A whirlwind trip report, like one of Digger's bike tours only we stopped at churches and listened to choirs singing instead of walking down back streets looking for out of the way disco's with classic rock. I'm starting in Risaralda Department 5 hours south of Medellin and finished in Valle Del Cauca Department, 160 km from Cali.
Santuario is in the highlands above Pereira. It used to be 1 hour 15 minutes by bus from Santuario to Pereira. Then the infamous 2010 landslides turned a two lane blacktop twisted mountain highway into a bumpy, rutted, muddy trench in 11 different places. At these spots traffic slows to a crawl and we all hold our breath. It is disconcerting to be on the canyon side of the bus, looking down from the window and watching the back wheels come within inches of a sheer drop of hundreds of feet. Now it takes nearly 2 hours to get to Pereira but it still costs only 8,000 pesos on Transporte de Tatama. The bus company, like so many things in this region, is named after the 1,000,000 hectare national park nearby.
Santuario has a population of 8000 happy souls and a couple of grouches as I've found out. All around is coffee fields and mountains reaching to the horizon. Everything here is all about the coffee. Planting, growing, picking, sorting, weighing, processing, drying, transporting. You have to respect these people. They work hard, starting at 6 or 7 in the morning and often going for 12 hours and 6 or 7 days each week.
I settled here 10 months ago because my best friend who lives here is a Colombian who speaks good English. He helps me with the logistics and trivia of living day to day in a culture I don't always understand and where I don't speak the language well. He promised to teach me Spanish. Unfortunately he and I have such active minds and tremendous range of interests that when we get together a conversation between us is rapid fire, almost always in English so we can share ideas faster. Turns out that after 10 months I've not been learning Spanish. Instead I've been practicing English with Benny. He is no longer just "good" in English, he is now fluent. I am still struggling at the intermediate level Spanish.
On the way to Pereira it's impossible not to go through La Virginia. This is one of the more unpleasant villages I've been through in Colombia. Lots of poverty, typical of any riverfront town anywhere in the world. This city of about 40,000 people is perched on the Rio Cauca, the main river that drains about 1/3 of Colombia before it joins the Magdalena and eventually empties into the Caribbean at Barranquilla. La Virginia is surrounded by monoculture Sugar Cane, which is fertilized by pig manure from the big hog farm up near La Marina. God the stench is terrible, how can these people stand it? What adds to the odor is the low hanging air of a hot and humid river bottom town where there is no mountain breeze to freshen the air. No wonder these people look so unhappy and sluggish. It reminds me of dirt poor cotton towns in the US deep south.
I arrived in Pereira bus terminal at about noon. Hungry, so I walked over the pedestrian bridge to the shopping center at La Catorce and go straight for the Mexican Burritos at Frisky Chicken. I hate myself for eating junk food but damn I miss Tex-Mex and the Mexican Fried Chicken Buritto is as close as I can get to Tex-Mex in this town. Because I'm a gringo and friendly they load me up with extra jalapeños,
Back to the bus station for a ticket to La Unión where I'm to meet my novia at 4 pm. This time the ticket is 8,700 and the trip is advertised as 1.5 hours. La Unión is unique because it is the center of the Colombian Wine Region. Don't laugh. They think it's serious. God, what awful wine! This is not Napa Valley, but if I squinch my eyes just right and put my mind on pause I can sort of believe that maybe someday they will in fact have a real wine industry with real wine. In the meantime, everyone here encourages you to taste the wine and buy. After you politely decline while trying not to spit up they look a little crestfallen and grudgingly admit the Chilean is a little better flavored.
The story behind the wine industry has to do with the drug cartel that used to rule the upper Valle Del Cauca. As a way to launder drug money and make themselves look a little more legitimate they actually started a vineyard. After 15 years that one haphazard grape patch grew into miles and miles of beautiful vineyards and a huge, modern and efficient winery. The winery stretches for several hundred meters along the main road through town. Hundreds of people worked in the winery and in the vineyards, legitimately, so when the government captured the drug lords and confiscated their property the best thing to do to keep the economy of the town and region afloat was to keep the vineyards and the winery in production, so that's what they did. Now the Colombian government owns and operates one of the biggest vineyard/winery businesses in South America.
La Unión itself is a clean little pueblo, probably 30,000 people. Beautiful church, no surprise there since the Catholic Church is still the biggest and most profitable business in Colombia. There are a lot of field workers in this pueblo and they need to be entertained so there are a number of discotecas, each with their own Volkswagon size speakers and one armed bandit casinos. The biggest surprise for me was the coffee. I'm not real particular.....well maybe a little....about my coffee, but damn, I hate like hell to be served instant coffee in a cafe, in Colombia of all places. I have since gotten in the habit of asking before ordering.
Catching the bus from La Unión to Roldanillo is easy. Just walk over where the bus is parked and buy a ticket from the driver. If he's in a hurry he stuffs the ticket book in his shirt pocket and just motions you to grab a seat and you pay when you get off. This time I bought tickets for myself and my novia to go to Roldanillo then on to Armenia where she is finishing up her Master's in Language. A ticket for this trip is 11,700 and the trip is advertised as 3 hours. We need to go through Roldanillo to drop her daughter at home. The driver is very pleasant and drives two blocks out of his way to drop the girl at her front door. These bus drivers are really accommodating, which sort of makes up for how uncomfortable these smaller buses can be after a couple hours of bumps and curves.
We top the main ridge above Armenia just at dusk. Nice view of the city from up here. It looks like a friendly little pueblo, but actually has nearly 300,000 residents. Most of whom are crazy and drive motos like they are being chased by Orsen Well's Martians, half desperation and half bravado.
The University of Quindio is quiet. It's Friday night and only a few night classes going on. Lots of students in the streets, swigging beer, grabbing fast food from the street carts and listening to stereos blasting from windows. I love a University town, all that energy and all the smart kids. All the good looking chicas, too. Eye candy.
Sleep tonight is at the Comfortel, the only hotel in my price range that has wifi. 50,000 for the night for two people includes breakfast. Hotel is quiet, clean and the breakfast was good and it was real coffee.
After Saturday class the dash back to Roldanillo which is a sleepy little pueblo snugged up to the Cordillera Occidental Montañas at about 1000 meters elevation. Probably 25,000 people year round. The population swells to 25,200 each January when the International Parapente (Para Gliding) Championship is being held. There are thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of hang gliding sites in this country, but for some reason Roldanillo has become the mecca for para gliders. They jump off the mountain way above town and glide around for a few hours then land in a field at the edge of town and high five each other a lot.
The Omar Rayo Museum is interesting. I'm not particularly fond of Mexican style buildings being plopped down in a historic, Colombian pueblo, but the people seem to like it. It's essentially eight towers, each about ten meters tall and ten meters in diameter connected by walkways. It looks like eight Mexican sombreros without the brims, just the head part sticking up from the park. The architect was 80 years old at the time he designed the building and it's not totally clear whether he actually knew he was not in Mexico. After being dismayed by the awkward, actually awful, architecture I went inside and was very pleased with the works of art on display.
Here's what Wiki has to say about it:
Quote: The Museo Rayo de Dibujo y Grabado Latinoamericano was founded on January 20, 1981 by Rayo in his hometown of Roldanillo, Valle del Cauca with funds the artist himself provided, along with help from Colombian government agencies and others so that on this site would remain a permanent exhibit of his works of art. The museum was designed by Mexican architect Leopoldo Gout and opened with a collection of 2,000 of Rayo's artwork and some 500 other Latin American artists' works. The museum contains a library, many modules for expositions, a graphic arts workshop and a theater.
End Quote.
Roldanillo itself is a pleasant little typical 19th century Colombiano community. No discotecas as in La Unión. More residential, more comfortable. The church on the main parque however is an abomination. It is probably the ugliest church I've seen out of maybe the last 200 I've looked at in Colombia. All brick and sheer sides and perched roof. Not a cathedral or charming at all, more reminiscent of a three story U-Store building in the US. Next door to this ungodly apparition of a church is the Davivienda Bank, an modernistic monolith which looks like it was copied from a 1980's Sears Roebuck strip mall storefront. I'm left feeling that Roldanillo deserved better than these three architect designed buildings that rankle the senses.
