It seems to be becoming a trend that I start each entry with some kind of transport misadventure, so I might as well continue with that theme....
I left for Salento in the Zona Cafetera (a whole region devoted to making coffee, yes please) on Friday morning, having made a valiant effort to get up at 9am despite a bit of a raging hangover. I'd been informed that the bus would take around 6 hours and that although the bus was bound for Armenia, I could get dropped off beforehand at a turn-off to Salento and a local bus would take me the last 30 minutes (rather than connecting in Armenia which would take an extra hour or so).
Well, 7 hours of bus later and we pulled over on a darkened highway and the driver called out 'Salento' and looked over his shoulder at me.
When I say 'darkened highway' this is actually more of an understatement, as there was not a single light in sight, except for the bus headlights. I gave the bus driver my my best 'are you f*cking kidding me I'm not going to get off this bus with ALL of my belongings and stand in the pitch black on the side of a Colombian motorway like some giant sitting duck' look.
Apparently the look needed no translation into Spanish as we moved swiftly on to Armenia where I managed to get the last bus to Salento. I arrived just before 10 (a mere 10 hours after I left Medellin) which apparently is too late for dinner in Salento so I grabbed what can only be described as a deep fried ball of something from a street vendor. Still tasty though.
I ran into some swiss girls I met in Cartagena who were staying at the same hostel as me (Hostel Tra La La), run by a rather blunt Dutch man. My favourite example of his surly approach to hostel management was when the girls asked if they could get some laundry done, he responded "fine, but put it straight in the washing machine, I don`t want to touch your dirty underwear". Brilliant.
The next morning we all (as in almost everyone that was staying in the hostel) got up stupidly early to get a jeep ride out to the start of the Valle de Corcora trek. This was a pretty amazing 6 hour hike through a cloud forest, stopping at a local farm high in the mountains for a snack of chocolate con queso - yes this is just as odd as it sounds. Apparently a traditional local 'treat', this basically consists of hot chocolate served with a block of cheese not dissimilar to ungrilled halloumi. Weird combination even to serve together, but the traditional way of eating it is to break chunks of the cheese INTO the hot chocolate and eat/drink it together. I gave it a try but I can confirm that it is just as wrong as it sounds. And I would not be surprised if it turns out to not actually be a local tradition, but more a product of some unsuspecting tourist asking if the cheese is meant to be dunked in the hot chocolate and the Colombian vendor thinking 'sure......let's say that and see if he's dumb enough to eat it'.
Anyway after our brief snack stop we climbed above the valley of wax palms and then gradually descended into it amongst an awful lot of eerie mist with these huge (some 60m tall) palm trees shooting into the sky above. It was pretty spectacular and I must have taken about 50 photos of just the trees as it was impossible to capture just how impressive they were.
That night we all went out for the local specialty of trout (delicious) and ended up at a tejo bar afterwards. Tejo is a Colombian game which is a bit like lawn bowls but with gunpowder. You throw stone discs down a dirt lane, at the end of which are 4 paper triangles stuffed with gunpowder. The more you blow up, the more points you get. The ideal sport to participate in when drinking surely?
The next day was my last in Salento and had to be spent visiting one of the local coffee fincas. Unfortunately on the walk back a thunderstorm hit and we all got completely soaked. The thunder, lightning and perpetual rain didn't really bode well for my first night bus experience either (on windy roads through the mountains to Bogota). But thankfully the 7 hours overnight passed without incident (despite aggressive air conditioning reducing the temperature of the bus to that of a fridge) and I arrived in Bogota at the unsociable hour of 5:30am to be welcomed by a temperature of 10 degrees and unrelenting grey drizzle - just like London....
