Pausing while standing in his basement workshop off Marine Avenue, guitar maker Robert Valine contemplates his recipe for life. “I think that you possibly can live longer if you are interested, and I think that maybe I am interested in interesting things,” says the 78-year-old luthier.
Bob and his wife Rita have spent 52 years of their lives together. They have a warm, comfortable demeanor, happy to listen or share stories, which serves them admirably in their travels through Latin and South America and Europe.
March 19 they returned to Canada after spending two weeks around the Bogotá, Colombia area. They had taken up an invitation to visit Martha Liliana Bonilla Zabala, a young harpist they met while volunteering during the final year of SOAP (Symphony Orchestra Academy of the Pacific) back in 2012.
The Valines developed a rapport with Martha and assisted her with accommodation for a week-long stay in Vancouver. “We finagle invitations,” says Bob with a mischievous smile. “Sometimes we say, ‘oh, if we go to your town, can you recommend a good place to stay?’ Of course, they reply ‘you can stay with us.’”
With a son working for the airlines, the Valines travel standby and keep a very flexible schedule. To reach Bogotá they took a circuitous route, Vancouver to Dallas, to Fort Lauderdale, then rail and bus to Miami before finding seats on a flight to Colombia. “When we got to Dallas, the next two flights were full, over-sold, couldn’t get on,” explains Bob. “So we looked at the ‘menu’ of destinations and were told there were flights out of Miami. So we checked with the gate agent. Dallas to Miami were overbooked, so then she said ‘how about we get you to Fort Lauderdale?’” After participating in the roundabout trip, the Valines were seated in first class on the jaunt across to Bogotá. “You have to travel with no more than you can run with.”
Travelling, seeing new places and experiencing different cultures, is easy for Rita and Bob. For 18 years they lived on and off their sailboat, Ritana, with 10 of those years around Latin and South America, breaking off from humanitarian work (such as teaching remedial math to Mayan children for six years) to work short three-month stints back in North America on the oil rigs to garner enough money for another two years of travelling.
With three young children between knee and thigh height, they spent 1969 in the Portuguese Azores islands at Bob’s grandmother’s home, a 250-year-old little rock house. “We took the three kids at the ages three, five and six, and lived in that little rock house, tile roof, no running water, no electricity,” says Bob.
Bogotá is a city of eight million, 12 million if counting the outlying districts. At over 8,500 feet, it is also one of the higher cities in the world. Evidence of Spanish colonialism is everywhere, yet sufficient remains of the pre-Columbian era first nation’s influence.
There are many things for tourists to do around Bogotá. For Rita and Bob they had the personal assistance of Martha, her mother Liliana, and a pickup truck driver enlisted by Martha to show the Valines around. “We were so well looked after, like part of the extended family.”
Coffee several times a day was a mainstay. “Their coffee is just excellent,” says Bob.
“It is not bitter, it is a nice flavour and you don’t get all jangly from it, you can just sip on it all day. It was a real treat,” adds Rita.
Back in Canada, Bob makes guitars. It is a craft he learned during some of his travels, coming across a shop of luthiers and asking to be taught. Heading down to Bogotá in March he gathered 20 guitar-top pieces of wood and donated them to a school which teaches instrument making for children in poverty.
Rita has taken up the cello, learning from local musician Laura Wallace, violin luthier, and is also improving her French. Both she and Bob are artists, with Bob also having learned the art of framing. The Mayan-coloured walls of their modest hillside house are covered by a mixture of family portraits, some from 100 years ago, and watercolour, pen and ink depictions of travels and sights seen over the past half-century. In fact, the whole family has been bestowed with the artist gene. Daughter Ana is a filmmaker receiving rave reviews for her recent screening. Son Dominic trained as a welder, helped build 35-foot Ritana while the family was in Prince George and now is a silversmith, engraving belt buckles and spurs for rodeo enthusiasts. Building a harp is the next challenge for Bob, which he thinks should be easier than creating a cello.
Such a taste for art and culture speaks to the rich experiences of life shared by the Valines. They have chosen countries to visit at times when they would not have been on the map for the average tourist. They spent time in Guatemala during the last year and a half of civil war. “It always seemed like the shooting was somewhere else, over the next hill,” says Bob.
“We are very wealthy in experiences and gifts, but we are not worth kidnapping,” says Rita. “Nobody was interested in us so we didn’t feel threatened. We were just people there in sandals.”
