After spending our first few weeks on the coast, and my Michigan blood boiling from all the hot days and air conditon-less nights (well, some of them), we headed south to the mountains. After a couple memorable days learning about the country’s history and transformation in Medellín, we continued south to Salento. One of our new favorite places.
It was a bit of an adventure getting to Salento. We found a bus line in the Terminal de Transportes Sur, Flota Occidental, that claimed to have a direct route from Medellín to Salento 3 times daily. Most other companies you need to travel to Armenia and hop on a Collectivo back to Salento. We were lazy, so we decided to try and go direct. As our departure time neared and then passed, a woman finally told us they cancelled our bus and we had to take the Armenia bus anyways. We thought we were going all the way to Armenia when a man told us we were at our stop – a lonely bus stop on the highway near the entrance of Salento. We had to cross the 6-lane highway and waited for the bus we hoped would come. Luckily it was only a 4 minute wait before one of the Collectivos on its way pulled off and had space for us to hop on.
Salento is not a large town so it was easy to walk in and find our hostel. We checked in and went out exploring. We happened to get there the day before New Years Eve, and the town square was alive with performances, food carts, and kids games. This festival atmosphere continued until we left on the 4th of January and I’m fairly certain there were a few days left. While Salento is small, there is are a ton of great restaurants, bars, and activities.
Coffee Tours
We chose to begin with a tour of a Salento coffee finca. There are many options of coffee fincas you can visit and they are all down the same road. You can just walk out of town on Carrera 5 and keep walking for about 1hr and you’ll start coming across the fincas. It does get muddy, and I made the mistake of wearing canvas slip ons so it took us a bit longer than an hour to get there. We got a lot of great suggestions of which tours to take from our hostel owner, and in the end ended up going to the more expensive one he didn’t necessarily recommend, Ocaso. However, it was a great tour! It was 10,000 COP a person and they have both English and Spanish tours scheduled throughout the day.
We began by learning about the growth of the berries through harvest and the challenges along with it – fugus and parasites and the solutions the farm uses to minimize the effects of each. After the initial lecture, we went through all the steps from harvest to tasting. We began by picking a few bright red berries. From there, we weighed them, separated the bean from the berry, and walked through some greenhouses to see how they are dried. Finally we ground them and made coffee and FINALLY got to drink some. The coffee we eventually ground and drank at the end was classified as first class Colombian coffee. While it all depends on the tastes you personally like, the coffee was a bit acidic for our tastes.
New Years Eve
There are a lot of great ways to party in Salento on any given day, from the townie bars to the gringo bars to the bizarre yet incredibly difficult game of Tejo. So while the town was starting to pick up for the New Years celebrations, we decided to start with some Tejo.
Tejo was first described to us as “horse shoes with gun powder,” a traditional Colombian sport. Naturally, we had to try that out. The place to try it is at Los Amigos, where you buy a couple of beers, pay $2,000 COP/persona and are given a handful of gun powder packets while you hear explosions coming from the game room. You may be thinking “none of that sounds like a good idea,” but let me assure you, no one lost any limbs that day. Luckily one of the owners speaks English and was able to give us a quick tutorial about the rules and some technique. Then we choose a thick metal saucer and played!
The goal of
the game is to be the first to reach 21 points. There is a platform on one end of the room covered with clay and has a metal ring in the middle surrounded with 5 gunpowder packets. You get awarded points based on how close you are to the center of the ring, if you hit the ring, and of course, if you explode a gunpowder packet. Will and I were there about an hour and a half and we only hit the gun powder packets twice and I somehow lost one of the metal discs in a wall. It’s a really difficult game! One of the best parts is watching the Colombian men playing – they stand as far as 100ft from the playing end and hurl the metal discs high into the air while hitting their targets every time.
A few beers down, our hands coated in clay, and thoroughly disheartened by our poor performance at Tejo, we decided to see what was happening around the rest of town. We forgot briefly that we were in Latin America where things get started a little later, so we got some dinner and parked in a bar and ordered drinks to watc
h the night unfold. As midnight neared, we met this wonderful Colombian family who invited us to ring in the New Year with them as they helped us understand the traditions around town. All day Will and I had been seeing cheeky scare crows sitting around town and I had my suspicions that it may be like the Venezuelan tradition I participated in as a kid – stuff it with fireworks, and blow it up at midnight. Our new Colombian family helped confirm these suspicions, and we got to ring in the New Year with Burning Año Viejo. Our clothes smelt like bonfire for days but it was definitely the best way to say farewell to 2016.
We bid our new friends goodbye and started walking back through the main square and New Years really kicked off. There were tons of people dancing in the street to DJs or bands.
If you find yourself in Colombia for New Years and not sure where to spend it, I would highly recommend making your way to Salento. It may be a small town, but people from all over come to celebrate and it is an absolute blast.
Salento
After our New Years shenanigans, we decided to spend the next day exploring Salento proper. There are a ton of shops to buy anything and everything (we got salt and pepper shakers), a gorgeous church on the square, and a viewpoint of the town and the surrounding mountains.
We ate some really great food in town – from local to American comfort food. Trout is the meal to get in Salento, either grilled or in a cream sauce. We chose to get it for lunch at El Rincon de Lucy, where it is served with their Correntazo (set lunch menu) and you can choose between grilled trout or chorizo. We also got lucky to have the festival going while we were there so there was no end to delicious street food – from cheesy arepas de choclo, to obleas, to sausage.
As Salento has been a big tourist destination, there is no shortage or restaurants for those who would like a bit of a break from Colombian food. While we have really enjoyed the food we have been discovering, we definitely took part in these restaurants more than a few times during our stay. We started with a big delicious cheeseburger from Brunch to cure our New Years hangover. They also have a huge delicious breakfast menu where we happily indulged in a ginormous plate of potatoes, eggs, mushrooms, chorizo, and red onion before a hike. The hostel we stayed at, Casa La Eliana, specializes in delicious curries and amazing pizzas.
If you’re looking for a beer and don’t want to throw metal discs at gunpowder packs, Bar Danubio was our favorite place to hang out. It is right near the main square and there are a ton of pool tables – from standard billiards to carom billiards. We also enjoyed hanging in Jesus Martin for a cup of coffee and a game of cards.
Valle del Cocora
The thing we were most excited about was Valle del Cocora. The Cocora is the wax palm, and the national tree of Colombia. They can grow to be 150ft tall (so a realllly tall palm tree). The government declared Cocora Valley a reserve to protect these national symbols. And man is it beautiful.
Since we were visiting the town during a festival with a closed main square, we had to catch a Jeep to the valley in an alternate location on Calle 2. These Jeeps wait until they fill up and then head to the Valley. We wanted to get started early, so we grabbed a big breakfast and aimed to be at the jeeps by 7:30am. It costs $3,400COP/person and takes about a half hour to get to the entrance, to which there is no entrance fee. You can keep going straight on the road to get to the main looking points for the valley, or you’ll find a blue gate on the right to take a loop for a 4.5-6hr hike that ends in the Valley. We wanted to go on a long hike after a lazy day in town so we headed right. The scenery throughout the hike is unbelievably gorgeous. The blue skies, the green mountains, the tall palms, the fog – I had to force myself to put away my camera more than a few times. The only downside of the hike are there are a million horses – sometimes the trail gets narrow, and sometimes the horse has to poop, and sometimes Will is in the way.
Along the hike there is a trout farm you can go into to feed the fish (trout is very popular in Salento, even though the demand is so high a majority of it is imported) and a hummingbird sanctuary with $5,000 COP entrance fee and you get a chunk of cheese and coffee or hot chocolate. We were really enjoying the hike so decided to skip both of these things. But to each his own.
The hike took us about 4.5 hours and then we were on the jeeps headed back to town.
