Category: Colombia

We’ve made it to Colombia! My first new country of the trip, and coming from Buenos Aires, it’s been a bit of a culture shock getting back in the groove of not drinking the tap water, being very obviously tourists, and no-rules-of-the-road driving.

We finally enter our fifth country, not on a Sunday! However, instead of entering via a major city, we have flown into what’s known as The Coffee Axis, or Eje Cafetero. A spectacular spot for local and foreign tourists to enjoy the stunning scenery of coffee farms and traditional living.

My many, many, hours of research have told me that cash is king, the tiny airport we fly into has no WiFi and no sim card shop to ensure we have data to be able to order and pay for a taxi online, nor a cashpoint to withdraw money to pay for one. Attempts to buy Colombian pesos from Argentina were shot down. Meaning we arrive into a country with no means to pay for anything, again. In a bid to avoid getting stuck being unable to pay for a taxi or bus to anywhere useful, we take a hit buying an international sim card in Panama Airport so we can at least Uber to a cash-point in town once we arrive. We’ve checked, Uber shows us drivers.

Our welcome party:

If you’ve been paying attention to our blogs, you won’t be surprised to hear this plan doesn’t come together at all on arrival. Yes, I have Internet, and yes, I can book an Uber, but as we hulk our bags around the carpark outside the airport looking for our Uber driver, he messages instructions to hide in the bus, then as he comes round, jump in the back seats with all our stuff, like in a getaway vehicle. Uber is illegal here he says, and the police behind us will confiscate his car if caught! Wonderful. At the same time, James has been separated from me by official airport taxi drivers telling him the same thing and selling their services in broken English. Never knowing who to trust in these situations, and having now been awake 36 hours, with two Columbian men both speaking to me at once in rapid Spanish in a new accent I can’t understand, it’s not the smooth start we envisaged!

Realising we are beat, the taxi price offered is cheaper than Uber, and we can pay on card, we get in an official taxi with driver Jamie. Jamie explains to us that whilst the Uber app functions here, it is still illegal to take rides, and so we can get conned like we have in paying for a ride we never took (although I did eventually get a refund), and they can charge over the official rates that the official taxis have to abide by. Our official taxi is actually regulated and he can only charge us a certain amount, which is cheaper than Uber! He’s very sweet in apologising on behalf of his countrymen for our first impressions, and I apologise for not knowing who to trust (and for not knowing any of the Columbian musicians he shows us videos of!).

We eventually make it to Salento, a tiny town in the Coffee Axis, and our next Airbnb. Salento is a tiny, picturesque town, that is of the style that apparently inspired Disney’s Encanto film.

The houses are small and white, with beautiful accent colours on the doors and shutters.

Surrounding the town are rolling green hills of coffee plantations and forest. It’s a stark contrast to Buenos Aires. Also unlike BA, we are able to withdraw cash from ATMs again, and our biggest headache from the last few weeks disappears, hurray!

Christmas has arrived here too, as it is now December, and we listen to Christmas tunes about snow and Santa in mid 20s heat.

An English-Man’s Guide to Coffee Growing

Of course, one of the main things to do here as a tourist is to visit a coffee farm. James has found us one we can walk to, and we join Patrick, an Irish-man here on holiday, on a three hour tour of Don Eduardo’s farm. Don Eduardo is actually an English-man called Tim (but Don Timoteo didn’t sound very authentic!). He has five glorious dogs who join us for the tour, which is really a thorough lesson into all things coffee.

Tim is a great teacher of the coffee growing, harvesting, grading and roasting process.

First, the basics…

There are two different kinds of coffee, Robusta and Arabica. Robusta is literally more robust and can grow at low altitudes, making it cheaper to produce, but more bitter. The country that is the second largest producer of coffee is Vietnam (behind Brasil), because napalm destroyed the soil that meant nothing would grow, except the hardy Robusta. Here in Colombia though, Arabica is grown. Within the Arabica type of coffee, there are more variants, sub-grouped into traditional and modern.

Traditional trees grow about 5 metres tall, and take longer to yield, but yield for longer. The height means the harvester has to lasso and pull the top down to reach the cherries containing the coffee beans (they only grow on new growth, i.e. up). They also need shade, and so not only do you need space for this harvesting method, but you need a row of shady plants like banana trees to provide the shade they need. Modern trees are short and squat and grow outwards instead of up, making them easier to harvest. They also yield faster, but for less time.

The plants produce on a bell-curve, yielding more over a few years as the plant grows, but then dropping off as it reaches size. The farmer will then often cut back the plant to ground to start another round. There’s an n+1 formula that you should only let the plant grow one more stem for each round of production you’re on, otherwise the yield drops off even more than it will in each subsequent round. So the plant’s cumulative bell curve will show smaller and smaller returns for each round.

Tim bought his plantation about 20 years ago after coming here “and gettung stuck”. He has some plants of the traditional variety that are over 100 years old. He keeps these to keep producing seeds rather than beans for drinking. Over 100 years, these trees have evolved to survive here, and so are invaluable to keep producing good new crops for the area. If you buy a plant from a different area, it may bring new disease to your plants that aren’t resistant, or it may be susceptible to disease your plantation has developed resistance to that you don’t know is there, or it isn’t used to the climate or conditions. So, having this pedigree tree is a precious investment.

That being said, climate change is really being felt here, with fewer consecutive dry days, that are needed to dry the coffee. It also means the cherries ripen faster as happens in the rain, and so instead of harvesting just twice a year, they are harvesting more often. This actually isn’t a good thing as this will be impacting the taste, and it may result in farmers needing to use more chemicals (and therefore more pollution and cost) to balance out changes too quick for the plants to adapt to. Climate change is a huge concern here, for many reasons, and one of those that will flow through to us in the Western world is in coffee production.

He has invested in continuing the traditional practices with his plantation, with the idea to give people (rich foreigners) the option to invest in their own plants to have their very own coffee, being able to know the supply chain of their daily cup of java. It’s definitely where the market is going (it’s already happening with wine), but he is also looking to retire, so whether the market catches on before retirement happens, I’m not so sure.

Back to beans. In Colombia, the farms are pretty much all family-sized, tiny producers. This means that the beans are all mixed together by merchants who buy up your beans to make a haul worth selling. This is why you’ll have a ‘blend’ from this area, and there’s no way to actually know what varient you have in a bag as they will all be mixed. Tim’s approach would let you know exactly what you have in your bag. In other countries with huge plantations, you will have this consistency, but that’s impossible here with all the independent and small growers.

The plants will flower and then produce the red cherries that contain the coffee beans.

The cherries are all harvested by hand, because they will ripen at different times, so only a human can nimbly pull off only the ripe cherries and leave the rest to continue ripening. The plantations are also on some seriously steep terrain, that I don’t even know how humans stand and harvest let alone how a machine could, “Colombians are part-mountain goat” Tim tells me.

Inside the cherry there will typically be two beans in the cherry (95%), a pea-body (4%) where there is just one bean, or a triple-bean (1%). You can either leave the cherries to dry on the tree or as they are on the ground, Tim dubs this ‘the lazy-man way‘, I forget the real name. You cannot re-plant these beans. If you remove the cherry casing, you have two further drying options. One is to ‘wash’ the beans (soak them) for less than a day, and then dry them, called ‘washed’. The other is to dry them without washing them. Tim tells us that this used to be called ‘unwashed’ but of course that sounded dirty, so they renamed it ‘honey-drying’. Apparently 80% of the taste comes from the roasting process, so how much any of this really matters to your lay-person is up for debate. Q-graders (the sommeliers of coffee) seemingly can though!

The three different drying techniques shown in the three bowls:

You would then take a sample of your dried beans to a merchant, who puts them through a machine that removes the two outer skins of the bean. One that looks like paper (called parchment, on the bottom left of the photo above), and the other a thinner silvery one that is harder to remove. How easy this is to remove this second skin will tell your merchant how dry your beans are. With skin, your beans can regrow. Without them, they won’t. You want the beans at 12%, otherwise the merchant will give you less money as the less dry the beans are, the more of the bean isn’t coffee, and so there’s less coffee to yield. They’ll also look at imperfections and how much other non-bean junk is in there, extrapolating this to the whole bag to come up with a price. Of your 1kg bag, this shrinks down to something like just 200g (maybe less, I forget) of actual coffee, so you want your bag to be as dry and all bean as possible.

Once your beans are sold, they’ll be roasted. In the western world, we’re used to seeing dark roasted beans, but actually the more roasted the bean, the more bitter it gets, and the less caffeine you’ll get. A medium roast, which is like the colour of chocolate, will allow you to taste all the different flavours of the coffee, like a tea, and will also have a higher caffeine content. So, if you want a proper, flavourful, less bitter hit, look for your medium roast! We have a cup of this medium roast coffee and as a non-coffee drinker myself I am able to enjoy the flavours we can now taste. It doesn’t smell anything like the coffee we’re used to, and I could drink more of this type.

Tim shows us how you can just roast your own green beans at home, using a metal pan, and keeping the beans constantly moving to ensure a consistent roast.

Pre-roast on the right. Post-roast on the left:

We’re given a tour of his hostel (that they’ve now shut down), the old plantation, and new plantation. There’s two bundles of fresh bananas (he’s using banana trees to create the necessary shade) and I also give one of these a try and don’t hate it! Coffee and banana in one day, I really am changing!

Of Tim’s 20 hectares he only has a couple of full-time staff working it. The main costs to a coffee farm are labour and fertiliser, and so there aren’t really many economies of scale. Most farms run by themselves with their families running them. There is no money to be made in these kinds of plantations he tells us.

The place is subsidised by the coffee tours, and we’ve highly enjoyed it and are happy to subsidise Tim keeping his plantation going the way it is.

We end with appreciating the amazing view from the back-garden of his house that looks over the valley, that he invites us back to to watch the sunset, and enjoy the dogs (Stanley, a Newfoundland, Bonnie, a sheepdog, Oli, a stray, Jack, a sheepdog, and Pi, a Newfy-Sheepdog) and chat over beer. He’s a really friendly and eccentric guy, and we enjoy learning about his life out here. Back when he came, there would be a gringo every few months, now there are over 250 hotels, many catering to the now constant influx of tourists. It’s another huge shift in tourism, but at least one that is appreciating the natural and traditional cultural beauty of this place, to keep it as it is.

Valle de Cocoro – Wax Palms, Cloud Forest and ‘Willys’

Firstly, the jeeps here are called Willys. I have no idea why. They are the way to get to the valley where we’re off to do a circular walk through a protected region known for its wax palms. We are given the standing position at the back, and pray the jeep will not be jumping around like the dune buggies of Huacachina!

Thankfully, we stay on paved roads the whole way and enjoy the best views of the jeep.

We head off on the clockwise route, taking in viewpoints, flowers, plants, quiet, the cloud forest, pines (?), wax palms, vultures, birds, butterflies, bridges and rivers. This is an unguided 10km circular walk, so we just take in the glorious scenery and enjoy being back in nature. No filters necessary:

A beautiful spot for lunch:

James practicing his balance and appropriately repping Chasing Lights:

Filling Time

The rest of our time in Salento is largely filled with eating trout and drinking coffee (in various forms with ice cream for me!) with cakes. Never able to sit still, we decide to fill an empty day with going to play some mini-golf that pops up on Google Maps. It’s half an hour walk from town, and because we are who we are, we decide to walk it instead of take a bus or other form of transport along the steep winding road. Unsurprisingly, we are the only ones doing this on foot, with many serious cyclists bombing down or struggling up the hill, as we cross and dodge vehicles speeding and over-taking around blind corners.

Nevertheless, we survive and make it to the mini golf where we are the only ones here. It’s fun to play and battle each other, and we manage to get two rounds in, with the result being a draw, even despite my getting a hole in one!

The rest of our last day here is spent enjoying the town that is now totally buzzing and alive with Colombians, as it is a Sunday. There’s a band playing in the square, the streets are full of shoppers and people eating cheese covered bananas from street vendors, and Christmas lights twinkle. The travel blogs we’ve read complain about the busy-ness of weekends, but I’m loving seeing the town come alive.

We head up to the two viewpoints above town to enjoy the sunset and find a perfect little bar overlooking town, serving cold beer, with a live band playing brilliant Colombian-style ambient music (Estado Zambo). It’s been a stressful few days of planning ahead, so taking time to stop here and remember what it’s all for has been much needed and appreciated.

We’re now off to a farm-stay to have a bit of R&R, before we hit the ground running again scooting through Colombia’s major cities, and meeting up with James’s sister Lottie!

*************

Adventure – walking down a steep, windy, road with no pavement to the mini-golf, drinking coffee and eating banana (not something I do!), getting to grips with new money, accents, foods, ways of doing things in our latest new country. Watching the sunset at Tim’s house after bribing him with a beer.

Excitement – getting a hole in one without realising it, James managing to putt a hole 10ft away without trying, being escorted to and from our Airbnb by a tiny cat each time, discovering the cute sunset bar with perfect music, absolutely stunning views and vibrant colours, Tim’s dogs!

Trauma – dealing with the mosquito bite after effects from BA airport, trying to leave the airport with excited Colombians blocking the door to get to their loved ones with phone cameras in your face like they’re some kind of paparazzi, the whole “jump in the back with your stuff” Uber ordeal, not being able to pay for lunch after the server telling us she made a mistake and they don’t actually take card