In Colombia, life is just a day at the lake

This is chapter 5 in my ongoing description of our adventures in Cali, Colombia.

8:06 a.m. June 22 – This is supposed to be a time of sunshine and warm temperatures, or so say our extremely pleasant handlers. Too bad the weather didn’t agree with them last night as it rained, hard, nearly the whole night long.

The good aspect to that was that the thrumming of the rain on the roof nearly – nearly, I say – muffled the sounds of the music coming from the house next door, sounds that lasted nearly as long as the rain did. Dude likes to party hearty. Just saying.

So I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep. Which meant that 7 a.m. came even earlier than usual, 7 being the time that Adriana – I think that’s how you spell our housekeeper’s name – rings the gong, literally, for breakfast. This morning there were six of us: Megan, Marilyn and I, three of the four Gonzaga faculty; Holly and Mako, the two Seattle U. professors; and Jonathan, Mako’s significant other.

My wife, Mary Pat, the fourth GU representative, slept until just before the bus came to pick us up at 8. Which is typical of her, not being Little Miss Sunshine until nearly noon.

Anyway, we´d been up late the night before, following an afternoon that saw us touring around Cali, checking out the statue of Cali´s founder, Sebastián de Belalcázar, which overlooks the city, and then the Cali Zoo, where we saw everything from lions and tigers and bears to an elderly woman wearing a green shirt with the words “Hot Chick” emblazoned across her chest.

Then, after dinner, we watched the end of the Cali-Baranquilla futbol match, which ended up tied 2-2 but that resulted in the Baranquilla team advancing to the tournament finals, we were told, because of a point differential. Come to think of it, maybe that´s why it rained so hard.

On second though, nah. Life isn’t always a Sylvester Stallone movie.

Our bus (minibus, actually) came, along with three of our handlers – whose names I ultimately will learn, I promise – to take us on a daylong tour of Lago Calima, an artificial body of water that was created, we’re told, 20-some years ago to provide the area with hydroelectric energy.

One of our guides told us about how the lake flooded several settlements of indigenous peoples, including the Calima tribe, all of whom, presumably, were moved somewhere else. This kind of flooding out of towns, of course, is something Washington residents understand well enough, especially those who live near Grand Coulee Dam.

I asked the woman if there were any ghosts around, and she just laughed. But it seemed to me that her laughter betrayed a slight bit of … nervousness?

10:02 a.m. – We´re stopped at a roadside eatery, where they don’t serve coffee – what?!? – but they do serve a delicious kind of pastry, a pan dulce, that we scarf down with no effort. I find a piece of what looks like mystery meat in mine, no pleasant surprise for a vegetarian, but I slip it onto MP’s plate. No harm, no foul.

10:31 – The driver negotiates a narrow road off the main drag down a steep hill toward what we’re told is the restaurant Entre Pájaros y Flores (Between Birds and Flowers). The owner gives us a tour of the property, which she says has been in her family for 80 years. She shows us everything from an ancient phonograph to a pet monkey named Juana (though, apparently, he is male) before accompanying us down the hill to a boat.

That’s when we take a short tour of the lake, getting a lecture on the area history and a few interesting facts from a young woman named Jenny. Problem is, Jenny speaks only Spanish, and with that and the sound of the boat’s engine, it’s hard to understand anything. We do discover, though, that the winds that hit Lago Calima, usually in the afternoon, are supposed to be the strongest in Colombia and – we find this hard to believe – third strongest in the world. Ooooookay.

1:09 p.m. – We’re back at the restaurant, sitting down to a meal that would fill an army of Polish engineers. And it’s delicious, too, even for the two vegetarians in the group, who are served a tasty salad of various vegetables surrounding a pile of potatoes and guacamole. The others have chicken and soup and other stuff that I didn’t bother to study.

2:33 – We reboard the bus, heading around the rest of the lake on our return home. On the way, we make a short stop at the pueblo Calima Dorién where MP pays both to use the bathroom in a bar (for a quarter) and, at another store, for a pair of tennis shoes (less than $10). Her shopping jones quelled, we flag down the bus to make the trip home.

And that’s where we end up, just before 6 p.m., tired and ready to rest. But some of us have to swim, others have to head for more shopping, and still others have to write.

But that’s all finished now. So we wait for the dinner gong.

You think I’m kidding, don’t you? You haven’t met Adriana.