Valle de Cocora, Salento

If you are ever in Colombia, don’t pass up the opportunity to visit Salento, a quaint village surrounded by bucolic rolling hills. Aside from its colonial charm, mild weather and spectacular views, Salento is a 30-minute jeep ride from the incredible Valle de Cocora, which makes for a wonderful trekking experience. Cocora almost looks and feels like the Alps, but is distinguished by the presence of the uniquely tropical tall and slender wax palm (palma de cera), the national tree of Colombia.

One of Salento's colonial buildings in the evening.

Wax palms on the way to Acaime.

I did an excellent, if slightly grueling (mostly because the Beer Olympics does not provide adequate physical training for anything, well, physical) hike in Cocora which I highly recommend. In order to get to the park, you’ll need to make your way to the town square and hop on one of the many jeeps waiting to take you to the entrance. The cost is $3,000 pesos - just under two dollars - and the jeep leaves when it’s “full”, i.e. when there are two passengers in the front, six in the back, and two hanging off the back. We took the 7:30 a.m. jeep so we could take advantage of the views, as the afternoons in Salento tend to cloud over a bit.

Our jeep convey.
Note the regard for passenger safety :)

We started off by hiking up to the Reserva Natural Acaime. Along the way, we had a to let a cowboy with his milk horses pass and cross a few sketchy Indiana Jones-style suspension bridges, which wobbled in a terrifying fashion when you crossed them.

At the start...and I'm already behind the rest of them!

Making way for the milk horses...

Taking our lives in hand...

When we reached top, we were met by a lovely paisa couple gave us coffee and/or hot chocolate (included in the admission price of $3,000 pesos), which helped stave off the exhaustion from the ascent, and warded off the chill brought on by the fact that we were 2600 meters from sea level! The couple keeps approximately 80 different hummingbirds on site (“mas o menos“, said the elderly man who runs the place with a chuckle, “they move too fast to count!”), which whiz around from feeder to feeder. We were also visited by a chicken and a rooster, and got to meet their horse, lol.

The reserve, with the hummingbird feeders..

Hot coffee!

'Sup dude?

After fortifying ourselves with the coffees and some brought-along snacks, we headed along another path towards La Montaña. While I was told we would have spectacular views from there, no one mentioned to me that it required a 1 km ascent straight up a mountain: although in fairness, had I been paying a bit more attention to the name of the trail, I may have figured it out earlier! My very young trekking companions nimbly shot up the hill like goats, while I huffed my way up behind them. The labour was worth it, though, because we were rewarded with some of the most amazing views I’ve ever seen.

We eventually returned to the entrance of the park, around 1:00 p.m., where a number of jeeps were waiting. Unfortunately, we’d missed the 12:30 p.m. jeep, and the next one wasn't scheduled to leave until 2 p.m. The driver did agree to leave early, however, if we had eight passengers at $3,000 pesos a head, or if we paid him $20,000 pesos for our five: some strange math, if you ask me! We managed to round up a Colombian couple and convince the driver to let us pay $3,000 pesos for the missing eighth person. We drew “straws” (they were actually small sticks picked up from beside the road) to decide who would pay the extra fare. After much laughter and joking, the Colombian guy drew the short stick and had to cough up the additional $1.75 to the driver. A great end to a great day!