Salsa, coffee and aguardiente

Like a favourite album, Colombia grows on you. After the disappointment that was Cali, we haved moved onto the capital, Bogota, via a coffee plantation and an amazing trip to Villa de Lleva, a delightful colonial town about four hours northwest of Bogota.

Cali was a bit like a tropical Milton Keynes. A Bracknell surrounded by banana plantations. Myself, Joe, Tristan and Rob went out on a Saturday night and all we could find was salsa bars. Salsa is a deadly serious pastime here, and if you are to spend any amount of time in Cali, then it is advisable you learn a few steps. My only slight bugbear about salsa is that I find it utterly insufferable. After half an hour of it I dearly wanted to drive rusty bolts into my head, in the hope that the pain would make me forget about the music. Even large quantities of rum didn´t make it sound any better, so we left fairly early. I declare Cali to be officially rubbish.

From Cali we went to a La Zona Cafeteria (the humid coffee growing region) in the centre of the country, to a small village called Solento. The town itself is like something from the Wild West. Moustachioed men loiter on corners wearing ponchos and cowboy hats, while others in identical garb canter around the town on horses, or sit around drinking in saloons. The coffee plantation was owned by an English guy called Tim, who also owns the hostel we stayed in, "Plantation House". It was a pleasant couple of days outside of a big city, eating Solento trout and drinking lots of freshly ground coffee right off the land. We also got a guided tour around the farm, which hangs off a mountain side, and is full of not only coffee plants, but also bananas, pineapples, bamboo forests, strawberries and coriander. We were also shown how coffee is made, from picking it off the trees to roasting the beans. The farm has a house in the middle of it with a retractable roof, so the coffee beans can dry on a flat concrete surface in the sun. I surprised myself at how interested I was about the coffee-making process. I was expecting it to be a desperately dull hour, glimpsing inside hessian sacks and witnessing the pedestrian turning of cogs. Whenever I have been on a wine tour, I have always wanted to skip the part where we have to stare numbly at metal vats and whirring machinery, and get on with the sampling of the vino. Who knew coffee could be so interesting?

After Solento and saying goodbye to Joe, who went off to Medellin, myself, Joe and Tristan headed for the massive capital, Bogota. We are staying in an area called La Candelaria, where all the oldest buildings of Bogota remain. We spent a great weekend with some locals we met - Ines, Ana-Sofia, Andres and Hernan, who took us to some great (if pricey) bars in the trendy Zona Rosa area of the city. The cheapest but deadliest way to drink in Bogota is to hit the aguardiente, a rough-as-nails local spirit which is only marginally more swallowable than absinthe. The hangovers are similar, though. On Sunday we all went to an amazing little town called Villa de Lleva, a perfectly preserved colonial gem four hours out of Bogota. On Sunday the nation celebrated the Festival of the Lights, which is a bit like our Fireworks Night. The following day was a public holiday in Colombia too, so the town was still busy with local tourists. We spend a blissful day in the countryside just outside the town, which looked more like Narnia than Colombia.

Today I have been a proper tourist, taking in museums, churches, plazas and cable cars. One of the most hyped attractions of Bogota is the Gold Museum, where there is a literally dazzling collection of pre-Colombian metallurgy. The pre-Incan societies of Colombia represented their universe in all kinds of intricate gold designs, from jewellery, armour, ornaments and practical objects. It appears they were enthusiastic about making tiny golden birds and jaguars. To be honest, after the first eighteen tiny golden jaguars I saw, I had had enough of gold, and, indeed, jaguars. Worth a visit for two thousand pesos though (which sounds a preposterous amount of money, but in reality is less than a pound).

After that I visited the Plaza Bolivar, the central point of Bogota where there is allegedly the first ever statue of Simon Bolivar, beloved Venezuelan liberator of much of northern South America in the 1820s. Checked out the Presidential Palace, which probably has more armed guards than the Pentagon, and finished the day´s activities with a trip up a cable car to a gaudy church on top of a hill, with commanding views of the city. It was the first day in Bogota that hasnt been cloudy and rainy, so was very lucky to see a perfect sunset over the vast city. The photos don´t even begin to do it justice.

This week I´m off to Medellin, Colombia´s second city, about ten hours north of Bogota, where hopefully I can secure some voluntary work for January and February, before heading to the Caribbean coast for Christmas and New Year.

---

---