Sunday 9 July 2023

At 0400 hrs a taxi picked us up for the normal 90 minute trip to Marseille Airport, which at that time was just on an hour. Marseille is one of the world’s not very good airports: old, dirty,  packed with people and with poor facilities such as lounges. However in a couple of hours we were airborne, flying over the food bowl of Europe towards Paris. It always intrigues me the amount of crops and other produce that is produced all over France.

Landing in Paris, we headed for the lounge before boarding our Air France flight to Lima, Peru. Now Air France is a funny one, owned by the same company as KLM, however the standard of service and upkeep of the cabin is normally much higher on KLM than Air France. Hence it was a pleasant surprise when we boarded the new Air France Boeing 777-300 with a really great crew, smiling as they went about their work, providing great service and delivering excellent food, which made for a very comfortable twelve and a half hour flight. The good thing about modern planes is they have great ground and forward facing cameras on them. As we lost altitude over Peru I turned on the ground camera witnessing some spectacular scenery in places where switchback roads made their way to the tops of steep hills, which then opened out onto green valley floors. As we came into land at Lima I switched to the front camera. I was surprised to see that the invader huts (people that came down from the hills) that used to be prominent on the side of the runway had all gone.

The journey through immigration was reasonably quick, a driver awaited us on the other side for what was a relatively straight-forward trip to our hotel in the Miraflores area.

It has been 10 years since I was last here and the improvements in the city are remarkable. Apart from the new road from the airport to town, there are no beggars walking down the streets with scruffy pieces of cardboard asking for money. They must have shipped them to Auckland, NZ. The streets are now clean, there has been a reduction in coiled razor wire on walls and fences.

We spent the evening relaxing with Sylvia doing some pre-reads for her meetings tomorrow.

Monday 10 July 2023.

After a night of not much sleep we headed down to breakfast. Soon we were joined by Ludo, the cluster manager for Royal Canin (Peru, Columbia, Puerto Rico and Chile). Sylvia headed off to have some one and one meetings while I caught up with Ludo and Nicolai.

After breakfast I took a walk down to the cliff-top waterfront area, which was like taking a walk down memory lane. My friends AJ and Michelle were here with me all those years ago and we had a great look around Lima, visiting the old Mayan ruins and many other places. Back then (2013) there was a guy on a yellow and green parapont with a motor on it that made his way back and forth along the sky above the foreshore. I saw what looked like the same machine still going for it.

The day was quite clagged in (I am not sure whether it was fog or smog) but as I wandered around the mist cleared to the extent that I could see the aerials on the peninsula to the south of the city that was once a fortress. I wandered south along the cliff-top to where a motorway cuts up the valley, heading inland, and then wandered north to where another motorway heads inland through a valley and there is a large statue of a couple making out at Love Park.

Just before noon I headed back to the hotel. Looking out the window towards the buildings next door, I was thinking to myself, I wish these guys would clean the windows so I could take a photo, then carried on getting our stuff together. The next time I looked out the window I was a bit surprised to see a man hanging on a couple of ropes cleaning the window, a practice I remember they banned in Hong Kong some years ago, after a woman reached out the window and cut the rope with some poor guy hanging below somewhere. Anyway, windows cleaned I was able to get a photo of the gaggle of buildings next door.

I headed down to the foyer and met Sylvia and the crew (Ludo, Nicolai and Monica). We hopped in a van and headed across town to a restaurant at the Hyatt Hotel where we enjoyed a nice lunch of octopus and shrimp before heading to the airport.

It was late in the evening when we touched down in Bogota, where we headed to the Marriott Courtyard hotel, ready for an early start in the morning.

Tuesday 11 July 2023

Ludo picked us up at 6:15am and off we went, back to the airport, boarding a 737-800 for the 60-minute flight to Medellin. On arrival we were met by some of the Royal Canin crew, ready to pounce on Sylvia and race her off to a whole lot of meetings. Meanwhile, Juan Carlos, one of the Royal Canin team, had organised a guide and driver for me. Diana, the guide, led me through the carpark to a Chevy SUV and Carolina, the driver, sped us off to Santa Elena. This is an area in the hills on the outskirts of Medellin that is renown for its flower growing, which dates back some six+ generations.

On arrival at one of the grower’s houses, we were treated to a sweet tea made from sugar cane and the herb citron before being escorted on a tour of the property by the owner dressed in his traditional attire.

Every year, at the beginning of August, in Medellin, they have a large festival where five hundred and twenty locals from the Santa Elena area parade 2 miles through the streets carrying large floral displays on wooden frames on their backs, some of them weighing up to 100kgs. It is only the people from the Santa Elena area that can enter this procession and the tradition stems back to the early days of the Spanish, when the Basque people, who originally moved here as gold-miners, used to carry people over the hills on a chair-like frame on their back. Each participant receives $500 from the government and the displays are judged in five categories. The winners of each category receive $5,000 and become cultural ambassadors for the country.

The tour over, we headed back down the hill towards the airport and then through Latin America’s longest road tunnel, at about 8.5kms, to the city of Medellin. This tunnel had smiley face speed signs that went to a sad face if you went too slow. Once the most crime-ridden city in South America, Medellin is now relatively peaceful with a metropolitan population of about 4 million, basically stacked into a valley with buildings and housing now making their way up the side of the hills. The city has become very popular with digital nomads. Both Diana and Carolina take great pride in their city, consistently extolling its virtues and telling me how nowadays many people have moved there from all over Colombia, many working remotely, with the demand pushing the price of accommodation up.

 

Our first stop was a large monument built in memory of all those killed by Pablo Escobar. This site was where Escobar had his eight-storey house-come-headquarters, which housed his family, his art collection and a whole lot of security people. After his death the government literally blew the bloody thing up (Diana showed me a video on you-tube of the explosion). Constructed on the site is a large dark granite monument, which has on one side the 250 bombings that Escobar organised between 1984 and 1993 and on the other side, 46,612 holes to represent the people that they believe Escobar was responsible for the deaths of.

From there we headed into the centre of town to the Alambique restaurant, with its eclectic collection displayed on the walls. We were seated at a table and not provided with a menu as such, but more of a book covering all the different options to eat and drink in the place. Wanting to try some local stuff I asked Diana to order for me. The first thing that turned up was some Canasticas de bunuelos, a shrimp cocktail served in a deep fried basket thingy. Next arrived Cazuela de sobrebarriga, corn chips with pulled beef, cheese, and a few other tasty things.  The last course was Calentado de Ursula, which was a corn fritter with rice, octopus and shrimp, nicely presented in a coconut bowl. By that stage I was over-full and couldn’t eat it all.

 

Lunch over we headed up to the north end of town to the cable car station. This is quite unique as the cable car links up to the metro and is used for public transport. Like most large South American cities, Medellin has its share of Barrios Bajos (slum areas). In the seventies and eighties, during the major times of trouble in Colombia, many people were forced off their land through conflicts and acts of terrorism and migrated to the city.  Arriving with nothing they scrounged begged and stole materials to build themselves accommodation. A lot of the buildings are literally stuck to the side of steep hills. Originally with few roads and only paths carved into the hill to access these areas, no water or sewage people suffered many hardships just to survive. Gradually over the years the local government has supplied infrastructure such as water, sewage and electricity to a lot of these homes but access to factories and other places of work from these remote locations remains extremely difficult. In 2004 a cable car system was installed to service this area and link it to the central metro system.

We mounted the cable car, headed to the top of one hill where there is a station, down into a valley and up to the top of another hill where we dismounted and had a look around before making the return journey. The trip was really quite impressive covering 14 kms and giving one a good understanding of just how vast these once-slum areas are.

The cable car ride over, we mounted the Chevy and drove through some steep but narrow streets to Conuna 13 (District 13). In Colombia all cities are divided into six classes, 1 being the poorest areas and 6 being the most wealthy. Conuna 13 is in the category 1. Illegal structures were first developed here in 1978 and over time more and more structures have been somehow established on the hillside. Diana introduced me to a lady called Milena, who is part of a trust that does all sorts of things to assist people in the area. Milena took us on a walk through part of the town and explained to me how her mother, Socorroco, had been one of the founders of the area. In the late 90’s and early 2,000’s there were a number of military operations conducted in the area to try and clean out criminals and terrorists that were occupying some of the buildings.

During a massive gunfight on the 21st May 2002 a couple of children had been seriously injured by stray bullets.  Socorroco grabbed a white bedsheet and walked out into the middle of the gunfight holding it above her head. Other women in the neighbourhood saw this and did the same thing and the shooting stopped and the children were taken to hospital. It was at this point that the people started to stand up against the crime and the shooting and there was only ne more military operation that took place in the area on 16 October 2002. Socorroco now runs a charity where people in need can go and receive food and medical treatment. There is lots of graffiti style art in the area depicting various scenes relating to the days of the trouble and lots of art for sale. The local community even got together with the authorities and organised the construction of a number of escalators to help get older and disabled people up to their houses. We took the escalators down to the bottom of town and wandered through some busy narrow streets where Milena introduced me to her mother, who presented me with a little white flag printed with the words ‘Mujeres al Poder’ (Women of Power).

Carolina then picked us up and we drove south through the town and up onto the hillside into an area 6 where the Pullman hotel where we were staying for the night was situated.  That evening I was privileged to be invited to dinner at a local Japanese restaurant with the Royal Canin Colombian team.

A big thanks to Ludo, Tomas and the Colombian team for a great time in Medellin.

Wednesday 12 July 2023

Sylvia was up bright and early and off for some breakfast meetings while I headed to the gym to endeavour to remove some of last night’s dinner. At 9:30 I met Sylvia and her team in the foyer. I showed the white flag I had been given yesterday to Sylvia as it was in the outside pocket of my suitcase. Sylvia immediately confiscated it and gave it to Diana, one of her team here, who has recently battled cancer.

Leaving the Royal Canin team to it we jumped in a taxi and headed to the airport for the next leg of this journey. The first leg was a one-hour flight to Panama City, followed about 3-hours later by another one-hour flight to San Jose in Costa Rica. In hindsight, they were the easy legs. The next part of the journey was four hours sitting in the back of an SUV, two of which were spent mostly stationary in a traffic jam. It was around 11pm when we arrived at the Nayara Springs resort near the Arenal Volcano. After checking in at reception we climbed in an electric buggy and were driven up a steep cobbled pathway to villa 9 where we will spend the next four nights.

Thursday 13 July 2023 – Nayara Springs

After a bit of a sleep in we got up to have a look around  the not-so-little villa in daylight. Not only does it have a large four-poster bed and rather classy chandelier but out through the ranch slider is a  crystal clear thermally heated private plunge pool, surrounded by thick jungle including red lipstick palms, creating a really stunning atmosphere. It was mid-morning when we wandered down to Mis Amores for breakfast. Looking out across the jungle canopy to one side and an outdoor area leading to pool, complete with sunken bar on the other side, this is a very tranquil and relaxing atmosphere to enjoy a leisurely and tasty brunch.

We then wandered down to the reception area to organise our activities for the next couple of days then meandered along some of the cobbled paths encased on either side by thick jungle plants. Apart from a visit to the local gift shop and the gym we had a relaxing afternoon, including a massage at the local spa.

Friday 14 July 2023 – Nayara Springs

We were down at reception by 6am to meet our guide, Pablo, and driver, Juan Carlos, for our tour to the Canó Negro wildlife refuge. We headed east for about 40kms passing through little villages and towns in an area that is largely crops of pineapple, sugar cane and cassava. Eventually we hit Corredor Norte (Highway 35), which took us in a northwesterly direction towards Nicaragua. Not far from the border we turned down a pot-holed side road for the final journey to Canó Negro on the Rio Frio.

It was on this bumpy road that we stopped to look at a large flock of egrets, wood stork, jacana, tiger heron and even a roseate spoonbill feeding in a large body of water, which was also occupied by a number of caiman. I picked up the camera to take a photograph only to realise that the battery was completely flat so I will have to in advance apologise for the quality of the photos for this leg of the journey as I had to resort to the i-Phone, not great for taking pictures of wildlife.

Not far down the road we came to the Canó Negro and mounted a boat and began our cruise down the river. A table, complete with table cloth was set up on the front of the boat and our breakfast laid out for us to enjoy as we drifted down the river. We hadn’t gone very far when we came across a Tamandua (type of tree climbing ant-eater) high up in one of the trees.  Next there was a bunch of white faced capucin monkeys. Pablo was explaining that these monkeys will even eat iguanas if they can catch them and next thing a large green iguana launched itself off the tree, almost resembling a bomb as it sped towards the water, rather taking its chance with the caiman than these aggressive little monkeys.

A little further along a Nicaraguan sliding turtle perched on a log in the middle of the water, and then lived up to its name, sliding off into the water. We could hear Howler monkeys in the distance and above us in the tree spider monkeys hung from their tails as they fed on the leaves. Next we pulled up alongside a tree growing in the water, to see eight little long-nosed bats, which blended perfectly into the colour of the bark on the tree, only given away because they were on a dark patch.

An emerald basilisk sat on a twig by the river bank hiding from more capucin monkeys in the trees above. Pablo told us that the capucin, when the water level gets low and there are a lot of caiman around, will run to the water and dip their tails in, then run away and sip the water from their tails to avoid being eaten.

We continued to cruise down the river, passing many troops of each of the three species of monkey in the area. We also spotted a two-toed sloth asleep high in one of the trees.  Right before we turned around to head back we saw a howler monkey with some unusual orange markings. Pablo explained that there are a few in this area that even have completely orange babies. They are unsure if this is a genetic mutation due to inbreeding or exposure to pesticides but the orange babies seem to have a shorter than usual lifespan. Arriving back where we started Pablo spotted a great potoo high in a tree. This bird could easily be mistaken for part of the tree.

On the journey back to the resort we took a bit more notice of the farming activity in the area which included large orange plantations and cow farms stocking I think the originally Indian humpback cow. There is a very efficient sort of fencing around here where they use two different types of trees for fencing, one the quick-stick and the other called immortal mountain. Both these you can just grab a stick and stick it in the ground and it will grow. The sticks are planted in straight lines and wires stuck on and the trees grow, some into quite big trees and others are trimmed back.

At one small village we pulled over and saw a couple of sloths in the trees right by the main road, one wth a very tiny baby. The Costa Rican people value the sloths and they have adapted to live close to human habitation.

Arriving at the nearby village of La Fortuna we visited a local restaurant for a very tasty lunch. On the short drive back to Nayara Springs, the volcano that had been covered in clouds since we arrived appeared.

The local coffee machine.

After a bit of rest back in the room, Blanco arrived in a buggy and took us for a tour around the complex. Consisting of three separate areas, Nayara Springs for adults only, Nayara Gardens, the largest, original resort catering for families and at the top of the hill Nayara Tented Camp, the newest area. As we headed across the Toucan bridge near the spa, Blanco pointed out another two-toed sloth on the move. I was quite impressed with the speed – even with quite a large baby on board she was able to move quite steadily up the tree and along, always hanging on the underside of the branches.

After observing the sloth we headed up the hill to an area with a number of thermally heated hot mineral pools, which can only really be portrayed (and then not well) in the photos. At the top of the hill is the Alto restaurant and reception area for the Tented Camp, not that these are really tents. With its stunning views over the canopy to the volcano, infinity pool complete with sunken bar and large restaurant with a swing bridge leading off it this certainly looked like a good place to hang out.

Heading back to our room,  we stopped at a garden area and glasshouse with hives for the tiny (almost mosquito-sized) native non-stinging bee.

Saturday 14 July 2023 – Nayara Springs

At 7am we strolled down to the restaurant for breakfast. Mist hung around the volcano and there was the odd spot of rain. At 8am we wandered down to the reception area to meet our guide only to find that today’s adventure didn’t start until 9 so we took the opportunity to relax and wait. The driver and guide showed up just before 9 and we hopped in the van and headed west through some very lush farmland mainly cattle, passing lots of resorts and tourist venues, and eventually crossing over the Laguna de Arenal dam. We stopped just down the road as a couple of three-toed sloths had been spotted in the trees. The first was hidden amongst the branches and vines, with only its eyes and nose visible, and the second, round the other side, was the baby of the first one and with its arms wrapped around a branch looked more like a ball of fluff than anything else as it was fast asleep. In most cases when you see these animals they seem to be stationary and asleep although we did see the one yesterday with a baby wrapped around its body climbing the underside of a branch with surprising speed, reaching out and hooking its claw into the bark as it gracefully swung underneath the branch.

Turning off at the end of the earth dam (made using lava rocks from the volcano) we headed up the hill to Mystic Hanging Bridges, which is basically a well-set up tourist walk through the jungle. Our guide Damzon turned out to be a gushing fountain of information – a tap that could have been turned down a little bit. But as we strolled along the concrete paths he gave us the full run down on every plant, insect and the odd bird we saw along the way and a lot of other information in relation to symbiosis, bio medicines and much more. But to his credit, he was bloody good at spotting hard-to-find things, like the strawberry blue jeans poison dart frog. The many insects, amphibians and other small animals we saw can best be seen in the photographs.

Stingless native bee hive

Leaf-eater ants at work

The path wound its way up the hill to the first of six suspension bridges, the highest of which was about 45m above the gulley floor. Sylvia struggled a little with the first few of these but by the time we got to the sixth one she was almost comfortable. There was a restriction of a maximum of 15 people on any one bridge at any time and a person stationed at each bridge to control the flow of people. The whole trail was about 4.5km long and we exited and enjoyed a picnic lunch at a table overlooking the valley below.

 

 

 

 

On returning to the resort we tried some famous Costa Rican coffee at the cafe above reception but unfortunately it didn’t rate very highly with us. Returning to our room we sat in the crystal-clear outside pool, which is supplied by hot water from the local thermal springs.

Later in the afternoon we wandered up to the Lapas bar situated by the pool at the Tented Camp on top of the hill, where we enjoyed a drink while chatting to some of the other guests before heading for a massage at the local spa.