COLOMBIA’S HIDDEN JEWEL
Salento offers world-class hiking, scenery and coffee
For most of my adult life, when I thought about Colombia, it was in the context of drugs, kidnapping, murder and endless civil war. When our son announced he was going to join the Peace Corps and commit to 27 months in that country, I was motivated to attempt to revise my opinion.
About a year after his departure, my wife and I boarded a plane in Atlanta for a three-hour, 20-minute flight to the Caribbean coast of South America. By then, I had reassured myself that the worst of the drug violence had ended with the 1993 death of kingpin Pablo Escobar, and a peace deal had just been reached between the Colombian government and FARC, the country’s main rebel group.
By the time we boarded a flight in Cartagena for the hour-and20-minute trip to the Colombian interior, we were fully committed, but not without some trepidation. I can’t say what we expected, but it sure wasn’t a brand new jet with individual video screens on each seat, or the tidy little hotel whose balcony I found myself standing on a couple hours later.
A van and driver we had arranged picked us up at Matecana International Airport in Pereira and drove us out of the not-especially attractive, medium-sized city. But as soon as we began to climb out of the crowded chaos, we found ourselves lifted into a pristine landscape of green mountains. The tropical heat of the coast had been replaced by a cool breeze infused with the irresistible perfume of spring growth.
We soon learned the climate was like this year-round; a delicious chill in the early morning and late evening, and 25 C while you’re up and about. In just more than an hour, we crossed a rushing mountain stream and entered an early 19th-century Spanish colonial town. One- and two-storey stucco buildings were arranged in neat rows, their barrel tile roofs and rainbow-coloured balconies lining up into fairy-tale streetscapes radiating from a central plaza dominated by a weddingcake of a church tower.
This was Salento, a town of about 7,500 people living along a steeply canted grid of paved streets more than 1.6 km above sea level and ringed by mountains ranging in elevation from 2,100 to 3,000 metres. The Terrazas de Salento hotel featured two floors wrapped around an open courtyard filled with flowers, banana trees, palms, rubber trees, ferns and plush moss.
We ate the ample, included breakfast in the lobby looking out the open front door at the mountains and the town stretching away below us. The afternoon was a good time to stretch out in a hammock strung in a rooftop gazebo and watch the hummingbirds flit among the flowering trees to all sides.
Salento is in the middle of Colombia’s coffee-growing region, where the temperature, soil conditions and altitude all conspire to produce some of the finest beans in the world. Until 10 or 15 years ago, it was an out-of-the-way place. But more recently, the charm of the well-preserved architecture, the spectacular surroundings and the improving political situation have made it one of Colombia’s hottest tourist destinations. The town is now filled with hostels, cute bars, good restaurants and backpackers from all over.
But it hasn’t tipped entirely into hypertourism. Among the shops and restaurants, Colombian families still live — hanging out their laundry and gathering for card games visible through windows. A pool hall on the main street looked pretty much how it must have looked half a century ago.
But the amenities that come from touristic development were welcome: restaurants serving a range of good food, from vegetarian Indian dishes to jumbo American-style burgers to the excellent locally farmed trout with fried mashed plantain cakes; bars with live music and fabulous views; a network of jeeps available to take hikers in any direction. And all of it — the meals, the transport, the lodging — costs a fraction of what it would in a similar location in Europe or the U.S.
As for entertainment, all you need to do is walk. A downhill hike of about 45 minutes brings you through breathtaking hills to a coffee plantation offering tours where the organic growing methods are explained — right up to the point of brewing and drinking a cup of Grade-A Colombian. When we went, one of the fat, happy Labrador retrievers who seem to wander everywhere adopted us and followed us all the way through the tour.
The next day, we piled into one of the Jeeps ( less than US $2 each) for the exhilarating 30-minute drive into the Cocora valley for a hike in Los Nevados National Park. A variety of trails, from very challenging to less so, would take weeks to explore fully on rented horses, much more on foot. The trail we took required concentration to avoid mud, logs and rocks on the sometimes steep ascent.
But the effort was more than rewarded. The majesty of the green valley unfolding between steepsided mountains is awe-inducing. On a clear day, in the far distance, the snow-covered peak of the 15,617-foot Nevado del Quindio is visible.
A hike in the opposite direction on another day led us along the banks of a river, through a roughhewed tunnel and across a swaying cable bridge to a hole in the jungle carved by a gushing 15-metre waterfall.
With Colombia beginning to emerge from its troubled past, this jewel-like paradise in the Andes could soon be overrun with enthusiastic tourists. My advice: Go soon.