Iglesia Nuestra Senora del Carmen

No story here, but Josh flexed his photography muscles on this devastatingly beautiful candy cane cathedral, and I thoght I would share. If you ever get the chance to visit Bogota, don’t miss Nuestra Senora del Carmen.

 

 

 

 

 

Bogota on Election Day

We were both nervous and excited to be in the Colombian capital on the presidential Election Day. Let me break it down for you:

  1. The progressive candidate was Petro. He campaigned by kissing babies and the elderly, using rainbow fonts and flags, wearing jeans and a button down, and generally appealing to the common man. We saw a pro-Petro rally in the streets and people lining up to hear him speak. The people chanted “Petro, amigo, la gente está contigo”, (translation: Petro, friend, the people are with you!), and “Peeeeeetroooo” in a call and response manner in the streets.
  2. The conservative candidates were Duque and Lleras. Street art contended that these two candidates were two faces of the same coin, and a continuation of the status quo in Colombia. The current presidency was associated with police corruption, (including a police-run prostitution ring where the prostitutes were also police), murdering homeless people and dressing them up like FARC rebels to meet military quotas, budget skimming, and general exploitation of the people. Duque campaigned by wearing suits, posing with wealthy older people with light skin color, focusing on symbols of strength and power, and talking critically of compromise with the FARC. It was widely believed that electing him would risk the progress made that had ended the civil war.
  3. Colombia is dry on election day and it was impossible to get alcohol before or during the time that the polls were open. The locals think it’s nuts that we sell alcohol on election day in the US.

The elections went to a second round with the top 2 candidates, Petro and Duque.

Duque won.

We’ll see what that means for Colombia and the peace treaty as time goes on.

 

This reads: Two sides of the same coin. Only a change in skin.

Snorkeling Doctor’s Cave

Jamaica abounds with expensive, private beaches full fancy, rich people at resorts. We didn’t go to one of those. The alternative was local beaches, where even locals warned us not to go. We didn’t go to one of those, either. Doctor’s Cave was somewhere in the middle. Here, we were able to pay a small fee to gain entrance to the beach and leave our things in the sand so we could snorkel without worrying about whether or not they would walk away. The beach was nice but the snorkeling was unfortunately unremarkable. Climate change and overfishing have decimated the Jamaican reef and turned it into a bleached, algae-covered mess. Still, we managed to see a few neat fish and corals, and at least the water was warm.
When I flip you flip we flip.

 

Urchins. Beautiful, painful, sometimes destructive.

 

Bleached corals.

 

Here fishy fishy…

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Observations on Schools in Jamaica

One local told us:

“Parents will go without, but Jamaicans take great pride in getting their children to school every day in a crisp, clean uniform”.

From what we saw, that was largely true. 

The streets felt safest just before and after school time, when parents were shuttling their uniformed children to class and older children walked in groups. We took advantage of this time to walk around and explore the city and feel just a little more secure.

 

 

Schools were also beautifully decorated and generally well kept.

 

This schoolyard was decorated with inspirational Jamaicans throughout history.

 

We also had the privilege of seeing Usain Bolt’s school, where the track around the field was interestingly dirt. Unfortunately we didn’t get a photograph.

The Greenwood Great House

On Christmas of 1831, a man named Sam Sharpe lead a slave rebellion that spread throughout Jamaica. Plantation owners fled and most of the great plantation houses were looted and burned to the ground. Only a very few great houses were not destroyed, and Greenwood was one of them.

Greenwood Great House

 

Why were some plantations spared? It is said that if a house survived the rebellion, it is because the owners were kind to their slaves. Greenwood Great House was the estate of Hersey Barrett, who was one of the only plantation owners in Jamaica known to educate his slaves. He reportedly gave them rest, good healthcare, and treated them kindly. The fact that his house remains to this day with the original furniture, books, maps, and treasures in tact may be proof of that.

 

The house had magnificent jungle-like gardens.

 

The man who owns this collection is black. I wonder what it must be like for a black man to own a whip that was once used to discipline slaves? I couldn’t imagine living in a house where this hangs on the wall.

 

This is a man trap. It would be laid between the bushes and camouflaged with branches in pathways that were likely to be used if a slave tried to escape. If triggered, it partially or entirely removed his or her foot.

 

A courtship couch, meant to preserve chastity between a girl and her suitor. Those Victorians really had some funny ideas about propriety.

 

Many of the Great House’s musical instruments still played, like this Polyphone. You can enjoy a bit of the music below.

It glows! Swimming in a Bioluminescent Bay in Jamaica

I vividly remember the first time I learned about bioluminescent bays. I was sitting in the second row in Biodiversity 21 at Duke, and professor Paul Manos described the tiny dinoflagellate organisms that get so pissed off when agitated that they glow a blue-green color. (Okay, that’s an anthropomorphism. But the concept is still there.) The point is I remember thinking “Wow. That’s something I need to see before I die”.

I couldn’t believe my luck when a year later I won a grant to do research in Puerto Rico, near one of the 5 major bays in the world where this happens. And then science happened, and we were busy chasing lizards and discovering new weevil species, and I never got to go.

It would be another 8 years before I would be near another bioluminescent bay again, this time in Jamaica, and I was absolutely NOT going to miss this opportunity a second time.

Fortunately, our Airbnb had a local hookup and got us in touch with someone with a boat, who brought us out to the middle of glistening waters bay.

 

 

As we moved away from the dock, the motor of the boat caused a blue avatar wake behind us. Fish darted away from the bow in front of us, each of them drawing an illuminated streak across the black water. It was a lot like watching for shooting stars, except they were every foot or so, and in the down direction. The boat driver anchored us at the darkest possible part of the bay, far from the lights of he town, and we climbed down the ladder and slid into the warm, mucky-bottomed water for a swim. Everywhere we kicked and splashed lit up like broken glow sticks in a cotton candy blue. If you stood still, you could almost be invisible. But the moment you moved it blew your cover.

We played like kids and it was magnificent.

 

 

These bays are in danger from pollution, storms, and global warming. Hurricane Maria damaged the one in Puerto Rico and it’s unclear whether it will recover. If you have the means, I urge you to go see this phenomenon sooner, rather than later. It is one of the coolest things we’ve seen in this world.