Colombia!

Hola from Villa de Leyva, Colombia!

Since returning from Kenya I had about 10 days home in Fort Collins and a few days in the Colorado mountains, including a powder day at Steamboat that I hadn’t experienced since the 20^th century. The powder was at near waist level and I skied through it like... I'm struggling here.... a wet warm knife through angel food cake (that metaphor is awkward but I’m going with it)? And then the terrain with the waist-deep powder flattened out and I floated through the powder like an anchor floats through the ocean.   

Villa de Leyva, Colombia. It’s a colonial town of just about 10,000 people located right smack dab in the middle of the country at an elevation of more than 7,000 feet and surrounded by taller peaks on all sides.  That means a whole lot of water funnels into this place when it rains, such as 4:00pm every day in February, from what I can tell. The mornings start off with a light layer of Colombian fog that burns off to reveal a beautiful and hilly landscape. I’ve gone on a run on each of my mornings so far, and nothing teaches you about the terrain of a place like running in it. And nothing teaches you about a town’s wanderlust animals like running in it either.  In Lamu, Kenya, it’s donkeys.  In Podgorica, Montenegro I remember a lot of cats. And in Villa de Leyva, it’s lazy and uninterested dogs, dogs that are the anti-Kupar.  Kupar is my dog that I was manipulated into adopting in 2006 by my clever friends Nicole and Sarah, and he is to Colombian dogs what a living hummingbird is to dead hummingbirds: significantly more hyper.

Kupar is pronounced “Cooper” but his name was misspelled a few years ago by a Samburu woman who made him a dog collar with the name beaded on it, and I wanted Kupar to wear it but I didn’t want to confuse him, so I changed the spelling. He’s a great, affectionate, fence-jumping, marathon-running, mix of collie, lab and shepherd.

Kupar the wonder dog has hurdled our six foot fence numerous times, swam to the middle of lakes in pursuit of ducks, hates police officers, and in 2010 was placed on probation for one year by a Fort Collins municipal judge despite my lies that a section of the fence blew over in a recent wind storm and that’s how he got out.  When he was ticketed for dog off-leash and public nuisance, the animal control officer asked for name and weight and I was honestly unsure if he meant me or the dog, and I instinctively gave him my own information and that’s what he wrote on the citation which caused confusion later on with the municipal attorney with whom I met to plea bargain. That's right, plea bargain my dog's various infractions. Not a lot of crime in Fort Collins, and apparently I dont live in a medium-sized municipality as much as I do a gigantic home owner's association. On the citation the animal control office wrote that Kupar was “difficult to capture," and the attorney brought this up in a tone that suggested it would make my negotiation position more difficult.  I was entirely amused by this entire situation, and I wanted to offer the attorney a cigarette so he could blow the smoke directly in my face to express his position of power.  When this whole episode was all over, I left court feeling a new level of pride for Kupar. 

Kupar successfully completed probation and saved me $400.  However, he later cost me $510 when, in a fit of uncontrollable excitement, he jumped through a living room window after failing to realize it wasn’t open, which it often is in the summertime. Kupar doesn't keep track of seasons.

I’m here in central Colombia to participate in a forum about the skills and abilities that conservation leaders will need to address our environmental challenges in the future.  There are about 150 people here from mostly North and South America but there are some polite Brits and a few others representing other parts of the globe.

Of course, the wild card in all of this is trying to predict what the future environmental challenges will be.  Such as alien invasions.  Years ago I took a group of students to Great Sand Dunes National Park in southern Colorado, and we stopped at an alien-viewing platform along the way. The logic seemed to be that the additional 12 feet the platform provided above the ground would be the key to seeing spaceships. Sure, why not.  There must be some threshold at which our eye can or cannot see something, and this platform could conceivably sit at that very threshold. My Aunt Ferne once claimed she saw spaceships in her backyard. An alternate explanation of what she saw might be that her home was under the flight path to the nearby regional airport but I’m not going to question a woman who has played Bridge every week for six decades. Aunt Ferne also fell in a hole once, and my Grandma – Aunt Ferne’s sister – suggested we just shovel dirt over her and call it a funeral (Ferne survived the hole plunge just fine).  My point is that between an alien viewing platform, Aunt Ferne’s sighting, and the lesson I learned  from Sean Hannity to be fearful of anything that is non-white despite a lack of any  actual basis for that fear (I promise  I love you, my conservative friends), pollution to my water by  extra-terrestrial beings is a viable threat.  Could be real, people. Could be real. 

Overall, Colombia seems to be a very civil and beautiful place.  Up until now my paradigm of Colombia was based on the 1984 movie Romancing the Stone and the steady news of the 1980s about Colombian drug cartels.  But I have neither been kidnapped, nor had the opportunity to purchase snow-globes full of cocaine or experience an on-again/off-again romance with Michael Douglas. So my Colombian paradigm is under reconstruction.

Cue that torturous “It’s a Small World” song for this next section.  Here’s the story: It was Day 1 at this conference. I strike up a conversation with David, a fellow attendee who also enjoys sitting in the very back where we can escape the suffocation of being around too many people and also avoid pretending like we’re paying 100% attention to whomever is speaking about whatever it is they’re speaking about, like those suckers have to do in the main part of the room. 

We do the usual introductions and cover where we’re each from, our organizational affiliations, and generate some meaningless conversation about whether or not they’ll have snacks at the break between speakers. We break, I join the crowd around the break area to appear social, return to the back of the main room minutes later from social fatigue, and David returns shortly thereafter, with an odd sense of purpose to his stride.

“Did you climb Cotapaxi in 1999?” he asked loud enough for a few other people to turn around. It sounded more like an accusation than a question.

Cotapaxi is a 19,000 mountain in Ecuador. And I did climb it in 1999.

“We were in the same climbing group. Our guide was Gaspar. I was with two friends. You shared muffins.”

I wanted to ask "What kind of muffins?" just to throw a funny angle at the situation, but was caught up in being simultaneously astounded at David's memory and the fact that 14 years and a life stage later, here we were in a meeting hall in Ville de Leyva, Colombia.  When we spoke earlier and I mentioned I was from Colorado, he said it triggered the memory. Impressive.

He went on to tell me that a photo of us taken during that climb was used in a poster for a guiding company based in Cali, Colombia that according to David, was still on the wall the last time he was there.  He lived in Cali for a number of years as a teacher, and visits annually after marrying a Colombian to visit her family. He said the photo had an amazing sunrise in the background; I remember that sunrise clearly. It was, in fact, amazing. Our group stopped our climb to watch it in silence. I framed my own photo of that sunrise which is sitting in my basement but will be promoted to the main part of the house when I return.  

I had a similar small-world experience in December on my trip to Montenegro-Albania-Greece.  After a full day meeting, I had joined the facilitator, Jon, and some others for an after-meeting drink.  He definitely had something familiar about him, but then again he was British and maybe all British people seem the same to me because they all say “lovely” and “brilliant” a lot.  I hadn’t let on that he seemed familiar. And then I had a moment of clarity and I blurted:

“Were you on a safari to the Masai Mara (Kenya) in summer of 2002 with Adam Henson?”

Any toddler with experience in the game of Twenty Questions knows that an initial question with this much detail in a scenario with a lot of uncertainty is absurd.

“Possibly. I lived in Kenya at that time. It’s a lovely place.”

In the Summer of 2002, I took my first ever trip to Kenya to visit Adam, a former roommate from graduate school who moved there with his wife to work for the Africa Wildlife Foundation.  We did some of the usual touristy things, like a safari to one of the most wildlife-abundant regions of the world, the Masai Mara. Jon worked for another conservation group in Kenya and knew Adam from running around the same conservation circles in Nairobi. He joined us on the four day camping trip to Masai Mara, a trip that opened my eyes widely and piqued my interest hugely.  It was THE experience that led me to pursue my own opportunities to work in Kenya. It’s also the only time I’ve had three alcoholic drinks before 8am, following a free hot air balloon ride in which we saw lions and hovered over part of the wildebeest migration) Now to provide an excuse, the balloon company laid out a sprawling breakfast after the balloon landed, and it included mimosas and bloody mary's that the very hospitable Kenyan servers generously and frequently refilled.  If you were in the Masai Mara at dawn surrounded by widlife after an amazing balloon ride, you'd want to cap that off with a nice drink(s). Kids, that was very bad of me and if I could go back in time, I would eat more french toast in between those drinks. 

So in both of these small world scenarios, I knew exactly one person in a large professional meeting. When I overhear other conversations between people at these events who clearly knew each other beforehand, their dialogues go something like this:

“I haven’t seen you since you successfully bred the red-billed feathery bird back from near extinction.”

or

“We had so little time to talk at the Society for Amazing Conservation People meeting last month.”

Instead, as I have shown, my conversations at these events amount to the time I shared pastries in a sleeping dorm at 17,000+ feet shortly before puking from altitude sickness,  or how buzzed I was shortly after sunrise in one of the greatest ecosystems in the world. That’s all right though. I'm content with my mediocrity in the world of conservation because I think I’ve found my “achievement comfort zone” and it’s not necessarily among my professional peers but among 43 secondary school students in Samburu, Kenya.  If you don’t know about the Samburu Youth Education Fund, that previous sentence will seem like I have again been drinking a lot before breakfast.  

Two more days before heading home and unpacking Spring-like clothes suitable for Villa de Leyva and replacing the duffel bag with Winter mountain clothes (read: SKI GEAR) again.  Newly on the travel radar: today I was invited to Mauritius to contribute to discussions and planning for a new conservation leadership facility. Mauritius.  I had to google it.  I just might go….J