Cultivare

• Country: Colombia
• Location: Anapoima
• Date: 19/09/24
• Duration: 13 Days
• Company: My adopted Colobian Family
• Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

My third work away in a rural town called Anapoima about 3 hours bus from Bogota working at a sustainable retreat. After my two weeks in Bogota I was excited to escape the hustle, noise and pollution of the city and return to the small town life I’d become accustomed to in travel like San Carlos and San Rafael, where the locals look at you with a sense of curiosity and bemusement about you’re presence so far from the Gringo Trail. Although a lot of the locals carry a machete strapped to their waist the small towns are some of the safest travel in Colombia, are the initial confusion the locals are lovely and they don’t try and rip you off because you’re a gringo like in the cities. The owners of the retreat, Natalia and Eyal ( who was away while I was there) built all the majestic but delicate looking structures from scratch out of Guadua ( the larger brother of Bamboo). The work was largely cultivating and maintaining the land like raking leaves, picking and juicing Mandarins and landscaping to make space for new structures. I enjoyed the structure provided here, waking up with the sun, lunch and siesta at 12 and finishing off work with a beer at the tienda with Papa. During my stay in Anapoima it hadn’t rained for a few months and so the rivers were dry and there was a water shortage. The Bogota river being way too polluted to even consider drinking from and the water companies that normally pump water up to the more rural regions not doing much to help. It highlighted to me how reliant these towns are on the natural weather systems to sustain their livelihood and how vulnerable they are against changing climates.