Last Updated on 03/09/2024 by Arun jain
Every July, thousands of visitors descend on Colombia’s Pacific Coast, crowding the frenzied passenger docks in the port of Buenaventura as they await the speedboats that will take them to the small communities of remote Malaga Bay. They have come to see humpback whales.
The whales, in their thousands, are on their own collective mission: migrating from their feeding grounds near Chile to their breeding grounds near Colombia, where they stay until October.
During the whale-watching season, which begins in mid-July, boats with licensed captains and guides take visitors—mostly Colombians but a growing number of foreigners—to watch the animals break, blow and slap the water with their fins and tails. for.
On shore, visitors can also witness lesser-known sightings as area residents gather for an annual festival to celebrate whales and revive a fading culture.
‘I was afraid of them’
On a late-June night, the sun went down and a delicious chill spread over the beach in La Barra, a village of about 400 inhabitants on the shores of Malaga Bay.
The festival was about to begin with an audience of mainly local people. Apart from the photographer and myself, the only other attendees were members of the large contingent of volunteer medics and veterinarians who had come to help the city’s residents. Stray cats and dogs wandered around.
Elders took to the microphone one by one to share stories about whales.
Amable Rivas, a fisherman and nature guide, recalled how in the days before motorboats became common, humpbacks played alongside sailing ships that ferried passengers to Buenaventura. People mark the seasons by the arrival and departure of whales. They made chairs from the spines of huge whales washed up on the beach.
Then, in the 1990s, Mr. Rivas said, fishermen began paying attention to yachts that came from elsewhere to look for humpbacks. Before that, he didn’t think whales could be an attraction. “I was afraid of them,” he said, thanks to stories he’d heard about whales “swallowing a certain Jonas” the prophet in a biblical story. Now, he said, he saw the whale as a “gift.” Sometimes, when he was on the water, he would hear them sing and sing back.
Once the elders have spoken, a group of young women take turns reciting poems, including a ballad about a “fatty fat fish.” A marimba band was set up, and children performed whale-inspired folk dances boldly and skillfully. Cups of viche, a sharp-edged home-made sugarcane liquor, began to make the rounds.
This World Whale and Singers FestivalThe regional-government-backed event, now in its seventh year, consists of two parts – an event in late June to welcome the whales, and one to send them out from September 20 to 22.
In September, the crowds will be even bigger, with members of the Waunan (pronounced woo-NAHN) indigenous community joining the Afro-Colombian residents of the beach towns, and musical acts from across the region — not on the open field. , like now, but at a stage that the residents of La Barra will soon start building.
The festivities are off to a good start. As the night wore on, the marimba and drumming waxed and waned. As the residents of La Barra celebrated the whales, they were celebrating themselves.
Reinventing the ‘Fat Fat Fat Fish’
The area around Malaga Bay, Part of the approximately 116,000-acre National Marine ParkAn important breeding ground for humpbacks. Females and their calves seek refuge in the warm waters of the bay away from fishing boats, shipping lanes and aggressive males.
A few years ago, Fabian Bueno, a 42-year-old community organizer, began to wonder what humpback whales traditionally meant to cultures living near the bay. “Have you ever heard whale songs?” Mr. Buono started asking people. “Did your grandparents tell you stories about whales?”
At first, Mr. Bueno said, there seemed to be little to do with whales, and local residents traditionally feared them. “But then we investigated a little more,” he said.
An Afro-Colombian cantora, known to locals as a keeper of the oral tradition, Mr. Bueno taught a poem about a “fatty fat fish.” Wunan had a word for whale, he learned, meaning “big dolphin.” Neither culture hunted whales, whose annual arrivals were associated with an abundance of both fish and staple crops.
That’s when Mr. Bueno came up with the idea of a festival centered on whales. “We want to help people give a platform for their traditions, their talents and create a sense of identity and belonging,” he said.
A new kind of tourism
Whales aren’t the only attraction around Malaga Bay, which is located in the middle of Colombia’s Pacific coast. Visitors also come to kayak, surf and visit the vast network of mangrove canals inland from the coast. The ferry from Buenaventura lands in a town called Juanchaco. From there, the villages of Ladrilleros and La Barra can be reached quickly in an hour or so on foot or by motorcycle taxi.
Accommodations in Ladrilleros range from bamboo cabins to small, cozy resorts with pools. La Barra, where this year’s whale festival is being held, is mostly mom-and-pop restaurants, surfboard rental shacks and wood-plank hostels like Casa Majagua, where private rooms start at 40,000 Colombian pesos, or about $10, a night. .
The morning after the start of the festival, when most of La Barra was asleep, I walked north from Casa Majagua to the wide gray-sand beach at the mouth of the San Juan River, whose sprawling network of tributaries connects the beach communities to the interior. The tattered cloth sign of Hola-Ola, which I had heard described as the best restaurant in La Barra, blew away in the wind.
Head cook and owner, Odalia Rivas, known as Ola, was already at work. Whaling season was a time of abundance for seafood, she said. These include her signature dish of blue crabs: Crab encocado. Mrs. Rivas sautés the crabs in coconut milk, onion, tomato and herbs, wraps them in banana leaves and serves them with a rock to crack their shells. Some of her other best recipes star Pianguablack-fleshed mollusks harvested in mangroves; Its structure is reminiscent of a conch.
Many local women, including Ola’s daughter Sari Renteria, go into the mangroves every day at low tide and harvest piangua. “You feel one with the earth,” Mrs. Renteria told me later that morning, her long arms buried in the mud.
Ms. Renteria was designing a new experience for tourists, something to do when they weren’t whale watching, surfing or lying on the beach. His uncle Mr. Rivas, the fisherman who had spoken the night before, had offered boat tours to discover the area’s many hidden waterfalls and natural pools. Mrs. Renteria brings visitors out to dig for piangua that they can cook together.
Santiago Ortiz, an elected official from La Barra, accompanied us to the mangroves. Mr. Ortiz, like Mr. Bueno, was big on orlidad, or oral traditions. It is in such situations, he said — women harvesting piangua, for example — that such traditions are sustained. “It’s not your grandfather sitting down with you and telling you a story,” he explained. “Your grandfather tells you stories when you’re doing something like fishing.”
Mr. Ortiz is an unlikely politician: a 19-year-old biology student in the city of Cali who can only go to La Barra on weekends and holidays. It hopes to promote a limited type of tourism in the city, which emphasizes nature and culture. Helped organize the whale festival. “I think this is the right moment,” he said, “to present myself to the world.”
‘Spirit of the Whale’
Part of Mr. Bueno’s vision for the Whale Festival was to create a shared cultural space for Afro-Colombians and Wunan, who came together primarily through trade. When I asked Ms. Rivas, the chef, what dishes are common in Wunan, she had no idea. “We live very separately,” she explained.
Although no Wunan came on the opening night of the festival, some planned to present songs, crafts and stories in September. For this reason, residents of a Wunan community called Jouin Jeb (HO-een HEB) invited Mr. Bueno’s team to their home on a tributary of the San Juan River.
Early in the morning, amidst a relentless light rain, I and photographer Mr. Bueno and his festival delegation set out for Juin Jeb through the thickest, oldest mangroves I have ever seen on a boat driven by a Wunan captain from Ladrilleros. Two hours later, dark webs of mangroves gave way to lacy acai palms. A toucan flew low across the river. We docked on earthen steps carved into the steep river bed.
Juin Jeb’s 130-some residents all speak a Waunan language, Waun Meu, along with Spanish. Many Wunan women are master weavers, using fine palm fibers and natural dyes to create beautiful, shiny, tight-walled baskets. Today was an important holiday for the community, a harvest festival, and many young people returned from working or studying elsewhere. Everyone, from children to elders, wore freshly painted skin designs made with blue-black ink. Jagua fruit.
Otoniel Chamarra, 39, had his upper body painted in a double zigzag pattern, with four lines crossing over the heart. The purpose of the design, he said, was to represent the paths he took as he considered which path to take with his studies and his life. Mr. Chamara was working on a business administration degree at Cali, and also served as the cultural director of Juin Jeb. In September, he will speak in La Barra about the Wunan perspective on ecology and, of course, whales.
For most of their history the Wunan were seafarers, inhabiting beaches like La Barra, Mr. Chamarra said. Although in recent centuries they lived deeper inland, “we’ve always lived in both the river and the sea,” he said. “Whales protect those lost at sea, and they transmit the energy that does everything with our harvest.”
It is in June, when the humpbacks are on their way to Malaga Bay, Mr. Chamarra said, that Wunan prepares for this festival, gathering all the families for a prosperous year ahead. “The spirit of the whale,” he said, “is the soul of the products we harvest.”
After sharing a generous lunch of steamed river fish and fresh acai juice with our hosts, we bid farewell to Juin Jeb. Rainbow blue butterflies floated around our boat as we passed through the jungle and mangroves. As we neared the sea the great river widened, drawing in whales, like many others.
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