Blogs from Salento, Quindío, Colombia, South America - page 8

Day 723 (22.03.09) Today was filled with bus travel as we made our way into Colombia's Zona Cafetera, first to the large town of Armenia and then on towards Salento an hour up the road. We passed through lush countryside and stunning views of the dramatic hills that make up this area and arrived into the town's main square just as night was falling. The plaza was full of revellers supping on beers and sitting around in food tents and the usual band of stray dogs that you find everywhere in this continent were running rings around excited kids. We learned that this was a long weekend for a festival celebration. It lent a great party atmosphere to the town but we soon found it was going to cause us a problem with accomodation with all ... read more

We have seen The World, and it's massive. Huge! It's 644 feet long and 98 feet wide and is occupied by the kind of people whose idea of a property crash is striking an iceberg. And when we saw it, it was floating (somehow) out of Cartagena harbour like a morbidly obese person attempting to negotiate a rather small door. The fact that the world's most frivolous housing estate was blocking our view of the sky in one of the most picturesque cities on earth (we couldn't see the sky for the world - is that profound or just ponsey?) was a sign that we had arrived in a city that even the moneyed hoity toity consider worth a visit- and it's been a while since we were in one of those places. But we know ... read more

Salento The road between Bogotá and Salento was a nightmare - not as a result of unsafe driving, but rather cockroaches and a million trucks on the road. We finally found out why bus drivers always turn the air con up high, this keeps cockroaches out of the bus! We coped by singing La Cucaracha! Salento is one of the little towns in the Zona Cafeteria, the Colombian coffee zone. There are hundreds of coffee farms in this green, picturesque part of the Occidental Andes. The Andes split up into three ranges in Colombia and this range is the western-most one of the three. This area is ideal for coffee farming as a result of a perfect climate, the correct altitude for coffee and very rich volcanic soil. We stayed in Plantation House, run by an ... read more

Greetings! This past weekend I traveled into the coffee region about 3 hours outside of Cali with my friend Aleja and her mother Martha. The terrain was unlike anything I have ever seen. The mountains are very different from ours in Colorado as they are covered in tall deep green grass rather than pine trees and rock, though they do house the same pumas and bears as we do in the Rockies. The two trees that do cover these mountains are palms and eucalyptus. We stayed the night in a small mountain town, Salento, where the trims of the houses are painted in traditionally very bright colors that would have Home Owner Associations in the U.S. passing out (orange and green combos, or blue and pink, red and yellow was my favorite). This may not shock ... read more

Heute sind wir um 06.30 h aufgestanden da wir ins benachbarte Valle de Cocora fahren wollten. Leider regnete es in Stroemen doch wir liessen uns nicht entmutigen und nahmen die beschwerliche Fahrt auf uns. Mit einem uralten Willy's Jeep fuhren wir mit 8 Personen (!) los. Auf holpriger Strasse erreichten wir nach 40 Minuten den Weiler Cocora. Dort sahen wir bereits die ersten hohen Wachspalmen die aus dem Nebelwald herausragten. Leider hatten wir nicht wie die Einheimischen Gummistiefel und reiten wollten wir auch nicht. So machten uns mit unseren Sandalen auf einen der Schlammpfade bis wir nicht mehr weiterkonnten. Wir nahmen dann spaeter noch einen anderen Weg bis wir auch hier aufgeben mussten. Trotzdem hat uns die bergige Umgebung mit den tropischen Palmen gut gefallen. Am Nachmittag haben wir uns dann noch den Fussballmatch Italien-Frankreich angesehen. ... read more