Some 'time off' in La Tigrera

I've been struggling a bit recently to get posts out, not that I'm not busy, I do keep quite busy, but I seem to be leaving my limited typing time for discord recently.

And really what better time to escape than now, @edicted called 2024 the 'do nothing year' within the crypto cycle. I'm certainly not doing nothing, I moving a lot of tokens around still, I've been working on a complete manual valuation of a few accounts I manage, and I am preparing a third HIVE masterclass with Colledge for this summer.

Its also rainy season around here, and there is a lot of work on Buena Vista, for @quintaesencia and turns out, with the new mayoral team, around Líbano in general.

It had been a long time since I visited La Tigrera, a beautiful, hidden and hard to access valley very close to Líbano. But it was time, supposedly the new mayor was going to visit, and they asked me to come support them when she did. She cancelled three times, but finally I got the call - its happening (.gif)

I had other plans, but I let it go and made the trip, off-grid, to make the meeting and spend some time here. I'm glad I did.

La Tigrera is a natural wonder that exists in a hidden and still hard to access valley, and some time ago, speaking of cycles, when I had extra money looking for undervalued things to buy, an opportunity that I deemed too good to pass up fell into my lap. A farm that no one else would buy at a bottom barrel price, difficult to access and with a demoralized community.

The farm had everything possible wrong with it on paper, it owed 17 years of back taxes, one of the owners (the wife) had died and opened up a complicated 'succession' process, the live-in help had signed a use-contract and was trying to take over, and it had been mortgaged with an entity that was now bankrupt.

Maybe I am crazy, but the farm also contained a number of waterfalls, coffee plants, timber trees, as many rocks as you could dream of, and other things its best not to mention publically, things I could not have even considered. This region also has sightings of such things as the rare and vulnerable Andean Spectacled Bear, a living treasure.

So with a tiny budget I accepted that people thought I was crazy and worked for two years to liberate the farm from all its 'lios', which per the agreement would come from the fixed purchase price of the farm, but of course I had to do the work. Along the way I continued to learn about the sometimes byzentine system of land ownership in Colombia.

Its like with my '79 Nissan Patrol, I just can't resist getting under the car with the mechanic. Its not enough to get the job done, I like figuring out how stuff works.

So to fast forward to the present, the Tigrera has been selected as a hidden treasure by the current mayoral office, put on the short list to develop a cable car system, and added to the official birding routes of the town, one assistant to the mayor says to me, drone in the air and looking at his camera -

"You bought that house next to the waterfall? Boy you have some vision!"

I am extremely thankful for the local community that has befriended me. That has decided to see me and what I represent as an opportunity not a threat, and has decided that once again its time to get motivated. Of course, I cannot 'change the world' by myself. But on a local scale, one person, one smiling face from somewhere else, can make a world of difference.

Or maybe I just happen to be in the right place, at the right time.

Freedom and Friendship