Biodiversity

Cecy and I returned to La Piscina, this time to stay the night. We met our friend Yamie in the centre of Manaure, he's  the head honcho under the owner. He organised our room for us and then we had a wander into Manaure. The venues that were open were a little too lively for us, we came here for a quiet night away from it all so we bought a couple of drinks from a local shop. Funny idea because the shop owner takes your order through a little hatch in a metal door like the ones in prison, disappears for a little while and then your order is pushed out through the hatch. We walked back to our room at La Piscina to spend the night after downing our drinks under the stars.....what a clear sky!We had to walk back into the centre of Manaure to catch a "taxi" (actually just a local guy in his car making a few pesos) but I was struck by the diversity of fruits and plants here. These pictures were taken walking along one road in town.

These are coffee beans growing on some bushes in the grounds of La Piscina. They are not ready to pick because they are still green. They will change to either yellow or red when they are ripe for harvesting. They only go brown/black once they have been picked and go through processing.

In this picture you can see two different types of mango growing in trees alongside each other. The green ones are the bog standard mango that you would expect but the red ones are called Mangos de manzana (apple mangos) and are a different variety of the mango. I haven't tried a mango de manzana yet so can't comment first hand on them. The normal mangos grow in the garden of our house so I both eat them and have drinks of mango fairly often.

Here's where I start to get a little bit out of my depth because I am by no means a botanist. I just take the pictures and Cecy tells me what they are called. This particular tree-growing fruit is a Guanabana.

A little more familiar this bush-grown fruit, at least I have heard of it. These fruits are Maracuyás. Cecy told me this is a plant that behaves a little bit like ivy, growing attached to a larger tree - no sign of that here though.

OK, happier here because this is familiar territory. It doesn't take an horticultural expert to recognise these babys. These are bananas to you and I, here they are called plátanos, bananos or guineos depending on where in Colombia you are. The are either picked green (plátanos verdes) to be used more like a vegetable or picked yellow (plátanos maduros). Over here they actually prefer bananas nearer to black than yellow but they don't ofter seem to eat them like a fruit preferring to fry them or use them in recipies.

Not really much to add here.......coconuts.

This is a type of citrus fruit called toronjas. Look them up on google because that is about all I know about them! I could look it up myself for completeness but I am here to spend time with my other half, not researching on the internet.

I'm not going to upload all the pictures of the flowers in this street, just one as an example. All the flowers I took photos of are varieties of Margaritas (Daisys in the UK). This particular one is called a Margarita Fucsia. The other versions I saw are Naranjas (orange) and Rojas (red). 

One final point is to reinforce that these plants were all found in one street about seventy metres long. A diversity to admire I think.