board from Gabriel Garcia Marquez is not therefore so much in the visual, there is arguably a haze that you can feel as much as see, the magic is in the tradition, the lumbering pace of life. The fauna such as an iguana or lizard will raise its head, salute you until you get too close and then carry on with its basking, soaking up the sun as you might soak up the energy that washes over you.

If you read the UNESCO description of Mompox it repeats over and over that what is remarkable about the town is that the buildings are still used for their original purpose. Whilst in some cases this is a little tenuous as one warehouse for example is now a hotel, there are still families rocking away in their locally made chairs thoughout the day and commerce thrives in cellular phone shops wedged into the back of the church squares, selling their wares as they would have done centuries ago. All this happens without a great deal of force, a natural succession from whatever might have blown in from the east, perhaps spices, precious metals, dyes etc have been replaced by modern Chinese products of the day. And it is this natural succession that UNESCO are trying to highlight, still the same pace of life, a little less commercial than the heyday, but folks just beating to the rhythm of the daily grind of commerce, consumption and social intercourse. The kids are growing up, playing, swimming in the river, studying in the same schools that have been there for hundreds of years. Life goes on, simply, without fuss, without pretention as the older, wiser Momposians recount tales of the past, legends and songs taught by their forefathers and a curiosity of what might be to come.

The jarring fact if you dig a little deeper is that what might be to come may not be too different from what is there now. The politicians will come and go with promises of more tourists, more development, better education and more employment. A plan that would keep families together as inevitably without the above there is not enough to anchor the young in the town that they will grow up in. There is a limit to the filigreed tradition of the jewelry shop owner as one tells me about his day as regular, “regularly bad” he says, as he sold nothing, which from Spanish doesn’t quite translate. With just a splattering of hotels and restaurants, families are not supported by the tourist trade but the community. So in 20 years if Mompox is the same as it is now, for the lucky few that are likely to arrive by car or bus over the concrete monolith that spans the silted up waters, they will most likely feel the essence of time slowly washing over the serene community just carrying on, with the expectation of a change that never comes. Perhaps it will be an even more aged population with less children knocking new memories into the church door with their soccer balls. Or perhaps it will be different, with thousands of Japanese and Chinese tourists descending into the airport after it is reformation (yes there is a perfectly good airport, its just not been maintained in years), with drones whizzing above the 16th century houses and bodegas, taking videos back to the orient from where once the merchants were arriving to the same very banks of the river so far, far away.

Whatever happens, the legends will still be told of the three travellers who were boarded up inside their room for several days and when someone finally forced the door they found three coffins, each with contained a manikin of Christ inside. A neat way to give more color to the representations of Jesus that hang proudly in the churches of the town. The princess Barbara will still be recounted as the beautiful young woman who was locked in the tower of the church by her Muslim father for falling in love with a man who wanted to be Christian. She will still be taken to the mountain, de-robed and when with her father at the point of removing her head he will be still be struck my lightening and she will be free to return to Mompox and live out her life of legend with her husband. Maybe the stories will add more color, more variations from tour guide to tour guide, but then maybe that’s the whole point. What’s the point of having one version when you can have your own, personal experience.

A curious house stands towards the edge of town called the house of the Devil. It’s a relatively new building built in the 1930’s with influence from the Art Deco style. According to legend it is haunted, not so says the man who lives opposite and also passed several years inside the house. It simply was not finished, abandoned to some extent and nobody has ever filled it with their family or business. On the site of the house, according to the same man there once stood a brothel, so that perhaps is a more fitting explanation as to why it has its name. But as it stands, with a guise of looking burned out, however the only fire that has ravaged the building is that of time and the stories that swirl around the chatter of the town as to why it was truly abandoned. The truth is banal, it's likely to be caught up in the mire of hereditary passing, going from one man to ten or so sons and daughters, where a sale would require a dozen people to agree on its future destiny in order to release the property from its current state. Still, like everything else in Mompox it will change when the time comes, in it is own time and not any other.