The other side of the Colombian postcard

Dear Julien

Thanks for the email. Here are some of my experiences.

I first came to Colombia in 2004 to see my wife's home country. As a professional photographer, I was immediately impressed with some of the fantastic scenery here.
My wife Kelly had been living with me in the U.K since we got married in 1999, but after a while got very homesick. We tried to alleviate this with visits every few years. but to no avail.

Over the past 10 years, one by one the garden magazines I worked for all collapsed part due to the recession and part due to the decline in publishing due to the world of information on the internet. This cut my income drastically, but I still had another string to my bow, which was the commercial collection of wild mushrooms. I had been engaged in collecting these for about 30 years, supplying restaurants, gastro pubs and country hotels. In 2012 due to abuse of the environment by unscrupulous collectors mainly from eastern Europe, the british government banned the commercial collection of mushrooms. This ended my only existing source of income, so I said to my wife “lets get out of here and move to Colombia”, which we did in September 2012.

On a visit to Bahia Malaga in 2008, to stay on the naval base with Andrea our daughter the head nurse in the military hospital and son in law and Edwin, then a lieutenant in the navy. Whilst there, I had the great fortune to be asked by the Admiral to the majority of the photography for a book he wanted to produce to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the base there. This short 2 week visit, evolved into  5 months which were the best of my whole life. I was taken by ship to Islas Malpelo and Gorgona, flew from Buenaventura to Panama photographing the coastline, photographed whales from a helicopter and a simulated beach landing with the special forces.(some of these and other images of Colombia can be seen on my website - imagehire.co.uk).

We rented out the house in U.K and moved to Villa de Leyva, where we opened a restaurant called El Toque Inglés - The English Touch, and lived in rented accommodation. After a year the tenants vacated our house in the U.K and we put it on the market. A couple of weeks later it sold, so we started looking for a property in Villa de Leyva. We found that the prices of houses here had rocketed sky high for example an Englishman friend I had made there bought his house around ten years ago and it had now quadrupled in value! After months of looking we could not find a really nice property for less than $500,000.000, so we closed the restaurant.

We then came to Bogota and stayed with my wifeŽs mother while we looked at several of the surrounding towns for a property, eventually finding a picturesque colonial house near Subachoque that had belonged to a famous Peruvian painter.
The estate agent omitted to inform us of the true condition of the house, which was not apparent until it started a heavy rainfall and water was pouring into several of the rooms through the leaking roof. Next a builder working on repairs found that all the wooden posts holding up the roof around the patio were rotten at the base and had to be replaced.

The quality of workmanship generally in Colombia leaves a lot to be desired, plus we were taken for a ride by some of the people working on the renovations. i.e. 120,000 pesos for mowing the lawns. We have subsequently found a local chap who does it for $35,000, a big difference.

In July 2012 when the renovations were finished, and I had completed landscaping the garden, we reopened El Toque Inglés restaurant in one of the larger rooms surrounding the patio area. Since July, we have made lots of friends from among the restaurant clients. Colombians are generally some of the friendliest people on earth.
I play guitar and sing to entertain the clients, and have recently been invited to his home to try out his Karaoke, where we passed a really pleasant afternoon enjoying pizza, a bottle of wine and singing songs together.

My wife, the chef and inspiration behind the restaurant learned to cook many traditional English dishes during her 15 years in Worthing my home town. She has added her own flair to these and judging by the comments I hear from the clients, Colombians love her cooking.

I can honestly say that in my two and a half years of living permanently in Colombia, I have not been homesick at all, especially as the majority of our clients speak good English.