Colombia-2011

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Colombia Village-200 kilometers from Bogota

Arrepas in the window, cheese in orange container. Cheese is placed inside before grilling. taste good!

Main street of small village in country side.

Don't be offended! What else can be said. Outside the butcher shio.

Local butcher shop on Main Street.

We were invited for lunch at the company cafeteria! Unfortunately, we had other appointments, and had to keep moving, or fall behind schedule!

Even in Central Colombia, Blackberrys are required tools.

A Toyota "desktop" is useful. It explains why Toyota has such a large share of the market in the Southern Hemisphere!

This coal mined from independently owned mines, using pick and shovel manual labor, is much in demand due to current coking coal crisis to keep steel mill production in China [and other global users]operating. We visited storage locations like the ones pictured here. This coal will be "crushed" into a high grade coking coal, transported to ocean ports, loaded on ships and exported to world markets. Other coal mines in Northern Colombia are owned by larger corporate companies, have larger coal deposits, use higher technology and mechanization in the mining and processing of the raw material.

As noted above, this is a storage facility at the base of mountains, where mines are visible in next photos. Operators of these facilities are independent businesses that purchase from the independent miners , his mines output and sell onward. Some international [American]business acquaintenances of Fernando were looking to arrange purchases of three shiploads of coking coal for export to China, from ocean Ports on the west coast of Colombia. Most of the Northern mines ship from the East Coast [East of the Panama Canal]. The most direct route to the Far East is on the Pacific Ocean coast.

Look closely at the mountain range! See the grey areas on the side of the mountain? Those are coal mine entrances, that have been dug into the side of the mountain to reach the coal seam. I was told that the seam is only 15 to 20 inches wide or high, but goes back into the mountain for various depths and are considerable. This makes the manual mining of this raw material very, very difficult. It was noted that Colombian Natives, indigenous to this area, are rather short in stature.