Yesterday I took a 7 hour bus ride from Medellin to Salento. The ride was long but the scenery was beautiful and there were enough “close calls” to keep it entertaining. Actually that’s quite an exaggeration, there weren’t any close calls, but there were many tight curves in the road, and many occasions when the bus passed slower moving vehicles on blind corners. It’s just how they have to drive, I guess, otherwise they’d need double the time.
Salento is a tourist town in what is called the Eje Cafetero or coffee axis. This is Colombia’s prime coffee growing area, but the town of Salento is more about tourists than agriculture and coffee plantation tours are big business here. I plan to do one in the next few days. Another big item here is hiking or biking in the giant wax palm forests and tomorrow early I’m off on a mountain bike tour. I’m not sure yet if I’ll do the “easy” route or the “extreme”. I’ll wait to see them first, and I’ll let you know how it goes.
The weather here is cooler than Medellin and there is frequent rainfall. Both days I’ve been here it has poured in the late afternoon. Days are about mid 20s, last night was around 14C. People here were finding it cold. I found it very pleasant.
I’m staying in a very simple hostel, my room has a bed and nothin more, but there’s a really nice open common area with hammocks and seats, where we can look out at the scenic hills.
Today I went exploring in the hills around the town. I’d read about a hike to a waterfall where you can bathe in the pool below. I’d read about it in a blog, and it was suggested as a good thing to do to get “off the beaten track”, especially on weekends when the town is crowded and all the tours are full of people. So I followed some online maps and walked out of town, took a gravel path for awhile and ended up at a finca, a working dairy farm.
I asked if the trail passed this way and they said yes, but it was private property and it would cost me a few dollars to use the trail. So I paid and was led through the barn and shown to a muddy cattle trail which I followed for a few kms. I forded a stream, climbed a hill and I came to another finca where there were many people, and I was told it would cost me another few dollars to use their trails and visit the water fall. It looked like the waterfall was quite an “industry”, there was a car park, refreshment stand, it even mentioned a campground. I was assured it was “worth it”.
So on I went. Past the campground where people were playing badminton in a field and bathing in a stream, over one muddy hill and through another one by way of a tunnel, past another food stand where a charcoal grill was being fanned, over a slippery suspension bridge, then over a second one, and I was at the waterfall. It was pretty, water falling from high up into a pool, but it was not anything near the waterfall I had been expecting. And there were about twenty people daring each other to go into the water, which was a little cold. Eventually a few of them did go in, and the others took pictures and videos. Then others went in and had their photos taken. I went in too, I was hot and sweaty from the walk and the water was refreshing, but nobody took my picture. I regret now that I didn’t take any pictures of the waterfall, not because it was anything to “write home about”, but so that I could show you how it wasn’t anything to write home about. But I didn’t. I only took a few shots of the beautiful, lush hillsides along the way.
On my way down from the waterfall, I somehow got caught up in a crowd young people, a school group on an outing, I think. Anyway, I followed them for awhile, along a gravel road, so that I didn’t need to return through the cow pastures nor through the dairy barn.
It seemed to me the travel blog got it all wrong — this was not a place to escape the crowds or get off the beaten path. It was, however, a way of a escaping the “gringo” tourists, everybody I encountered during my day was Colombian, at least from what I could tell.