My amazing travel partner left ... so i wandered the abandoned streets of Barichara, watching the sun rise and set with the goats for a couple days. It has been really good to be in the mountains, hiking, enjoying the silence, and the company of the random strangers i encounter along the way. Tomorrow i travel to a Santuario de Iguaque, further up in the mountains to spend a couple days in this national park hiking more. Just trying to take in all this nature to hopefully sustain me for a while in the city!

To stay and patiently
peel back the layers
that hug to the core
of a country.
of a loved one.
of ourselves.

MINCA

small farming town in mountains an hour from the carribean coast. A woman in cartagena told us about this little place where she goes to paint. We had our own cabin with kitchen surrounded by mango trees and guadua (similar to bamboo) and we just spent the days hiking to waterfalls and rivers, eating good food, and drinking rum in the evenings with good company.

Rode motorcycles up to a coffee farm an hour from where we were staying and a really nice man showed us around. We met Karen, a spider, who lives in the storage building. She is famous, her offspring are at universities in Bogota and Santa Marta. Fumigation of the land 8-10 years ago to eradicate coca and marijuana plants also nearly eradicated this species of spider. So they are trying to repopulate the area with this native species. The chemicals left in the soil caused the coffee farm to loose their organic license. They are integrating volcanic soil and compost constantly into the soil in hopes of regaining this license in the next few years. And most permanently, there has been an increase of children born with birth defects in the region. Just one example, of so many, of the long term effects of a short term solution.

Cabo de la Vela