secret tours in Colombia

My Colombia guidebook doesn't mention the 'secret tours' of San Agustin, but I found out on my first day that it was possible to visit a real-life cocaine factory as a tourist.  I'm sure the official tourist office wouldn't advertise them, but there were some local tour guides who had an arrangement with the grandmother who ran a family cocaine-processing plant to take tourists along and watch the proceedings.

I learnt this from another tourist - in fact he first told me about his tour a few hours before it started, and I suggested that he take care, not take any valuables with him, etc.  It sounded very dodgy to me. But he emailed later that evening to tell me he was safe and well and that the tour had been fascinating. We found ourselves on the same archaeological jeep tour the next day so he told me all about it, from the leaves being brought in, through the stage where the brown residue (the crack cocaine) is thrown away - apparently this family don't want to sell crack as it takes too many young lives - to the pure white powder at the end.  Amazingly, he was even allowed to take photos.

At first my reaction was that I wanted to do the tour, it sounded fascinating but more than that I suppose was a kind of glamour at seeing first-hand something that is highly illegal.  But then I thought more about it, about the fact that you have to pay to do the tour, that the payment helps to support the industry, and perhaps more than anything for me the fact that tourists going along and taking photos somehow adds legitimacy to the whole industry.  I have nothing at all against Andean peasants chewing coca leaves to stay awake longer, seems no different to me from London businessmen drinking wine to relax.  It has been a part of the local culture in the Andes for centuries and seems to do no harm.  Indeed I have no problem with anyone taking any drug as long as it doesn't make them a danger, or a nuisance, to others.  But cocaine makes people aggressive, is highly addictive, and the whole industry to produce it has led to low-level guerilla warfare for decades in Colombia with many associated deaths and millions having been forced from their homes.  So, reluctantly I admit, I decided not to seek out one of the guides offering secret tours
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the historical sites of southern Colombia

Following work in Ecuador last month over two public holidays, I had accumulated enough compensatory leave to fly to Colombia a week before my assignment here so as to visit a couple of archaeological sites in the south.

Tierradentro is known for its underground tombs, carved out of the rock and painted in mostly geometric designs in white, red and black.  Some also have carvings on the pillars, such as in the photo above.  There are 162 such tombs, dated to between 600 and 900AD, built by an unknown people who have since disappeared.  Many have been looted, but the small local museum displays some of the pots found in them, pots which mostly contained bone fragments of the deceased.  Apparently the dead were buried twice, firstly as a complete corpse, and then when decomposed they were removed from the tomb and cremated, and the remains re-buried in these pots.

Visiting the tombs was quite hard work, as you enter via a stone spiral staircase, the steps some two feet deep and the walls in many cases curving inwards - my thigh muscles felt like jelly after hauling myself up and down many of these steps.  There is a lot of walking, too, with groups of tombs in various locations in the mountains around the little village. The scenery is beautiful though, with lush greenery, fruit trees everywhere (orange, guava and passion fruit especially), and orchids dripping from the trees. I would very happily have spent a second day there just to walk the trails a second time.

Unbelievably my private two-bedded room with modern ensuite bathroom (with hot water), next to the museum, cost me only $7 a night, and large glasses of freshly squeezed fruit juices were $1.

But I couldn't delay as I also wanted to get to San Agustin, where the tombs were not in themselves impressive but were guarded by great carved stone statues, some 300 of them over a large area.  Large enough for me to take a jeep tour one day (for the sites over 20km away from the town) and a horse-riding tour another day (for a round trip of some 12km or so to four other sites).  I also spent an entire day wandering around the main archaeological park.

The statues are generally of human-like figures but with jaguar teeth and various other fantastical features.  They were mostly carved between 300 and 800AD.  No-one is sure exactly what they represented; maybe demons or some other kind of supernatural figures.  Originally they were coloured - in red, black and yellow - but only a handful now retain their colour.  Some have also been eroded by the elements.  The majority, however, look as though they were made in the last few days with their clear, sharp lines.

Besides the human(ish) figures were carvings of frogs and alligators, and one of an eagle holding a snake in its beak and talons.

Again, the landscapes around the place were beautiful.  I enjoyed walking out in the fresh air, along country lanes and forest trails, up hills and down into river valleys, and past fields of coffee plants.  And of course, in the country that contains nearly 20% of the world's bird species, I was surrounded by birds: parakeets, tanagers, woodpeckers, swallow-tailed kites, and the surprising sight of several groups of Colombian chachalacas lumbering through the tree tops.

crossing the isthmus from the Pacific to the Atlantic

The Panama Canal celebrated its 100 year anniversary last August, something I would have written about only I was in Nicaragua at the time so it rather passed me by.  But last weekend I finally got around to doing the ocean-to-ocean transit, taking the tourist boat Pacific Queen from the harbour on Flamenco Island on the Amador Causeway (the Pacific end) to the port of Cristobal on the Atlantic (Caribbean) coast.  Or at least, that was the plan.

We were all picked up from our various homes/hotels to join the boat, and set off at about 07:30, passing under the Bridge of the Americas into the canal.  A pilot from the canal company had already boarded our boat by this time as no-one, no matter how experienced, is allowed to pilot their own boat through the canal.  We passed the Port of Balboa, with its massive cranes lifting containers on and off the ships that dock here - as much cargo crossing the isthmus is actually carried next to the canal by train rather than through it by ship - and from there arrived at the first of the two sets of locks that one has to pass through in order to rise to 26 metres above sea level.

There was a guided commentary on the boat, and they explained that the canal could not just cross the isthmus at sea level, saving the time, money and lost lives of building three sets of locks in total, because the tidal range of the Pacific is much greater than that of the Atlantic (the former being around 7 metres and the latter only 70cm), and high tides occur at different times on the two sides, and the result of building straight through would have been massively strong currents in the canal that would have prevented safe navigation.

The first locks are at Miraflores, where there is also a landside visitor centre that I must get to one day, and after those the second set, Pedro Miguel Locks.  From there we passed under the Centennial Bridge which carries the Pan-American Highway into the city, and then through the Gaillard Cut, where the canal cuts across the continental divide.  This took us to Gatun Lake, a large area that was flooded when the canal was built; small islands dotting the lake are really the tops of submerged hills.

Finally after Gatun Lake we arrived at the Gatun Locks.  This is the final set, and takes the boats down 26m in three steps.  Here are some of the tourists on my boat photographing our approach into the locks:

and here - well it wouldn't have been right to take photos of injured people lying on the floor in pain - is the front of the boat just a minute or so later - where it clearly should not have been:

We had swung round - I later was told because an engine failed but some passengers said that a crew member on our boat failed to catch a rope that was thrown to him from the lock side - and the back of the boat had crashed into the lock wall, followed by a gentler crash as the front of the boat, shown here, bounced back into the opposite wall.

Many people fell, and there were a number of shocked and injured passengers. The old grey-haired chap at the bottom of the first photo, who had been perched on the seat next to me, was lying motionless on the deck, clearly in a lot of pain, and we feared he had broken his shoulder.  No help came from the crew so fellow passengers tried to help the injured on my deck as best they could.  It seems the crew had been busy downstairs where there were head wounds and neck injuries to deal with.  Finally they made an announcement that we could not complete the canal transit but would have to be towed back to the nearby docks on the lakeside where ambulances were already waiting and buses would (eventually) take the rest of us back to Panama City.

So it was rather more of an eventful day than I had anticipated, not to mention considerably cheaper as the tour company refunded half of our money.  Maybe I'll wait until the new wider canal opens in 2016 before I make another attempt to go right the way through to the Atlantic side.

camping in the sand

The other part of my holiday in Oman - the part I enjoyed the most - was the time spent out in the desert.  If you've read posts from my louiseinsenegal blog on my various trips to deserts, or heard me talk about earlier trips to Mauritania, northern Mali and Sudan, you will know how much I love the desert.  You can't describe its beauty and you can't photograph it, as it encompasses the vastness, the emptiness and the silence as well as the shapes and colours of the dunes and shadows. However I think the photo above, taken at sunrise on 31 December, captures some of that.

I walked about on the dunes, I watched the occasional bird (brown-necked ravens and desert wheatears, mostly), we drove to places where there were camels and beduin encampments, and whilst in the Wahiba Sands we also drove to the coast where we watched fishing boats and gulls and camped on the beach for two nights.  It was lovely to go to sleep with the sound of the waves breaking onto the beach,

My favourite times though were in the Empty Quarter.  This is the largest sand desert in the world, covering 650,000 km sq, and sitting atop a dune watching the sunrise or sunset you really do feel a million miles away from work and the pressures of the modern world.  This picture of our New Year's Eve camp gives some idea of how remote it was.

the Sultanate of Oman

You know you've had a great holiday when you can't let it go after arriving home.  Five days after getting back to Panama, I am sitting here with a coffee flavoured with cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and ginger, and I have a small dish of dates beside me to nibble on.  If my luggage weren't still somewhere en route for home, I would also be burning some of the frankincense I bought in Salalah.

My eleven days in Oman covered a mixture of culture, nature, and what I suppose you would call 'adventure travel' when we camped in the remote desert, first in the Wahiba Sands and then for two nights in the Empty Quarter.

The culture began in Muscat with the modern era - a visit to the rather beautiful Sultan Al Qaboos Mosque, one of the largest in the Gulf, able to hold up to 20,000 worshippers.  Whilst Muscat is in many ways a modern city, it also has plenty of visible history, being surrounded by watchtowers and forts mostly dating from the century of Portuguese rule.  The twin forts of Al Mirani and Al Jilali are the biggest in the city although not open to the public as they are now used by the police and military. Outside of Muscat we saw the forts at Nahal (above), Bahla (UNESCO-listed and the second largest mud building in the world behind the mosque in Djenne see my post on mud marvels of Mali), Nizwa, and Jabrin.  The latter, built around 1670, was nothing to look at from the outside but its warren of rooms contained many remarkably preserved painted wooden ceilings - not easy to capture in a photo but here left is an attempt to show part of one.

Some of the watchtowers out in the countryside were built to guard the falaj water channels - an ancient irrigation system (also UNESCO-listed) which distriutes water from a few springs along many miles to support habitation and cultivation.  Our final UNESCO site was actually a group of archaelogical sites linked to the ancient frankincense trade.  All three (Shisr, Sumhuram and Al Baleed) are now in an advanced state of ruin, but their historical significance is important given that the frankincense trade routes stretched, 2,000 years ago, from China to the Mediterranean.  Sumhuram was said to have been one of the Queen of Sheba's palaces.  The region of Dhofar, around Salalah in the south of Oman, is still known for its quality frankincense although the trade now looks a little different from how it must have been in medieval times.

transiting Qatar

I had a few hours in transit in Qatar, enough to allow me to go into Doha.  Sadly it was on a Tuesday, when the famous Islamic Art Museum is closed, but I was able to find a bus to take me to Souq Wafiq, with its stalls, coffee shops and restaurants.

I indulged in a pot of Earl Grey tea (no alcohol here!) and an apple-flavoured shisha, then wandered around fairly aimlessly, happy just to soak up the atmosphere and gain a general impression of the place, until I heard the cheeping of birds up ahead.  I had found the pet section of the souq.  Aside from a few rabbits and puppies, this was all about exotic birds.  In one way the selection on display was really impressive, with birds ranging from African grey parrots, through Australian galahs and cockatoos to South American macaws and toucans.  I was able to hold or stroke several birds and it was lovely to see them all - and all seemed to be in good condition.  However at the same time it made be said: they should not be there, they should be flying free in the jungles they come from!

Some of the birds should legally not have been there, both the toco toucan and the white-breasted toucan being listed in the Convention on the Trade in International Species as among those birds in which international trade is prohibited.  It was sad to hear the latter species of toucan (pictured right) calling from the cages, having so recently heard that same call from the trees in the botanical gardens of Georgetown.

African greys, although endangered, can be legally exported by two countries (Cameroon and the DRC), although up to a total of only 8,000 a year.  This small souq alone had hundreds if not thousands of these birds (I counted 60 African greys in one small shop alone) and the research shows that the limit of 8,000 is not respected.  It reminded me of my flight in a cargo plane within the DRC, with crates of these birds on their way to Kinshasa [see my blog post from September 2011], now I know where they might have been headed for.

I asked how much a macaw would cost, and it was the Qatari riyal equivalent of around $25,000 - thus this photo shows $125k-worth of stock: