Salento

by Maggie Lard 5 years ago 3 min read

Salento is a proper tourist destination, which unfortunately translates to locals, used to taking advantage of the naive tourists, coming up with different prices every time. The town is colourful but without the other towns we encountered in the coffee region.

We didn't want to skip it though, as it has amazing surroundings, with coffee plantations and highest wax palms in the world! So we embraced being propered tourists for those couple of days and did the hike from the Cocora Valley (which turned out longer than expected) AND a coffee plantation tour next day. Incredible landscapes.

Cocora Valley

For the hike, we took the first jeep at 6:30 and since we took a longer route than the most popular one, we were alone most of the time. We didn't realized that the hike was actually 17km long, not something you should be doing having only some bread and bananas on the way! Luckily at Estrella del Agua there is a small hut where an old lady sells coffee for the hikers so we got our strength back and managed the rest of the hike. In the end we were rewarded by stunning views of the palms.

Coffee plantation

Coffee plantation tour was interesting and we tried not to roll our eyes too much seeing people making coffee pickers pose to pictures with them while they were eating dinner after the whole day of hard work and did not look that amused.

We did get to pick the coffee cherries ourselves and it was quite difficult, as trees grow close to each other, the cherry needs to be red (and they don't turn red all at the same time) and they are not easy to pick.

Landscapes at the sunset on the way back were again stunning, making it the perfect end to the Colombian part of the trip.