The Arab Place

We’ve taken to eating once a day as we wind down our time in Barichara. Thursday was Arab Day and as remote as this town may seem they have a Mediterranean restaurant. “We want to go to the Arab place,” we told our tuk tuk driver; because we did. 

Layne was less enthusiastic about this lunch but even though it was overpriced I liked the food.

It was half open air dining and we had the place to ourselves. I saw a dog water bowl so I assume it is Rusty friendly but it was a hot morning and he had been reluctant to go so we left him at the campground. Apparently he howled a little and he was glad to see us when we got back but I did miss him. 

We got refreshing mint and hibiscus drinks to start, tart with ginger and that was worth a non alcoholic buzz. 

Layne checked out the dried fruit and spice emporium before the appetizers arrived, lamb dolmas and falafels:   

We shared a lamb stew called “tagine” in Morocco which comes in a hot clay pot. 

Mark from the campground had a selection of vegetarian appetizers, olives in a spicy sauce, eggplant stew and labneh which is soft cheese made from twice strained yoghurt and has a dry goats cheese type flavor but much richer. 

The piece de resistance was a dessert of pistachio baklava with a honey sauce. Mark said the coffee is also middle eastern rather grainy and made with cardamom so we skipped it despite my curiosity. 

At $55 for us two it was rather more pricy than we expected but I suppose the surprise of having access to Middle Eastern food in middle Colombia made the expedition a success. 

It is a beautifully designed and curated space. 

At the top of the town. 

A Goodbye Lunch

We have postponed our departure till Monday but it turns out the Englishman volunteering to work on the farm is leaving today, Thursday. 

Starting Saturday Greg will be living at a new hotel on the coast and working to open a fine dining restaurant at that hotel. He is excited to be going and Layne has enjoyed very much cooking with him here at Guaimaro campsite. I will miss his wicked sense of humor and his knowledge of Colombia. But in any case we gave him a send off.

Our recent lunch at Hostal Nomad had intrigued him and he wanted to try the unusual mussels in a blue cheese sauce that we had at this French restaurant.

Oh and the classic beef bourguignon: 

Layne and I were ready to go back and even the new arrivals  at the campground were ready to join us. Indeed there are four vehicles here now and another overlander expected soon.

The German couple are not terribly sociable and I can’t even tell you their names but they declined the offer to join us do our party in the end totaled nine which prompted me to suggest to the Organizer maybe we should call ahead to warn them. Layne later told me I had a good idea. Well done me! Not only that, but by calling ahead Layne managed to stop a hint einderibgbof they might have crème brûlée for dessert…and quite by chance they did!

By one thirty yesterday afternoon, Wednesday, Layne had called in everyone’s order to the restaurant so service by the time we got there was instantaneous.

There just remained the small matter of rounding up a fleet of tuk tuks to get us there. The Bajaj three wheelers built in India are a common taxi seen all over the world. They are rugged, loud and overworked so your ride may be bumpy underpowered or screaming fast when they fly downhill in neutral to save gas. 40mph in a tuk tuk feels like flying.  

We got four of them and off we set to the bemusement of passers-by watching our convoy rolling down the hills. Hostal Nomad is in an eccentric location down in the valley away from town and in a dirt road a kilometer from the pavement. 

Rusty was not dining but he was not getting left behind even though he struggles to get used to the bounciness and noise of the three wheelers. 

The ride cost 20,000 pesos ($5US) per vehicle and the drivers promised to be back when we were done. 

I was keeping an eye on Rusty coping pretty well with the three Hostal dogs and Alex the New Zealander came over to check out the scene. The dogs settled down in a matter of minutes and we went in to lunch. 

Mark the inventor from Massachusetts. He is familiar with this place as he knows everyone around Barichara. 

Layne the organizer was making sure we got rides home as there isn’t much traffic down here deep in the valley on a dirt road. 

Rusty found his spot of course and made not a sound as usual. The other dogs disappeared off into the shade somewhere and were not seen again. 

Alex the New Zealander volunteering on the farm, Liz in a van from British Colombia, Miriam and Patrick (beard and cap) in a Sprinter from Switzerland, Remy, Liz’s husband and then Mark sitting next to Layne dealing with her crème brûlée: 

The owner was not on the premises yesterday, Flo the Frenchman but he served us on Tuesday. 

Layne and I had the mussels in blue cheese sauce that inspired our second visit. We also had the beef:

And the apple crisp that Liz and Greg tried and enjoyed on Wednesday. 

On Wednesday we had a charcuterie platter: 

And shared a quiche and salad with some white wine which seemed quite decadent. That all with two crème brûlées and coffee came to $38 US including tip. 

Yes it was decadent and having my boy next to me made it even better. 

Flo’s staff took good care of us and the prices can be translated into US dollars by dividing by 4,000. As in Mexico the symbol we identify as the dollar sign means Colombian pesos here (COP on official rates of exchange). Squach is Nono alcoholic squash(!) that is fruit juice mixed with mineral water: 

Rusty and I walked the driveway back to the campground and took off for a short walk to settle lunch. Then he napped and I went back to “Love in the Time of Cholera.” 

Peace and quiet descended on the campground as we digested our lunch.

The Road Ahead

We are leaving Barichara on Friday and we have forced the issue by making a doctor appointment in the town of San Gil. The owner of the campground had an upset stomach cured rapidly by a visit so we figured a check up after the bug (identified accurately I thought by one reader as novovirus) swept the campground. Medical care in Colombia is not eye wateringly expensive. A fellow traveler told us they had an MRI in a private clinic for $50.  In any event we have to be in San Gil Friday afternoon so Rusty will be bitterly disappointed that we must leave.

We arrived at Guaimaro March 1st so two weeks in one spot measures the enjoyment we have had sitting here baking in the shade and chilling under blankets at night. Layne found good company with a fellow chef, Greg from England and they have worked together on recipes for his restaurant planned to open soon on the coast of Colombia. Lacking traveling neighbors we have found people to share ideas with here at the campground and that has been lovely. Greg on the left, Alex from New Zealand on the right at one of our communal dinners in the kitchen. 

Julia and Joep (“Yup”) from The Netherlands, owners and builders of the campground over the past 14 years. 

Mark from Massachusetts, a thinker and builder and anti-technology mechanic who understands the value of simplicity. It’s his second visit here and he’s learning to fill a niche in Barichara. 

He’s learning to build human powered agricultural machines like this corn husker. The locals have done it by hand forever but Mark is learning to build machines that can make tedious hard work easier with technology easily accessible like bicycle parts. It really is lateral thinking genius. 

The basic application can be used to do any rotary task with leg power instead of arm effort and faces light up when the tool is explained to big armed locals. 

The prototype went to its new home and Mark is working on version number two with his new partner in town. I walked around Barichara one afternoon and on every street someone popped out and greeted him like they’d known him for years. He is full of surprises and I suspect Massachusett’s loss might soon be Barichara’s gain. 

Holidays and weekends are the curse of the retired classes as they say and up next to haunt us: Semana Santa. Holy Week is a blow out time across Latin America and even though this is our first one in South America we’ve seen the ravages several times before. Stripped of its religious connotations the week before Easter the holiday is a ten day stretch of family vacation time. 

Typically accommodations fill up, even campgrounds become zoos and all the tourist facilities, national parks, wilderness, water parks and so forth get unbearably busy. It’s a time for people like us to reflect the amazing privilege of a life of endless vacation. 

The other side of the coin is that we usually try to hide up somewhere remote not least to relieve Rusty of the anxiety of day and night long firework festivals. This year we have rented an air b and b apartment between the towns of Mongui and Sagamosa at ten thousand feet altitude.

The idea is to be off the roads during the rowdy time but also to start trying to acclimate to high altitude. The fact is our future is filled with very high mountain driving and we are flat landers. We are going to spend ten days before the apartment rental touring various places of interest around Villa de Leyva and Tunja and Aquitaina and after the Easter break we will be going to the capital city of Bogotá which lies at 8600 feet. And get this: among the capital cities to come 8600 feet is practically sea level by comparison. 

The more time we spend in South America, and we’ve only been here a month, the more planning we try to do, the more vast this undertaking becomes. We want to be out of Colombia in a couple of months and our route is to follow the PanAmerican Highway to Quito the capital of Ecuador at 9400 feet. 

The road south of Cali to the border with Ecuador has its dangers and I’m not one to hype danger. The PanAmerican has suffered many landslides and enormous roadwork between Popayan and Pasto. Our traveler app iOverlander is full of warnings about unfriendly locals. Wild camping is out of the question for us.

A couple wild camping a couple of months ago were woken up and robbed at gunpoint off the highway in a field. We are doing our research and using common sense and hoping we can convoy with any other travelers passing through here. But it makes you think.

So we then move to Ecuador, the country that sits astride the Equator and they have been in a state of emergency for a couple of months as the government tries to sweep up the gangs and cartels  and restore order in the heavy handed and effective manner of the job recently completed in El Salvador where we felt completely safe and welcomed. The coastal areas of Ecuador where the drugs are transported are said to be the most dangerous so once again we will stick to the main highway in daylight and camp only in secure guarded areas. It takes some planning.

I think of South America and I think of ostriches and llamas and Incas and astonishing mountains and canyons. I think this drive to Ushuaia will feel like an accomplishment hard to relate once we return to the ease and simplicity and fun of wild camping in the US and not having to think in two or three languages.  

And yet, had we not come here we’d  never have seen soap nuts which we use in the washing machine here at the campground. Peel the shells and toss them in like nature’s detergent. Weird but true. 

We make no pretense of being pioneers or of being adventurers seeking out back road wilderness. Just driving the main road around here seems excitement enough. I hope the van holds well at altitude, that our brake renewals serve us as they should and that when things go wrong we shall continue to keep our heads and find the lessons to be learned in the experiences. 

Were we to drive in a straight line we would have 6,000 miles to go just to reach the end of the continent. It does seem a long way from here. I can hardly wait to see what we will find, but fortunately Layne knows how to put the brakes on so we shall see more than road signs flashing by.