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Published: July 27th 2009
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Salento is a small town, population of about 3,500 people, in the Zona Cafeteria. You guessed it, the area which they grow coffee. Being a coffee lover, this was a must see place on my trip around Colombia. From Medellin, it would be a five hour coach journey through the Zona Cafeteria, climbing mountains, speeding down mountain roads to Armenia, and then it would be another hour by local bus to Salento. I met a group of travellers from the UK, Rory, Jimmy, Leonie, Katie and Leila from my hostel in Medellin and all decided to head down together. Well, Rory and Jimmy only decided 20 mins before we were due to leave. I tried to book us into a place called the Plantation House in Salento, which is the main backpacker hostel in the region. Unfortunately they didn’t have room at the inn so to speak, so they put us in touch with another hostel, which also didn’t have room. There was a house opposite the hostel and the woman/family who lived there agreed that for 15,000 COP each we could stay there. It seemed like a good deal at the time. We soon came to realise that in fact
the house only had three bedrooms and the children who lived in those bedrooms had been sent a packing to the back garden with a tent and clip around the ear hole. Part of me wanted to laugh, I could just image my mum doing that to my brothers and I (sorry mum), but the 90,000 COP a night she had got from use was a lot of money so I guess fair was fair. I think part of the deal Rory and Jimmy got was that one of the boys, Pedros was to be there boy servant for the 2 days we stayed there. Poor Pedros. We only stayed there for 2 nights, as Leonie was heading to Bogota, Leila and Katie were heading to Peru/Ecuador and the Colombia boy fiddlers were heading back to the UK. I headed back to the Plantation House to see if they had a spare patch of grass I could graze on for the night. I hoped they did, otherwise Pedros was going to spend his third night in a tent.
After taking over someone else house, we decided to explore the region. We went to the coffee plantation tour which was
run by the owner of the Plantation House. He reminded me of a cross between Bill Oddie and Fred Dibnah. He tour was everything you wanted to know about coffee but were afraid to ask. I was going to ask at the end of his tour, if you were a coffee bean, which one would you be and why.
The majority of my time in Salento was spent drinking coffee. I did manage a bit of a hike to the Valle De Cocora, where the Palma De Cera (Wax Palm), the national tree of Colombia grows. This involved getting there by jeep, which I travelled on the outside, at the back which was an experience in itself as some of the views from the jeep were stunning.
Our first night in Salento, we grabbed some food in a local restaurant. Half way through the meal, this giant cockroach/beetle thing flew in. Our table was deserted in 1.5 secs flat. It was the biggest cockroach/beetle I have ever seen. It flew into a light, fell to the floor and the owner kicked it out of the restaurant. It sounded like he was kicking a football, it was that big.
Needless to say, I raced out to get some snaps. Funny, I wasn’t as brave 2 mins earlier when it had been flying around, but after the loss of 3 of its legs and not being able to fly, I found new found confidence from somewhere.
The guys left after two days in Salento, but I wanted to stay for another day at least so we said our goodbyes and I headed back to the Plantation House in search of some shelter for the night. I dumped my bag there and put my name down on the waiting list in the hope a bed would appear. I wouldn’t know until 2pm, so I headed back into town with my Lonely Planet to plan my route through Ecuador, and I couldn’t think of a better place to plan it than the Jesus Martin Bedoya coffee shop, purveyors of the finest coffee in the region. As I walked into the coffee shop, I saw a familiar face in Edward, a guy I had meet whilst in Cartagena. We shared a coffee and a few travelling tales. He had travelled down to Salento that morning and was trying, like me to get
into the Plantation House. We decided to kill a bit of time by playing pool on tables with the smallest pockets in the world. 3 games lasted about 90 mins. As luck would have it, we both managed to get a bed (not the same bed!!) at the Plantation House. After a walk around the owners coffee plantation, we grabbed some food with some other guys from the hostel and then started playing drinking games with cards. I called it a night when the Aguardiente came out. That is a fool’s choice of drink...
The following day was my last in Salento. It was spent pretty much as the previous ones, drinking coffee and reading. I met some girls, Avril and Ciara from the Plantation House who were heading to Bogota as well, so we all grabbed the night bus from Armenia to Bogota.
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