Salento (The Coffee Region) - Week 47

4th to 7th August

After hearing that the bus from Bogota to Armenia in the coffee region east of Bogota only takes four hours, we decided to come. In fact it took nine, but hey, who's counting?? The drive was spectacular, this is real Louis de Berniere country. We saw a homemade cable-car-type thing strung 100m high across a ravine between two houses (and it was working with a person in it!!)and you could just imagine the mansion of a coca lord nestled in the depths of the forest with the river diverted to fill his swimming pool.

We intended to get all the way to Salento but missed the last bus so ended up staying in Armenia which is still struggling to recover from the earthquake it suffered in 1999. It doesn´t have any old buildings left standing and there are more homeless people and obvious poverty compared to other places in Colombia. The hotel was very seedy and I won't describe it except to say that there were definitely certain people paying an hourly rate!!

So the next morning we quickly took the bus to Salento which is a sleepy little village in the heart of the coffee region. We checked into The Plantation House and walked into the village for a delicious set menu of fish soup and then an enormous plate of trout and the obligatory 4 types of carbs for GBP 1.25! As it was Sunday, there was a real party atmosphere with lots of music and beer tents in the square. We wondered round the streets and walked up to a viewpoint with a glorious view of the mountains all around. That evening we cracked open a bottle of rum in honour of Mum and Fran's birthdays.

Next day we went to the two local coffee farms that show visitors around with a couple from Ireland and an Israeli bloke. The first, Don Elias, was a disorganised little farm growing organic coffee. They had some pretty amazing different types of fruit growing in amongst the coffee bushes. The idea is that they all make a better dinner for the insects thatn the coffee and so the coffee can be grown organically more easily. We saw pineapple, oranges, manderins, advocado, bananas and some other weird local fruits. They also had some fantastic flowers, quite different from the types we can get at home, really unusual and apparently growing like weeds.

The next coffee finca was much bigger, still organic, but growing bushes in greater quantities and perfect straight rows. It really looked exactly how you would imagine Colombian coffee to be growing, with green valleys and misty clouds dropping into the rows of bushes.

The next day we took a jeep up into the Cocoro Valley for a walk through the cloud forest and amongst the tall wax palms that grow there. They are the national tree of Colombia, really unusual looking, massively tall and growing out in the open, so we were not too sure why they had evolved to be so tall!

That night it was time for perhaps are last overnight bus trip of our trip from Armenia back to Bogota, then onto Valle de Leiva in the morning.

Books we read:

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho