Salento, Colombia – June 5th – 11th, 2017

In a feeble attempt to slow the pace, we decided to spend a week in Salento, a small town in the coffee growing region of Colombia. The problem with our approach is that although we did stay in one place for an entire week, we also took over 10 hours of private Spanish lessons, did 2 hours of Spanish homework per day, went on a coffee plantation tour, worked on the coffee farm picking kilos and kilos of coffee beans, went on a full day mountain biking trip in La Carbonera, and made our way to the Cocora Valley for an afternoon of hiking through the famous wax palms. Needless to say, we failed miserably at slowing down.

As in Asia, outside of the tourist areas, many locals struggle with the concept of being a vegetarian. For example, on our way to Salento, the bus stopped at yet another quality highway food establishment. Hungry, we decided to risk the back-door trots, and ordered a seemingly safe dish: huevos rancheros. When it arrived, we were surprised to find out that apparently huevos rancheros is not a delectable mixture of eggs, salsa, and tortillas, but scrambled eggs with cut up hot dog and a rock hard arepa (corn cake). Since when are hot dogs vegetarian? So, although Salento is quite touristy, we thoroughly enjoyed the convenience of good local and international food. We even stumbled upon a local restaurant which served 3 course set veg menus for around $4 – we went back 3x!

Our guesthouse and food around Salento.

A food thief was at large at our hotel! After our peanut butter brownie was stolen, we left this note in the refrigerator. Unsurprisingly, the thief never returned our treat.

As I mentioned, Salento was a whirlwind of physical and mental exercise. On day 1, we did a half day coffee tour with the plantation / guesthouse owner’s daughter and a handful of local dogs. We learned all about the coffee growing process and how the local farmers are being screwed over by the “Fair Trade” Colombian Coffee Federation. Essentially, coffee growers in Colombia are forced to sell their quality crop at meager prices to the federation, who then turn around and sell the coffee at top dollar to Starbucks and other western coffee brands. Apart from the lucky few farmers that are able to acquire a local roaster who pays fair prices for the beans, Colombian coffee farmers live in extreme poverty thanks to the greed and corruption of the federation. Nice, right?

After the farm tour, we roasted, brewed, and drank our own fresh organic Colombian coffee. Andy was in coffee heaven! Now thoroughly caffeinated (since I don’t like coffee, Andy grudgingly drank double the coffee), we returned to the guesthouse where we had an hour of downtime before our first Spanish lesson. It only took about 15 minutes into the lesson to realize that the Spanish teacher we hired was not going to be a good fit. She was a complete grammar snob and insisted on “teaching” us 9 verb tenses in the first 2 hours! We didn’t even know the names of the tenses in English, let alone Spanish! Also problematic, was that she only spoke in Spanish and only at or above Andy’s comprehension level (side note: Andy took 6 years of Spanish in school, while I know how to count to 10). I was completely lost and more than a little frustrated. We were under the impression that the point of language classes was to develop enough skills to practice and converse with the locals, not utterly destroy any language confidence (in my case, counting confidence) we may have previously had. My mistake.

Views from the coffee plantation. 

The process of growing coffee to sell to the Colombian Coffee Federation.  

Roasting fresh coffee!

The dogs that joined us on the coffee tour.

On day 2, we paid to work. It’s true, we actually paid for what they dubbed a “coffee experience.” To be fair, it wasn’t expensive, and lunch was included, but it did not take us long to discover that working on a coffee farm is back breaking work! After collecting the sun-dried coffee beans, we were both given a bucket and sent off to pick coffee beans in the pouring rain – the local workers were convinced that the rain made it a more authentic experience. Authentic or not, after about 3 hours, we were exhausted, soaked, and had each collected about 30 pounds of coffee beans (which was nothing in comparison to the locals who had collected at least 3x more). Although it was hard work, we enjoyed hanging out with the friendly workers, who laughed a lot about who know what (we were only able to pick up on about 1/10^th of what they said). One worker had a hilarious laugh though, so we joined in on the hilarity regardless. After our vegetarian lunch of fish with the workers, we made our way back to the guesthouse to get ready for our 2^nd Spanish class. Yet again, the class was completely grammar crazed, and we vowed to have a serious talk about expectations before the next class. As much as our teacher seemed to be trying to make me quit, I was not deterred, and everyone had a good laugh when I told a restaurant owner that we would come back “manzana (apple)” instead of “mañana (tomorrow).”

Would you believe that on day 3 we took the morning off? More accurately, we hung out in the room and planned, studied, blogged, exercised, washed clothes, oh... and shaved Andy's head. Later, after a stern talk about how intensive grammar destroys confidence, our “teacher” eased up some and we spend our 3^rd lesson at a cafe and walking through town speaking Spanish. It wasn’t a tremendous improvement since I still had no clue what anybody was talking about, but at least we weren’t learning the future conditional, present perfect, or imperfect subjunctive tense of irregular verbs (don’t ask me what any of those mean, I still have no idea).

The progression of shaving Andy's head!

On day 4, we went mountain biking! Lucky for us, we were the only 2 people to sign up that day and we had the entire mountain (possibly mountain range) to ourselves. With steep mountainsides covered in large grassy meadows and dense groves of wax palm trees, the scenery was absolutely stunning beautiful! La Carbonera region is situated on private land that was largely deserted until about 5 years ago when the government regained control of the area from the FARC. After our guide pointed it out, it became obvious that the “large grassy meadows” were actually old cocaine plantations that had been chemically destroyed after the FARC withdrew. 

La Carbonera region about an hour outside of Salento.

After enjoying a packed lunch, walking through a wax palm grove, and riding down the main mountain road, we turned off onto the Alegrias single track. Our groomed and regularly graded mountain bike tracks in the US looked like child’s play after riding the slippery and treacherous Colombian single track. Apparently, we passed the mountain biking experience test though because our guide was eager to extend our trip off-road to show us the route he was planning for a new single-track trail. Admittedly, the route needs work, since at one point we were forced to traverse a steep grassy cliffside in order to make it down to the road. All was going well until I lost balance and attempted to step down on what looked like a tuff of grass. The tuff of grass turned out to be at least 2 feet tall and I abruptly went endo (over the handlebars) and fell headfirst down the cliff with my bike chasing after me. Lucky for me, I did not tumble, the landing was as soft as falling in snow, and the bike rolled over top of me causing only a small puncture in my shoe. Andy witnessed the whole thing and almost had a heart attack, but was relieved and surprised when I emerged from the cliffside unscathed and laughing. Even the truck driver was nervous when we finally emerged from the trip about two hours behind schedule. After such an epic (and exhausting) day, we were glad to have the evening off to enjoy some shawarma and crepes before bed.

Mountain biking with Salento Cycling.

On our last full day in Salento, we had one last Spanish class before taking a colectivo (shared taxi) to the Cocora Valley. Although not as spectacular as La Carbonera region, we enjoyed wandering the hiking trails which overlooked dispersed forests of wax palm trees and meandered through the dense jungle. Although the wax palms are protected, grazing cattle prevent the growth of new palms (baby palm trees are tasty apparently), making the forests around the Cocora Valley much less dense than those in the Carbonera region. Though caused by human interference, the dispersed wax palms surrounded by lush grassy mountains had an undeniable beauty.

Hiking in the Cocora Valley.

Around Salento. Keep calm and be a prince$$!