cali's last hurrah

In Cali for what is very possibly the last hurrah for my family. I thought Corey and I would end up spending a relatively quiet, down-tempo time here, mostly watching movies and catching up on U.S. politics (an endeavor which ended up disgusting both of us so much that the phrase "ignorance is bliss" is beginning to make a lot more sense to me now). However, we ended up doing what we do best: being quite Busy Little Bees, buzz, buzz, buzzing around, this time (to our relief) in cars, instead of noisy, dirty buses, which made a huge difference in terms of comfort and sanity.

On Tuesday, Corey, my mother, Omar (the family driver/all around handyman and great guy) and I drove to Silvia, a small town in the mountains about 2 hours away in Cali. At the tollbooth, we purchased a yummy, if a bit crazy-looking and strange-tasting fruit called zapote. It peels naturally in that star shape, and you kind of suck on its fruity fuzziness like a toothless baby. One minor example of the amazing variety of fruits in Colombia, most of which are endemic to the country, Julie types in her best business-like guidebook tone.

The Silvia Tuesday market is huge: Indians from surrounding villages come in to sell and buy fruit, vegetables and handicrafts. It is amazingly busy and fills up the entire town: pots and pans, hair ties, chontaduros (a yummy palm nut you eat with salt), plantains... you see folks everywhere in their woolen skirts and hats, not so much "traditional Indian dress" as it is evidence left over from the days of oppressive rule by the Spanish, who forced the indigenous community to dress in such a way in order to mark them as visually obvious Indians. I wonder if people continue to dress like that nowadays as a mark of pride or simply because over the course of time it has become traditional... Anyway, it's interesting to visit a place with such a large and colorful indigenous gathering in Colombia, where such a thing is the exception rather than the norm (as it is in places such as Ecuador's Otavalo).

This bird told my fortune: its owner blew on it, it hopped down to the bottom shelf of the wooden box and landed on a piece of paper, which was then promptly turned over to me as my fortune. Unfortunately I can't remember exactly what it said, something about learning to appreciate my luck, I think...? Anyway, it was definitely a first for me. There were a lot of small stalls selling all kinds of interesting herbs, including a dried-up bear claw.

I love hiking around in Silvia, passing the people on horseback, the giant pigs, the chickens rolling in the dust, going over the little bridge...

On Wednesday Corey and I paid a visit to my father's workplace. It was too bad that we weren't able to give my father a little more advance notice about our arrival, because he commented that in an ideal world, he would have loved for Corey to have been able to give a seminar both about his thesis work on Bt corn and about our work in Ecuador. For next time, maybe...? There isn't much in the way of mycorrhizal (let alone mycorenewal) research going on there, but we got to talk with a soil scientist and check out a bean experiment meant to breed drought tolerance. Some of the many beans you see in the photo above are meant to represent drought conditions, others represent irrigated ones (apologies in advance for my faulty scientific terminology!).

This was an especially cool experiment because it wasn't using any fancy genetic work, meaning that they were no bacteria or jellyfish or harpy eagle genes pumped into the beans. Nope, it was good old-fashing plant reproduction. So, it was nice to see that that's still going on.

Another aspect of the bean project concerned aluminum toleranace. Here I begin typing eloquent dictation from Corey: "all plants are affected by aluminum concentration in the soil so they're trying to breed aluminum tolerance because the soils here and in other areas such as Brazil are high in aluminum concentration." Thank you, Corey! The long root in the photo above is the root of a bean that has demonstrated more resistance to aluminum than the short, stubbly root.

We also visited the biotechnology lab, full of impressive glowing white rooms, plants in jars, humming machines and soylent green.

Cultures for yucca, genetically manipulated so that they'll produce betacarotene. Some of them already appeared orange, even at this early stage, frozen in their little plates.

Genetically manipulated yucca plants. Some come out looking weird, others look quite normal. This isn't exactly related, but on the car-ride towards my dad's workplace, I read an interesting article in UK's The Guardian about the effects Bt cotton in India(http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/30/gmcrops.india) which kind of colored my view about the whole genetically modified food business. More on that later, maybe.

This is just a random crazy insect my younger brother found outside by the swimming pool, an example of Colombia's (or more specifically, our back-yard's) insect diversity and all around "whoa!" quality.

On Friday we embarked upon an Epic Pachico Family Adventure, in which we drove two hours to Popoyan, a very pretty colonial city to the south of Cali. Corey and I last knew Popoyan when we flew in to the Popoyan airport from Gorgona: after spending 8 hours in the Guapi airport, waiting for the delayed-from-weather flight, we were deliriously happy to be in Popoyan. This time around, we (thankfully) got to see a little more of the city than the airport lobby.

My parents very kindly treated us to a night in a very nice hotel room, in an old colonial building with a huge courtyard that was once a Franciscan monastery.

Those monks sure did live it up.

Popoyan is full of narrow streets and whitewashed buildings. In fact, everything is so white that when the sun is out and you take a picture everything appears as a white smear, as though an angel or vampire or the creepy girl from "The Ring" or some kind of otherworldly creature darted into your frame and messed up your photo.

That weekend was the Festival de Gastronomia (Gastronomic Festival!) in Popoyan, which meant that there were all kinds of exciting booths set up in the lobby of our hotel and others, with delicious free food ranging from black free-range coffee grown by a women's collective in the region to french fries (advertised under the brand name "McCain"--John, I didn't know you were in the papitas business!) to fried sausages (which I didn't try, because of the mad horde that rushed the booth the second the sausages were ready). My mother was given a free bottle of expensive Chilean olive oil--I guess she must have a nice face.

On Saturday we drove up to Coconuco, a small town famous for its volcano and hot baths. There were a lot of signs in the town for "Yoghurt Natural," so maybe their yoghurt is famous too? We spent a nice day soaking in the baths, getting all prune-wrinkled, and then my parents and Corey and I went for a small hike up a somewhat steep dirt path in front of our hotel, where we got nice views of the surrounding valley and a waterfall.

Corey and my dad discuss manly topics, such as map making, compass directions and geology/geography.

We were lucky enough to glimpse the snow-capped rim of the volcano, the first time I have ever seen snow in Colombia.

Today we drove back from Coconuco and made a brief stop in Popoyan just to explore it a little more one last time. Popoyan is full of these houses with these dramatic courtyards, which you can peep quickly into and admire the fountains and flowers.

The sight of this llama at the park inspired a discussion centered around a very important question: can you ride a llama, if you're not a) a small child or b) a short person from the Andean region and indigenous descent?

I wanted to climb this hill, but Corey said he was too tired. So, instead we got ginger cookies and pandebono (a yummy Colombian bread pastry of which Corey has become very fond), which was just as nice if not nicer.

The one family photo in which there wasn't at least one person making a silly monkey face.

One of the things I was thinking about on our first day in Colombia, in the back of the car with Omar driving and Corey in the front seat, returning from a trip to the mall to get Corey some contacts (yes, one of the first things we did after arriving in a rarely-visited foreign countrywas go to the mall), was that Cali is really just any other city after all. It took me living for a significant period of time in another South American city (a bigger, dirtier one) to get rid of Cali’s symbolic baggage. Quito has the same “pueblo town”quality as Cali—-a significant lack of throbbing, underground culture, the kind that produces yoga classes or art in the streets, the feel that I imagine that Buenos Aires or Bogota might have. Thinking of Cali this way (as similar to other places, as opposed to this wholly unique, unreplaceable spot) is a comfort rather than a downer for me… it makes Cali easier to leave, I guess, if it feels like other places, rather than this unique site. Not to say that there are certain things about Colombia and Cali that are and will be to me simplyirreplaceable, but I'm not going to dwell on that right now, for fear of getting sentimental. After all, people move away from their childhood homes all the time. Just because this has been my home base for the past soon to be 23 years (even when my family was living in Virginia and I was living in Portland, Cali was always argubably, without competition, home), doesn’t mean that leaving has to be, I dunno, a big deal. Oh, well.

Also, as a kind of random aside, here are some recent news updates relevant to Ecuador and the mycorenewal project:

This just happenned in Cuyabeno: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-08/14/content_9288163.htm. I know you read stuff like that in the news every day but it´s different when it actually happens to a place you know. I mean, picture the Willamete and the hooplah that would take place if the spill had happenned there. Makes me sad to see what it looks like, the Aguadulce (Sweetwater) river, when we go back there later this week. Sell your cars, folks.

Also, here is a somewhat hilariously inaccurate (at least to me) article about the mushroom project: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/08/eaecuador208.xml

Mushrooms eat trash!!! No, really!!!!!!