Aguardiente y cafe- kicking back in Salento

We’ve spent the last four or five days hanging out in Salento, a picturesque village in the south of the coffee region, with absurdly pretty painted shop-fronts and the kind of surrounding scenery that we are starting to get used to…coffee & banana plantations, brightly coloured tropical flowers and an abundance of greenery in general.

 

 Salento is famous for its proximity to the spectacular Valle del Cocora, where Colombia’s national tree, the Cocora Palm, towers against a backdrop of thick, humid cloud forest. Friday morning we made our way to the plaza where we ran into Eddie, a German guy we’d hiked the Colca Canyon with back in Arequipa, and the three of us jumped into a jeep to head off to Cocora. The five hour hike takes you on a circuit through open pasture, dense cloud forest, over rivers & streams and ends up in the actual Valle de Cocora.

 

 

Along the way we stopped at a little finca for traditional hot chocolate & cheese (yep…together at last) and to admire the hundreds of hummingbirds that flit around the various feeders and flowers.

Being German, Eddie opted for a BYO lunch of frankfurters and beer (I think it’s fair to say he loves beer just as much, if not more than, we do).

Friday night in town we wandered around checking out festivities for the Noche de Velitas (Night of Candles), whose significance I’m still not exactly sure of, but which seems to have something to do with the Virgin Mary (doesn’t everything!).

Saturday night we decided to pick up the pace a little and started with some afternoon beers in the plaza with Quinten, an aussie guy studying in Bogota, followed by beers back at the hostel, followed by more beer (and a few half bottles of aguardiente) back in the plaza, where we befriended some random locals and finished up around sunrise. Needless to say, Sunday was a bit of a write-off.

 

This morning we wandered down to the finca owned by the hostel- Finca de Don Eduardo- where we had a tour of the property and got a lesson in the art of coffee production.  

 

Colombia is the fourth biggest exporter of coffee in the world but that desn't mean finding a decent cup is easy...we fell in love with this guy at a cafe in Salento. He's using a machine made in 1905 and served us our best coffee (by far) in South America to date!!!