In the Zone Cafetera of beautiful Colombia, the hills are fertile and support fine quality coffee, bamboo for building, eucalyptus for paper and plantains for food. But in the main town of the region, Armenia, lots of people earn a living from selling mobile phone minutes  to those with no access to a phone and middle aged men in smart trousers sit by typewriters in the street waiting for someone who needs a form filling or help with a letter. This is the only place we have experienced aggressive beggars, thin dark men who shout at you but can be pacified if you buy them a bread roll from the bakery. The wealth of the natural resources here including oil and coal (which Britain buys) benefits  the so called developed countries.  The coffee profits do not flow back into this town, or the small villages on the hills around where the residents decorate their houses in a riot of colour. The real money goes to Germany where there are no coffee plants but the beans are processed.

We have been very lucky here because we met Nestor, a leading Colombian environmentalist, who is an old friend of Jim from Wakefield. He generously took us around his lovely district including taking us on hike into a cloud forest, where we saw hummingbirds and I had to cross not one but 5 shaky wooden bridges over a mountain river. By coincidence he was going for a week nearby to the next city on our list, Medellin. He and his partner Xalli, a journalist and artist,  invited us to their country house, an idyll in the hills, and drove us to see the  lakes and sights of this relatively rich area where hydro electricity, car and clothing manufacture support  a higher standard of living for some. But in Colombia 60% of the population are classified as poor and 42% as very poor.

A 170 years ago the area around Armenia was rain forest and is still an area of remarkable beauty and biodiversity. But Nestor is part of the fight to prevent a broad swathe being turned over to gold production, a disaster for the environment not only in the short term. The concessions to mine for gold have been sold by the government already to a multinational based in London and the USA . Can you imagine the Lake Distict mountains being sold to a gold mining company. The water and soil will be contaminated for decades if not longer once the mining stops. Moreover, only 12% of the gold can be called ‘essential’ required for the building of modern appliances and machines eg the I phone ; the rest is for jewellery.

Nestor and Xalli are both passionately concerned with the future of those mountains and of  their country as a whole. Nestor  has also been a witness to an international tribunal investigating the forced removal of forrest peoples by para militaries working for multinationals who then grab the land and clear it for bio fuels and other cash crops.Food for cars and not for people, as Xalli says. Nestor saw this happen himself and says when he told others about it, for a long time afterwards, he could not prevent his own tears.

We are now finishing our trip in a very different place, the Caribbean coast of Colombia,where it is hot, the rainy season has started and we have found a hostale with a pool. Oh dear.

Believe it or not we are looking forward to coming back to cold, dark and damp England.

So this is the last post! Thank you again to GVN who have enabled this blog. Reflecting back, we both say the volunteer experience was the most memorable and interesting part of it all.

We promise to print just a very few of all the photos…

We trekked through the rain forest, assailed by the threat of poisonous snakes, lethal frogs and red termites, tarantulas and spiny trees, breathing the hot humid air and shadowed by the canopy, unable to see through the thick vegetation on either side if there were hostile tribes or jaguars prowling. In fact, we were being safely led by a local guide down a track – not a path, we did have to scramble over fallen trees and avoid the mud and the  vines –  and learning about the hazards and the marvels of Amazonia. Our eco lodge was by a tributary river, in a large protected reserve in Ecuador, where the company can only rent the site and has to use local skills and staff.  I thought I was very brave when after being shown the tarantula large enough to eat a small bird on the thatched roof of our communal hut, I found another spider, luckily not with hairy legs, in our little bathroom. I only gave out a small scream.

The whole experience was wonderful. The guides were brought up in the jungle and were full of knowledge and enthusisam for this threatened ‘ green sea’. At night we stood in the dark, torches off, and listened to the symphony of insect and amphibian life calling for their mates. Any one leaf might have 2 or 3 different insects on it. As we learnt, the significance  of bio diversity lies in this amazing variety of life. Scientific opinion is that the full range of species has not yet been seen, and moreover, never will be. We saw the tinest orchid ever discovered, hardly bigger than a blade of grass, the vine which produces poison for hunting but only if you know how to boil it down, the plants you can eat if you get lost. The Amazon is under constant threat as we know, not only from the oil industry but because once the roads have been cut for oil other industries follow, rubber, cattle, crops, cosmetic industry plantations. We saw the diffference as we came by bus to the edge of the reserve, travelling through ‘secondary forest’ which has partly  grown back but is ragged  and scarred by the industry and by new settlements.

The reserve is primary forest, full of life and not just the small type. We saw 3 of the 10 species of monkey, fished for piranhas – there is a photo to prove even I caught one – saw some of  the 500 species of birds early in the mornings,  including striped toucans, saw alligators lying in wait for their prey in the river at night and a rare sight, an anaconda with its belly extended enormously. You could see the bulge lying in shallow water and a few inches away its small head just above the water. It only eats every 6 months and perhaps had a whole wild pig in there.

The butterflies and moths delighted  us too. Everywhere in all sizes, many of them huge, and brilliantly striped and patterned, they wove all through the air around us. One special one has wings of iridescent blue and stitches the air without stopping, so you can never see it clearly or photograph it, just catch its flashes of colour as it wings past.

In this dry season, the lake was nearly empty so we could stand on its floor in places. But this part of the forest is half flooded when the rains come early in the year, and then the intense activity of its life, and the importance of the canoes which form its transport method,  is even greater. The real hazard then is the electric eels which can kill with one shot of their massive voltage and can not be easily seen in the water. Indigeneous tribes have natural remedies for many things, for instance a moss which heals wounds as it contains haemoglobin , but there is no remedy for an electric eel.

So back to Quito and then onto Colombia.