God's water

From time to time we will post things here that are not so serious, like the travelogue that follows.

I really have no idea why the place is called “Agua de Dios”- ‘Water of God’, but it conjures up in my mind a picture of Zeus or Thor standing up in the clouds and peeing.

Whatever the reason for the name, we just spent a long weekend at a “finca” near Agua de Dios. The area is about 100 KM due west of Bogotá, which means two hours driving time when there isn’t much traffic, and three or four or five hours driving time on three day weekends when there is a lot of traffic.

There are two ways to go: the highway to Melgar, and then on to Giradot, or the highway through La Mesa. Both have been privatized under the patronage regime of Colombia’s beloved President Alvaro Uribe. Not completely privatized, but leased out. The results have been a large infusion of private investment into state infrastructure, in return for which motorists have to stop fairly frequently to pay high tolls to the lucky beneficiaries of Uribe’s largesse. It’s a mixed blessing for travelers, because the state of the roads in Colombia was terrible, and now is better.

And things are a lot better now than when the roads were first leased out. At first the private contractors invested money in toll booths, and nothing else! This did not sit well with the rest of Colombia’s capitalists who believe in privatization only up to the point where it benefits them, and they need good roads. It also didn’t sit too well with the country’s military strategists, who also want good roads, since this is one the principal means of drying up the seas in which the guerrilla used to swim.

In any case, we chose the road through La Mesa, since it is rumored to be faster and less crowded than the other, more traditional route.

We made a mistake, though right at the beginning. Instead of heading out Calle 80, we chose to go west on Calle 13. Calle 80 leads to the highway toward Medellin, but to get to the highway to La Mesa you have to turn off onto a toll road that has been rebuilt in a way that has caused me to get lost twice. So we took Calle 13, despite misgivings about driving through the industrial heart of Bogotá.

Like I said, this was a mistake. The country’s 150,000 independent truck owners had just ended a week long strike. The strike had been called over high fuel prices, and over unfair competition from the big trucking companies. I am still not sure what the deal was that ended the strike, but nevertheless, it ended Saturday afternoon just as we were leaving town.

This resulted in a miles long traffic jam of big rigs waiting to pass through the weigh station on Calle 13 at the outskirts of Bogotá. And that resulted in an hour or so delay while we tried to squiggle through the endless array, and disarray, of trucks.

Once we got out of Bogotá it was pretty clear sailing. We drove as fast as traffic would allow while we climbed up the slope of the Andes past “Mondoñedo”, one of the city’s two major garbage dumps. Then the air, and the traffic, thinned out, and we were able to travel the speed limit down through the pretty countryside of the western side of that range of mountains. We hit another traffic jam in La Mesa, and then sped on to the town of Tocaima.

Tocaima marks the foothills of the Andes as they run along the valley of the Rio Magdalena. Here a road heads south, reaching the river at Giradot. Along the way it follows the foothills and passes through Agua de Dios. The road has recently been rebuilt, and there are no tolls! Smooth sailing!

If you have ever driven highway 49 through the Sierra foothills in California, you have some idea of what the countryside is like. The country side is dry, but not desert. The mesas here are sharper than those in California, instead of flat table tops, the tables are all keeling over to one side as if the tectonic upthrust of the Andes was being guided by some drunken sailor. The sedimentary layers of shale and sandstone near the mesa tops are clearly outlined beneath the dry brown grass. Down below, along the creeks, everything is a lot greener than in the California foothills.

Dry is relative, because even though this countryside is nowhere near as humid as the nearby river valley, and much much less humid than the interior tropical plains, this is still a lot wetter than the California foothills could ever imagine.

Like the California foothill country, a lot of this area is cattle country, but here you mostly see Brahman cattle with their big hump backs.

Driving south from Tocaima the country gets a little greener around Agua de Dios. The town itself is prettier than most small towns. A friend has developed a rule which makes sense, the older the town or neighborhood here, the prettier it is, the newer the town or neighborhood here, the uglier it is. After giving the rule a little thought, I concluded that there are three underlying reasons which make it true: stucco, paint, and trees.

Most buildings in small towns are do-it-yourself brick buildings, with tradition rather than architects and engineers providing the design. Often part of the first floor is built, and then the next part, and then the next. When the lot is built over, the second story is started, and sometimes a third or even a fourth. Once construction is finished, something that often takes years or decades, decoration begins. The stucco goes on, and then the paint. And, if there are any empty patches of earth, maybe a tree or two gets planted.

Agua de Dios’s buildings are mostly stuccoed over and painted in pastels and whites, and there are lots of trees.

Agua de Dios, besides being prettier than most towns, stands out as the location of three leprosy hospitals: two for men, and one for women. Why they are segregated by sex beats me, and I will not repeat the awful jokes I heard explaining possible reasons.

The place where we stayed is a few miles south of the town. Although the word finca more or less means farm, this place is not a farm, it is a vacation house built just to rent to families and large groups for weekend trips. At the front there are lots of large trees shading a little parking area. Next to the parking area there is a covered open air recreation area with a billiard table, a ping pong table, “Rana” (frog), and some sofas and chairs to lounge around in. Next to the roofed area there is a tejo court and a mini-tejo court.

Rana is the Colombian answer to darts. You play it while drinking beer, only there aren’t any sharp pointy things. Instead you throw weighted metal tokens into frogs’ mouths. Tejo is a more explosive drinking game, sort of the Colombian answer to horseshoes, only you don’t throw horseshoes you throw metal weights. And you they don’t hit a little pole and make the shoe clang and spin around. The object is to hit throw the weights and hit a little square filled with black powder and make it blow up.

Connected to the rec room area is a little house with two bedrooms, one for the guests and the other for the owner’s girlfriend and her son. Nearby there is another little house for the couple who take care of the place.

Up the hill there is a lawn and a swimming pool, and then the main house. The house is nothing special. In fact it is sort of utilitarian. Four big bedrooms with loads of bunk beds. Two bathrooms, a kitchen, and a very wide central hallway/living room connected the rest. Behind the house is a sort of poorly maintained soccer field. At the back of the soccer field there is a barbed wire fence which someone thoughtfully decided to install a door in. The door even has a window. And a lock.

For a group of 10 or more it costs less than $10.00/day/person.

We ate, slept, swam, played, read, relaxed, got sunburned, and got bitten by bitey bugs.

A few words about the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees.

I don’t really know the names of all the local flora and fauna, but the flora includes a lot more flowers than you would find in a similar place in California. And the fauna includes a lot more kinds of birds and insects than in a similar place in California.

Tropical places have lots of ants, and several different kinds in one place. At this finca there were big ants, little ants, and flying termites. Also wasps, some other things that looked sort of like wasps, lots of little bitey gnats, and butterflies: yellow butterflies, black butterflies, and blue butterflies.

The little bitey gnats were worse than mosquitoes. You didn’t really ever notice they were biting you until after the fact. After the first night I had dozens of little welts on my legs, and so did everyone else. Luckily I didn’t have much reaction to them, and they just faded away. Unfortunately other people had major reactions to them with little bites growing into big angry looking itchy red hives.

It’s hard to say how many kinds of birds there were at Finca Lareno, but there were a least a dozen different kinds. Besides the turtleback doves which seem to be everywhere in Colombia, and besides the big black vultures gliding high up in the air currents over the foothills, there were lots of other birds.

There were little yellow and red colored birds that looked like wild finches or parakeets. There were several different colored humming birds: at least red yellow and green. There was a larger bird with a brown body and red wings. There were some medium sized black birds with long tails and an odd manner of flying. It looked sort of like the breast stroke. There were some gray and white birds. One bird, maybe the gray and white ones or the black ones made a really weird oommmuuup kind of sound. There were white egrets that like the swampy areas down farther near the river. And there were hawks.

Driving back was like driving there, only in reverse order. Smooth sailing at or near the speed limit until we got close to the top of the last ridge before “Mondoñedo”, then heavy traffic all the way into the city.

Now here we are, back in Bogotá.