C olombia today
C olombia today constantly goes back and forth in time. On a recent trip, I landed high up in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the spectacular snowcapped mountain range that falls straight into the Caribbean, and found myself sitting cross-legged with Kogi Indians who live as they did 500 years ago, in a cluster of thatched huts two days’ walk down to the sea. They have always felt at one with nature, but now they say the seasons no longer come when they are supposed to, and it’s hard to know when to plant. After listening to their shamans, I felt they could actually hear the earth breathe. A few days later, at El Cielo restaurant in Bogotá, I was enveloped in nitrogen dry-ice vapours while chocolate syrup was poured over my hands, followed by sugar sprinkles. The maître d’, who was dressed in jodhpurs and reminded me of a dominatrix, told me that I could lick it off or rinse in the white finger bowl presented for my “chocoterapia” – step three in an eight-step fusion menu produced by a team of chefs, all under 30 (some even in their teens) and who dress in what look like hazmat suits. The stainless-steel and Italian marble kitchen is called “the laboratory”. In Cartagena I stayed in a gorgeous private villa with an enclosed jungle garden open to the sky. At breakfast, one of two resident toucans nudged my ankle with his colourful beak, looking for a hand-out. Doesn’t everyone find a toucan under her table? Colombia happens to be the second most biodiverse country in the world after Brazil, and its proximity to both the Atlantic and the Pacific, four mountain ranges and vast plains, as well as thousands of kilometres of rainforest, exerts a powerful hold. In his Bogotá studio, for example, artist Pedro Ruiz showed me his latest paintings of giant red poppies, some with a tiny, illicit crop-eradication plane flying across the canvas trailing a long tail of smoke. He paints in the tradition of magical realism most famously propagated in books by Colombia’s literary maestro, Gabriel García Márquez. Ruiz often depicts a solitary black man holding a pole at the head of a canoe. The canoe’s cargo might be thousands of cascading butterflies or dozens of species of native birds – exotic bounty that is meant to portray the fading collective memory of millions of people who have been displaced from a traditional way of life. Yet after decades of violence and negative publicity, today Colombia is thriving; 4,000 hotel rooms are currently under construction. To someone like me, who has been in and out 42 departures-international.com
of the country for years, the energy is palpable. Colombia feels totally on the verge – yet for so long, whenever I told people I was on my way there, the only thing they ever wanted to know was if I would be safe. My journey to the country began more than four decades ago as a Peace Corps volunteer in Medellín, the “city of eternal spring”, before it was awash in cocaine. It was then that I rode on horseback across rivers, spotting parrots and monkeys in the trees; that I learned to dance the cumbia and the paso doble; that I was introduced to all classes of the country’s vibrant people, as regional in their dialect and cuisine as, say, Italy. Such a strong experience early in life obviously leaves an indelible mark. Colombia captured my heart then and has long kept me in its grip, even when I despaired of its drug wars, its social inequality and its bloodthirstiness. How could such a warm and polite people also kidnap and murder with such impunity? Nevertheless, despite suffering nearly half a century of guerrilla warfare and more recent natural disasters due to climate change, Colombians still rank as one of the three happiest populations on Earth, according to the New Economics Foundation’s Happy Planet Index, together with Costa Rica and Vietnam. And today I do feel safe, although I take the same precautions I would in any new environment, avoiding areas where government presence is weak and drugs still hold much sway. I go several times a year now to oversee a foundation I established in 2005 to teach English and leadership skills and provide laptop computers to underprivileged children. It’s an outgrowth of the school I helped build as a volunteer in the mountains above Medellín, which was named for me: Escuela Marina Orth. The Marina Orth Foundation began during the mayoralty of Sergio Fajardo, a dynamic PhD in mathematics who made education of the poor and public design to benefit social good hallmarks of his administration. He is now the governor of Antioquia, of which a transformed Medellín is the capital. Fajardo’s term also coincided with a drastic reduction in crime and an increase in security championed by former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe, who left office in 2010. Uribe’s successor was President Juan Manuel Santos, a former defence and finance minister who recently announced peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and has launched major initiatives to promote international business and tourism, including hosting the Inter-American Summit last spring in Cartagena with 20 heads of state, among them President Obama and Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff. “It blew everyone out of the water to see how well Colombia was able to pull it off,” says Laura Botelho, Marriott Hotels’ head of public relations for the Caribbean and Latin America. Marriott is currently building two new hotels in Cartagena and Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city. I was at the summit, too, and thought, “What a great time for a ten- Colombia is the second most biodiverse country on the planet. There are 1,800 species of birds alone, including the toucan. Opposite: the Hotel Sofitel Santa Clara, located in a former convent in Cartagena
