Popayan, San Augustin and Salento into Colombia

Colombia is pretty interesting so far. We crossed the border under our own steam, whereas previously we used buses that were of international flavour. Ipiales was the first border town on the Colombian side and we were set upon by numerous money changers and taxi / bus vender’s who were looking for marks. Ignoring most of these we sought the office of immigration to get our formalities settled first then went about finding our way to Pasto, a little town we elected to use as an overnighter en route to Popayan. No difficulties there and Popayan proved to be an interesting little colonial town. No great tourist spots but nice and laid back.

From Popayan we went south a little to San Augustin and their “Parques Achelogicos” were we encountered some interesting statues and tombs from as far back as 3000bc. I took the opportunity to get on a horse again and tour some of the higher up locations and the morning turned out to be a riding exercise rather than a tour. The horses were the best I have been on. Of the four hours riding they were probably walking for about 10 minutes, the rest of the time they were galloping, cantering or trotting along quite happily. We had real saddles too which made a big difference to my butt at the end of the ride. San Augustin was interesting also because many of the guerrillas in the region live there and cannot be distinguished from regular locals.

From San Augustin we went down to Salento. Now here is a really laid back little place to hang about for a couple of days. It is located in the “zona café” so there are plenty of coffee plantations about. The hostel we stayed at had one associated with it which the hostel owner brought some 18 months ago. It is a pretty labour intensive work requirement and they are very fickle plants which surprised me a bit. You cannot just take a coffee bean and plant it. It needs to come from the same altitude or it will forever be poorly. Even 50 metres altitude will make a difference to the health of the plant. They also need shade from the hot tropical sun so what they do is plant the space between each coffee plant with a banana tree which then provides shade. Pretty clever but then the bananas also need harvesting and everything needs fertilizers. The slope on the hillside is about 45 - 60 degrees and they need to cover every bit of it about seven or eight times per year. Picking bananas by hand is hard but coffee is even harder.

While in Salento we went for a nice walk into the forests and saw some pretty amazing wax palms which in Colombia are a protected tree. You don’t see many new ones coming up so I am not sure what will happen in 20 or 30 years when these ones die off. Strategically I think that the locals are keeping the little ones from growing so that they can free up their land for agriculture. They may be poorly educated but they are not dumb.

We have decided on a trip north and that means we will skip the major cities of Bogota, Cali and Medellin. It also means another overnight bus trip of 17 hours. Here we go, here we go, here we go….Santa Marta