A Touristy Kind of Place

In addition to being the prime jump-off point for wilderness hiking in the National Park alpine areas, Salento is, well, it's a party town for Colombians from the big cities.



Colombia has 54 festival days, so except for September you have loads of 3 and 4 day weekends.



That means that every weekend is a party weekend.

International tourism is still not common in Colombia because of all the years it was not a safe country. However Colombians are enthusiastic tourists within their own country. Almost every weekend, our friends tell us, you can expect Salento to roll out the party gear up in the plaza.  Salento is the Colombian equivalent to Julian or Leavenworth.

Food and craft booths, beer gardens, and salsa dance floors are set up. The people begin arriving Friday and by Saturday night things are rocking. That means wall to wall cars and people in the main plaza.  Really there is not a lot of drinking, mostly families walking around and enjoying the cool mountain air, having lunch, and just hanging out together. Pretty sweet - but loud nonetheless.


At the Monte Verde restaurant you could even have lunch and get a tooth filled, because the owner is a dentist with all his very modern dental equipment set up in a back room of the restaurant.  Cute.



Up by the plaza an old dance master enthralls a sidewalk crowd with his act, backed by a 4 piece band. A dessert tamale vendor walks the streets with his wares. The Brunch restaurant serves up excellent American comfort food to the backpackers and a few brave Colombian families who want to eat "ethnic" American food.

        Festival!     

Yet another interesting aspect of our favorite Colombian town!

Finca de Cafe

Coffee does not come from Starbucks. Mention Starbucks here and nobody even knows the name.




We all know this, but when we visited the beautiful Finca Ocaso near Salento we really gained an appreciation for all the work that it takes to produce quality ORGANIC coffee.

Almost everything seems to be done by hand because the land is very steep and tractors simply would not work.

The work begins with the planting of the coffee beans in seed beds filled with river sand. Four months later the best seedlings are transplanted into pots filled with the rich local soil. After eight months in a greenhouse they are transplanted out into the finca.



At the age of 33 months the little bush begins producing fruit, and produces continuously. Every 2 weeks for the next 4 years the coffee must be harvested - only the red cherries, not the green, and all by hand. OUr tour guide Marcos shows pictures of how coffee is mechanically harvested in Brazil and explains that is why their coffee is so inferior for drinking.

After 4 years of production the plants can be cut back for resprouting. This process requires 18 months to 3 years depending on how it's done, and then coffee can be harvested from that plant again for another 3 years.

This finca uses only one chemical input and that is a small amount of phosphate fertilizer that is added to a kilogram of organic compost during the planting process.

During the harvest 20 to 30 pickers each pick about 200 Kg of coffee berries per day, for which they are paid about 400 pesos per Kg. So a good picker can make 40 to 50 dollars per day in US dollars.

All of the coffee processing, including separation of the bean from the cherry, removal of the "mucilage" from the bean, and solar drying of the beans.

There are so many types of coffee defects that are removed by hand, and amazingly at the end there is about a ton of coffee harvested per hectare (2.45 acres).

Marcos served a cup of his best proudly at the end of our tour. And offered to help us buy and operate the finca next door.

Thoughts of living in a small hacienda out in this stunningly beautiful part of Colombia have spun in our heads ever since. The wildlife and birds are plentiful here (fox, coyote, ocelot, parrots). The water comes directly out of the high mountains east of here and is absolutely pure.

What a pleasant dream.

We Are in Coffee Country

This is very nice.

We are in the scenic mountain town of Salento which is at an altitude of about 6500 feet. The folks here tell us that it's 75 degrees every day, and while I'm not sure I believe that, I am sure it is what we like.

The only reason we are here is that a German couple said it was the place for us. This happened long ago down in Southern Ecuador.

  

We have met so many warm and friendly people here. Some expats from the US, UK, Spain, Switzerland, and some native Colombians. Everyone has gone out of their way to help us make connections, look at properties, and just simply be delightfully fun to be around.

 

There is actually good coffee to drink here. Today we took a tour of a coffee "finca" of 25 hectares. We now know how to grow the plants from seed, transplant, tend, and harvest the coffee. We also saw the machinery used to remove the "cherry" and begin the drying process.

What a commitment to quality!
Colombia is #4 in volume, #1 in quality.

Paradise

Jorge is the owner of the beautiful Colonial Hostel, our temporary home in Palmira. His father and brothers operate the family gem and pawn businesses in Connecticut, but he has returned to his hometown to build and operate his hostel and also to build his dream country home in El Paraiso (Paradise) nearby. He offered to take us there and we couldn't pass up the chance to see it.

   

And Paradise it was.  

Jorge drove us past field after field of sugar cane, then out of the Cauca River Valley, and up into the foothills of the Cordillera Central. The air freshened and the land became somehow more familiar to us. Crystal clear mountain streams hurried down the hill, birds sang, and fruit trees were everywhere.

He gave us a complete tour of his property and the interior of his large house which is nearing completion. Every room had territorial views across the Cauca Valley to the coastal mountains or of the high peaks to the east. Doors opened onto shaded verandas perfect for sinking into a comfortable chair with a large glass of fruit juice.

Jorge is an agronomist by education and he proudly showed us his organic beans. squash, and all manner of tropical fruit trees. We walked down by the stream below his house beneath Gradua bamboo over 40 feet tall and 10 inches in diameter at the base. This bamboo is a renewable resource, and is used everywhere for construction of rustic buildings, greenhouses, etc.


This foothill neighborhood has some older homes for sale or rent and properties are available. We walked down the country road to a large piece of property owned by the local indigenous people. They have a herd of African water buffalo and we took turns turning their heads with our amateur buffalo noises.

We had a wonderful time, we made a new friend, and we had fun. Yes we did.

Halloween!!

Dame dulces halloween! Dulces, dulces para mi!

(give me candy halloween! Candy, candy for me!)

  

Ever imagine how our Halloween traditions would translate into Latin culture? I admit the thought had never occurred to me until I found myself sharing a very narrow sidewalk with a throng of small princesses, pirates, and sundry superheroes all streaming towards the central plaza.

  

The proud mothers posed their dolled-up kids in front of their favorite Disney scene, arranged for photographs, showed off junior a bit, and then paraded back through town and into the various stores that offered candy. A true civic Halloween fun-for-all without much in the way of blood and guts.

Meanwhile at the community center many of the indigenous groups in Colombia had gathered to offer a day of speeches, prayers and music to help heal the state of the world.

  

The increasingly ghoulish interpretation of Halloween in the U.S. makes me sad. But I've never thought to pray about it. Traveling has opened my mind in many ways.

   

Caliento Cali

Moving north from Popayan, we actually had our hostel call ahead for a room at the popular Iguana hostel in Cali. Only the second time on this trip that we've made a reservation and it was good that we did because the place was full of 20-somethings from all over Europe and Australia. Friendly enough crowd, but deep into the cerveza and rum by dinner time. Everyone sitting around diddling with their i-whatevers, having multiple loud conversations, demonstrating cultural mastery, and performing radio-karaoke in furious spurts.

Am I sounding critical and old? OK so be it. But I did appreciate the Swiss pair who took over an hour in the kitchen to prepare an artful vegetable crepe dish. I did appreciate the acoustic guitar player over on the hammock patio who really knew some good old '70s licks.

Starr and I made a unique and wonderful tropical juice drink with our local purchases. Grenadine, sapote, acidic guava, sweet guava, and others I can't remember. So good!

After dinner the sky really opened up and the thunder and lightning came closer until finally the flash and the crash were exactly simultaneous. Starr showed me a rapid sort of tap dance to show how she would act if she was scared.

The thunder subsided by bedtime, but the party rocked on loudly for hours and hours. We were able to sleep, awakened only by the occasional shriek. Mind you, this was their TGI-Tuesday party.  Colombians REALLY party on the weekends!

In the morning we had a chance to meet and become friends with the owner, Urs, who emigrated to Colombia from Switzerland 25 years ago. Urs has walked in our shoes and offered many helpful ideas for our exploration of Colombia.

One night in Cali and we were ready to head out again.

Pasto Adios!! Hola Popayan. . .

Although I still get worn out a bit easily, leaving boisterous Pasto behind was a no-brainer.

Colombia has some different travel options, including small buses and vans.  The best part about the smaller transports is that the windows open plus we don't have to tolerate a LOUD, obnoxious (U.S.) movie.  Sure seemed like a good idea to try a small bus for our next trip northward.

With 8 tangerines and plenty of drinking water, We headed out for Popayan, population 270,000. I visited here in 1972 with my college buddy Paul, so I was curious to see it again.

The road we traveled is the Pan American Highway, just a fancy name for a two lane road that twists, winds, and spurts through the Andes.  Our small bus carried only about 20 passengers, an advantage when passing the innumerable tanker and freight trucks. This means that we spent a good deal of the time driving down the WRONG side of the road, barely skimming by the oncoming traffic.  These drivers seem to have an amazing sense of spatial relations.  I just look away.

With Mario Andretti behind the wheel, we passed through beautiful green valleys, deep arid canyons, coastal plains, and eventually climbed up into Popayan through a valley of beautiful banana, coffee, and bamboo groves. I love bamboo.

Did I mention it was hot at the lower elevations? Humid too. We saw (from the bus window) some perfect land where we would like to live. The unfortunate part is that we've been told this entire area in one of the last strongholds of the FARC guerilla forces and that we should only travel it during daylight hours.

Popayan is okay.  It was as clean and colonial as I remember. The whole town was leveled in the 1880's by an earthquake and was rebuilt. And I must say it's holding up very well.

We took an evening walk from our hostel up through the center of town and all was peaceful. Small groups of people, and very few cars. Utterly different than everyplace we've been. Quite lovely in a cobblestone/gaslight sort of way.

We had a tasty dinner of cheese and chicken arepas. New to me, but Starr treasured them during her Venezuelan days.

Our hostel is the best we've stayed in. The staff is helpful, information about the town is well-prepared, and almost everything works. We have a private bathroom, as well as a sitting room with a view of the city above one of the busier intersections in town.

One of the reasons we like staying in hostels is that the guests like to spend time in the common rooms comparing notes about their travels and how to make the traveling life work. Much better than staying in hotels where everyone stays to themselves.

Popayan is a place we like.