Two weeks in Colombia, and despite the slow start, pollution in town, political turmoils and occasional lack of electricity & hot water, i still love it here! Photos of WEEK 1 and WEEK 2. (about the market here is a version with sound)
I keep discovering new fruits, with new tastes, the diversity of produce is incredible, how comes those never reach Europe or US? Oh and i heard someone speak Guambiano yesterday, one of the main indigenous languages, it sounds so.. strange, almost seems like there are tones like in Chinese, gotta ask about that when I meet more of them this week.
This region was inhabited for a long time, pre 10,ooo years ago, some even pre-Clovis. I keep hearing about ancient cultures i never heard about. I also learned that i am in another putative region for the origin of bamboo, as the largest number of varieties is found in the Cauca valley worldwide (haven't check on that yet, but that's what a German architect told me.. he buys the material here to build bamboo houses worldwide including in Asia). Pre-colombian (in both senses:) societies in the region had a highly developed bamboo culture, one of the many things that got mostly lost with the demographic disaster of the 16th century. Still the vitality of indigenous culture and genes have not disappeared, they can be seen everywhere, just in a different form as before.