Salento can be crossed an explored in about 15 minutes. But it feels like being on vacation. Cute little bars, cafes, shops and a nice Plaza welcome you in the middle of a cloudy valley. And the hassle and tightness of Bogota is unbelievable far away. It feels like getting fresh air to breeze. Also safety is no issue anymore and you can just wonder around freely. Phhh….

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Now it was time for the truth. What’s happening to the Colombian coffee? We are right in the middle of the growing area so we decided to take a tour on the Ocaso farm. You just hop on one of these 4×4 – 8 people inside and three standing on the bumper on the back passing the police. Bienvenidos a Suramerica 😎.

We had a stroll over the farm with the different production sites. From the farm and the actual plants:

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To the production of coffee. We used a traditional machine (made in Germany 😂) to separate the beans from the shell.

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And then to the drying area of the beans. Ocaso is a completely organic farm. They reuse the organic waste to heat the oven for the drying process. Looks really good.

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And then we came to the fun part – coffee drinking. We grinded the class one coffee from the farm and actually used the old-school drip coffee method for the preparation.

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And then – finally good coffee in the land of coffee! What a relief. Go and get some good Colombian coffee at home 😉 . The weather though was quite changeable. A constant mixture of sun, clounds and rain. This was also to continue…

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The next day was dedicated to a hike in the Cocora Valley very close to Salento. Here you can see the national plant of Colombia. The Wax Palm Tree. It’s native to the high altitude are and can grow up to 40-60 meters. Laura and I left after breakfast and shared the 4×4 with two Dutch girls from our hostel – so the group was set for the day.

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Beard, Eline, Sanne & Laura

The hike was a 10km path up the valley to a hummingbird lookout and back through the neighbour valley. Yes, it was muddy and it rained for about three hours down on us. A bit tyring…

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But after about 2,5h we arrived at the little farm which feeds the hummingbirds with sugar water – and therefore there are 30-40 of them at the same time.

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On the way back the rain actually stopped and we even got a bit of sun. So the walk turned out great at the end. The shoes though stayed wet. No chance to get them dry. But the views made up for it.

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When you actually statnd underneath the palm trees they look even bigger. Since they are so thin they look extremly long.

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Early night today. And the attempt to get our stuff dry again. Tomorrow at 5am is wake up call for a three day hike in the Los Nevados Park. We will try to go up on a 4,800m volcano. Really excited about hiking again…