Finca Margarita
This morning I woke up peaceful in my tent on the mountainside grounds of the Hotel Colonia. Sounds of a river far below and birds in the trees above. I didn’t want to leave the beauty of these mountains behind after only two nights, but the day before I had committed to volunteer at a permaculture farm called either Finca Margarita or Love Grows Eden, a few hours farther up the coast. My hope was that this might be a place I could stay a while, and my resistance to leaving was maybe made less by the fact that the farm would probably be in similar environs, being in these same mountains, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.
So after making a pot of tea on my campstove, I packed up camp and hauled my bags a few hundred feet to the hotel terrace. Had a good breakfast there, huevos pericos and fresh-made arepas, chocolate caliente. Set off down the mountain by ten, plodding slow steps on the rutted road. Thirty minutes later, I was on the main street of Minca, my shirt sweated through, with a half hour before the next jeep left for the city. Time to stock up on a few items for the farm, and buy another papa rellena from the cute freckled girl from Bucaramanga. She told me to come back and see her, and I said I would. But when in my life would I ever be back in this little mountain town, not on the way to anywhere?
Rode down in the back of a jeep with two interesting humans: a Dutch punk backpacker who hates tourist places and guidebooks and only travels by a big fold-out topographical map, and a Panamanian girl who works at a biodiversity museum in Panama City. They’d met a month ago, and were traveling Colombia together for a couple weeks. He said he doesn’t even research things online, just picks the next place by the names of the towns and the rivers and mountains nearby. I could relate to this desire to get off the gringo trail, but he was full of the necessary youth and piss and vinegar to get him through all the crappy places, and despite everything, here he was in the same place as me. They were both friendly, we talked the whole way and the hour ride felt like a few minutes.
We landed in the swarming street outside the Santa Marta market, and within five minutes I’d found a bus to Palomino. Five minutes later I was on the road with a young blonde long-haired Austrian dude sitting next to me. A guy way into hiking, traveling with three friends he seemed a little tired of. They were going to Parque Nacional Tayrona, a beautiful coastal reserve that was apparently overrun by tourists, with all the trails turned to mud slop by rain and too many feet. I’d heard it described as a music festival without the music. He’d heard the same, but was going anyway. Didn’t want to miss out. After almost five months on the road, the desire just to find a good place easily bested any concerns of missing anything.
They got off after an hour, and as they melted into a multitude of backpackers at the entrance to Tayrona I was so glad to be carrying on. Outside of the park were endless banana plantations, more banana trees than I’d seen in my whole life put together, and some farms of papayas and palms. The road was close to the sea, and every so often it would appear to my left, turquoise in the distance but a muddy gray-blue closer to shore. In Palomino I switched to a colectivo taxi, packed in between a Colombian family of five, and got off in the little village of Rio Ancho, just a couple streets of run-down cement constructions along the highway. I was approached right away by William, a soft spoken man with piercing blue eyes, the moto driver Russell had recommended. The farm was above the village, either a two-hour walk or a thirty minute moto ride.
He said with my bags we’d need two motos for a total of forty thousand pesos. Russell had told me not to pay more than fifteen — and this was the guy who supposedly was not going to rip me off. Sigh. An exhausting and constant part of the traveling life, being seen as a walking ATM machine. I dug in my heels and started bargaining. Tried to convince him we only needed one bike, but he wasn’t having it, though after a few minutes we’d settled on twenty-five thousand. He recruited a younger moto driver, loaded my two packs onto the back of that bike, and I hopped on the back of his, clutching my food bag close to my chest and holding on to his shoulders.
Right at the edge of town we turned off onto a dirt road, and very quickly it was just a track, barely a road, sand and rocks and hard-packed clay. There was something about the terrain, the boulders, the color of the grass, the rugged mountains rising from the plain. This was a magical valley, one of those enchanted corners of the earth.
We rode through a couple streams, up and down, past many cows grazing, then into these light green charmingly pointed hills, over and down into valleys of thick jungle. Each range of hills were a little higher than the last, and at about the third of these we suddenly stopped by a little gate with a sign half-obscured by bushes that said “Love Grows” and they dropped me off there. William gave me extensive directions that I couldn’t understand in his breathy costeño accent. But I got the part that meant “go straight, all the way, no turns” and I strapped on my penance of materialistic over-packing and entered the gate and they motored back down the dirt road.
I walked down a steep hill along a single-file path cut into tall grass, across a creek shaded by thick foliage, then up an even steeper hill. Everything here was damp and fertile. Past a couple of neighbor’s farms, then into this little narrow green valley, a variety of thatched roof huts under palm trees, said to myself, “This must be the place.” That combination of words always triggers in me the chipper keyboard intro from the Talking Heads song, and I was humming this to myself as I walked through the farm…home, is where I want to be…
It was getting on dusk. There was a big open-aired hammock house with some people napping, a couple little huts with clay brick walls, and then I found myself at the center of the farm, a kitchen kiosk, open walls, palapa palm roof, about ten friendly faces welcoming me with holas, a black and brown dog and a tiny one of the same color jumping up and licking me.
I introduced myself as Gabriel, the new guy, promptly forgot all their names but liked them right away. I asked if Russ was around, and they said he’d gone to the city for a few days. I wanted to sit right down but needed to set up my tent before dark. Asked for advice on where to set up, and they gave me a few suggestions. I wandered around the farm looking for a good secluded flat place, and settled on a spot of soft and sandy ground underneath a grand pacay, what they call in English the ice-cream bean tree, forty feet from the river.
By the time I was set up and back at the kitchen house it was dark, and people were starting on dinner. Apparently there was word that I was an excellent chef. Oh no. I’m sure I said something in my email about cooking, when I was hoping to get accepted for a volunteer spot, but I never would have said I was a chef. Either way, they were asking for advice, and I immediately got involved. Two soft-spoken, immediately likable guys: Laurie, a Brit, and Jonah, a Belgian, were on dinner duty, making pupusas from scratch. I asked if they had cabbage, carrots and vinegar, and they did, so I said I’d make a curtido, the Salvadoran cabbage salad. Two minutes later I was chopping away, and had found my place.
What joy to walk into this kind group of humans: cooking food together, sitting around a long table talking and drawing and making crafty things. And how strange to see ten humans and not one cell phone! No service will do that. Meanwhile I boiled a pot of tea, and served ten little cups of mate. This is one of my ways of making friends. I realized quickly that these guys didn’t actually know how to make pupusas. We had to figure out how they are constructed — how to fill them with cheese or beans and then close them up without all the filling coming out. Perhaps somehow subconsciously I had picked it up watching all those Salvadoran ladies make them on the street, but on my first attempt I figured out if not the way, a way to do it. You make kind of a bowl out of the masa, fill it up about a third of the way, close it up into a ball, then smush it down flat. We made about forty of these, and several other people joined into the fun.
There was a two-burner stove powered by propane and a wood stove grill in the center of the room. We got some good coals going, and then put a baking sheet pan over top of that, where we grilled pupusas. The heat was uneven, so we’d take turns sweating over the very hot fireplace, constantly rotating them. This was a humble, rustic affair, one light over the table, dirt floor, cats and chickens jumping up on the countertops to steal food if it was unoccupied for a moment. The sink was a short walk away, and fed by a pipe coming from the river. I asked at some point what they do for drinking water, and they said they just drink from the tap. From the river?! I asked, and they said, yeah, we’ve all been doing it and no one’s gotten sick. Eden indeed.
We made some damn decent pupusas, and the twelve of us sat down at the long table and ate as much food as we could. A stellar group of humans — I felt right at home with them. It seemed like any one of them could be my friends. Usually at a whole hostel I might only feel that way about a handful of people.
After dinner a few of them gave me a rundown of how the place works. Every day is the same: breakfast at 7, we work from eight to twelve, swimming in the river to wash off, lunch at 1, most days a permaculture class after that, the rest of the afternoon free. Five days a week of work, you pick your days.
None of the family that owned the farm was around: Russ was in Santa Marta, Sandrine, his wife, and Lili, their daughter, are in France for a few months. But there is enough of a community here, and a system, that the place can basically run itself. No one has been here for more than three weeks, and most for less than one, but everyone seems to know what they need to do. Sounded like most people have their own creative projects they work on, and I’d noticed that almost everyone was doing little bits of work and improvements the whole time.
After dinner, they were sitting down to play rummy, and I said I had a better game than that. Taught a group how to play cribbage: Sorrel, a sassy red-haired young British lad and his kind earthy girlfriend Esme; Jonah the guy I’d cooked with, Jan, the veteran here at almost three weeks, a cook from the Netherlands who lives in Finland, and Jeremy, a French engineer. Jan made some kind of dessert from oatmeal and hot chocolate, and a good time was had by all. Everyone was in bed by 9:30, except for the cats, prowling around the kitchen to lick every surface, and me, savoring the sounds of the jungle night.
I settled into my tent a little while later and have been writing by the solar lamp my brother gave me; the first time I’ve used it on my trip. Gives me great pleasure to know that this is where I will be for awhile, that I shouldn’t have to move my tent for at least two weeks.
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My first night sleeping at the farm brought vivid dreams. At first I was with some guys from middle school who I hadn’t thought about in a long time. They didn’t know who I was and I was trying to explain it to them, but they disbelieved I was the same person. The next thing I remember they were putting on white face-paint and robes and coming after me, saying “you’re not Gabe!” And then I was with my friend Miki from New Orleans, and she was giving me a tour of her painting show even though in real life she’s a ceramist, and her paintings were really good, one especially a Madonna-like self-portrait with a young boy. I woke up thinking I needed to inform her that she was a great painter, but it would be a week before I could send an email.
That morning I was awake before the bell-ringing that marks breakfast, where everyone gathers sleepily in the kitchen house. The porridge was burnt and a bit gummy, and the black tea I made with boiled river water was strangely salty. I didn’t really want to eat at this hour, but I went with the program. By eight o’clock everyone was out on various work crews, and I was paired up with Sorrel.
We were splitting big bamboo logs into quarters lengthwise, then cutting these rough-hewn planks to size and nailing them into a frame on the side of a new house. This bamboo made a frame that would be filled in with a mixture of red clay, straw and sand. In our morning shift we were able to complete the outside of the front of the house — the frame is two sided so it can support the mud walls. We’d pick out a bamboo log and then split it with an axe — a solid hit in the center would split it in a line all the way down. Sorrel reminded me of a younger version of myself, passionate and headstrong. His instinct was to follow his gut and then figure how to fix the mistakes later; mine by this point is much more of a talk-it-out before you start.
Another group was filling in the clay-straw walls on the front of the house, gathering handfuls of bright red mud and slapping it into place. They were filthy and clay-stained and there was a good friendly work vibe. Jan, long-haired kind-faced Dutch guy, played us Jimi Hendrix on a little speaker from his phone. The time sprinted by and just as I was getting going on my first day working in five months, everybody was packing up the tools and our workday was done.
The next step in a standard day here was a walk down to the swimming hole, a lovely little spot just below my campsite. Thirty feet long and at most three and a half feet deep, clear cool water coming down from the big mountains in the distance. Everyone stripped down to their underwear and lazed about, soaking and half-swimming, sitting on rocks and talking. Really quite an idyllic scene. For lunch, Sorrel and Esme made lentil curry, cabbage with turmeric and a huge quantity of rice. Before a meal, when the food is ready and we are all sitting around the table, someone takes the “gong” — a pot-lid struck with a metal spoon — and hits it three times. Then we all wait, silently, until the fourth gong, when the meal can commence.
I took a long nap in my tent in the afternoon, tired after strange dreams and morning manual labor, and when I woke up again I was hot and groggy. Walking up the hill to the kitchen house, I ran into Russell, the owner of the farm, who had just come back tired from his trip to Santa Marta on buses and moto taxis bearing thick woven plastic sacks full of all manner of grains and vegetables. Didn’t know what to make of him. Tall and lanky with long hair, salt and pepper beard, probably about my age, he had a certain sadness hanging about him and I couldn’t tell if he was just awkward with new people or didn’t particularly like me. We talked about the farm and getting here, the billing he’d given me as an “excellent chef”.
Dinner was amazing, falafel and cucumber salad and shredded beets and cabbage, made by Jonah and his red-haired quiet sweet girlfriend Haune, who are the other campers right now, their tent pitched high up on the hill above the kitchen. Jan contributed several batches of pita bread he cooked in pans over a woodfire. What a reality we are living in. All the food is vegetarian and fresh made from scratch, there’s no alcohol — not by rule, it just isn’t part of the social scene — and the only sporadic cellphone service to be found is by walking fifteen minutes up a small mountain.
There’s no electricity outside the kitchen, and so most people hang around after dinner for the only available light and entertainment, that is, what we create for ourselves. That night we played this murder mystery kind of game called “The Wolves” and I was one of them and had to try to deny it while me and the other wolves kept killing villagers each “night”. They suspected me and about halfway through the game voted to kill me off, which felt weird but was also something of a relief — I could stop lying to my new friends.
That night I dreamed I was in Venezuela, and involved with some weird political event where I had to give speeches about how great the current regime was. One of my favorite baseball players, Pablo Sandoval, was there, and was pressuring me to go along with it. I slept all the way until the morning bell.
After breakfast, which appears to be consistently porridge with local tree fruits, some kind of tropical pear and starfruit, everyone left except for me and Russell. Laurie and Rachel for good, the rest for the day trip to Mingueo, one town east, or a weekend in Palomino. Russell was dealing with some kind of allergic reaction and not feeling well, so he wasn’t up for working. This meant that yesterday’s work crew of twelve was down to one — me.
I carried on with the bamboo framing, cutting and nailing smaller pieces of bamboo, small enough that I could hold them in place to nail. No fun work crew, no Jimi Hendrix to inspire me. After my lonely day’s work was done, I took a much-needed swim, and then started making my first lunch, and my first attempt to live up to my culinary billing. Cooked a big mess of lentil soup — onions, carrots, peppers, green beans, tomatoes and garlic — and as usual, it amazed me how good lentil soup turns out to be. It always seems like when I’m making it that there should be something more — that it needs something — but it doesn’t.
Russell and I ate around two, a late lunch, and I asked him a lot of questions about the place and the Kogi people who live in the vicinity, about his wife and daughter. They’d been traveling around South America for awhile and decided they were ready to settle down, find a place to start a permaculture farm. After seeing a lot of different places, they discovered this area and Russell knew it was where he wanted to live. Sandrine, his French wife, didn’t like living in the jungle very much, and was spending more and more time away. The biting flies that had already ravaged my ankles and led me to begin wearing long pants and socks and shoes at all times, despite the heat, apparently cause her problems, too. Russell said they don’t bother him.
All of this land had once been part of a much larger cattle ranch, all the way from the main road to the foot of the mountains, which was called Finca Margarita. The whole ranch had been pretty much deforested, and that was one of Russell’s main projects, to plant trees. He also told me that ten years ago we couldn’t have been here, that these mountains had been occupied by paramilitary and narcotraficantes.
After lunch we walked up to the banana fields, where they are also growing piña and cacao and coffee. He taught me how to properly use a machete to cut back the weeds — you’ve got to get low and swing parallel to the ground. He talked about how having a small farm is not profitable and his vision of this becoming a real permaculture school. At present he teaches an introduction to permaculture, six hour and a half lessons. We looked for things to harvest and ended up with a big bunch of green plantain and an armful of oblong yellow cacao fruits.
Much of my day since has been sitting in the kitchen, the center of the farm universe, defending the place from the constant onslaught of chickens; cats taking turns sitting on my lap, Russell coming and going every so often to grab something, sharpen the machete, drink water. He would seem to be something of a brooder, and has been cutting grass with a machete for the better part of the afternoon.
Two indigenous boys emerged from the jungle a while ago. They wear these long beige-white frock-like clothes, black hair cut to their shoulders, and came into the kitchen house to charge their portable battery, which they use to power a laptop and phone. It’s amazing, these kids don’t even wear pants, and I’m pretty sure they don’t have electricity at their village, but they have devices, and they come here to charge them, maybe get some food. Basilio and Manuel were their names, and they seemed to be about eight or ten years old.
Manuel, the younger one, saw me writing and came over to get a closer look. Sabes como escribir? he asked — you know how to write? — and the question and the earnestness with which he asked it were eye-opening. A world where being able to write is something noteworthy and fascinating. He asked if he could see, and I showed him some pages of writing and then Basilio wanted to see, too, and asked what I was writing about, how long it takes, what does this say? pointing to a line. It was tender, two worlds meeting. They left their battery charging, said ciao and walked down to swim in the river.
It feels like some change has occurred in my journey. I happened to arrive here on the winter solstice, and this seems like an auspicious time for change, renewal, consciousness. The third season of my travels. It is technically winter here, but what that means in Colombia I’m not sure. Dry season perhaps, though in this jungle it feels anything but dry. It may well be the equivalent of summer. Russell told me that the indigenous people of Colombia call these mountains “the heart of the world”, and though he couldn’t tell me exactly what that means, it feels clear that I’ve come to a spiritually charged part of the earth.
