Our first stop in Colombia.

Before even entering the country we had done some research and opted to bypass some of the suggested stops in southern Colombia for the sake of saving a little time. So we decided on Salento as our first Colombian destination. We’d heard good things about it, it was small, and it put us a few hours north of Cali giving us about a month to explore the rest of the country and hit a few festivals that were taking place during the month of August.

After saying goodbye to Ecuador and it’s many amazing peaks, people, and pork plates we were on our way, and after a fairly painless overnight journey we had arrived in Salento. It was indeed small and filled with gringo tourists and Colombian vacationers alike but it was colorful and was a nice place to collect ourselves after our many high altitude adventures in Ecuador. Our days spent there were filled with amazing coffee and blogging, deliciously cheap almuerzos from a little place called Lucy’s, a trip to Valle de Cocora, Willys jeep and all, where we turned a short day hike into an 18km trek to nothing. If you go to Cocora, apparently you are supposed to follow the signs to ¨La Montaña¨ and do the loop. We were feeling good and decided we didn’t want to return early so we followed the signs to ¨La Estrella de Agua¨ which we thought would be a cool spring or waterfall or something. Nope, just a research center where people base out of for further expeditions into the park. No good views, no waterfalls, no payoff, nada. But it did feel good to run around those hills like champs. We wound up doing the whole 18Km circuit in well under 5 hours; fast enough to get back down and catch the first truck back to town.We also made it to a local coffee plantation for a brief tour and sampling. All in all it was a relaxing couple of days in beautiful surroundings.

Now off to Bogota!