Pork and Apple: Zona Cafetera: Salento - Coffee, hiking and tejo

So everyone knows one the the things that Colombia is most famous for is COFFEE! This pretty much means you can't come to Colombia without paying a visit to La Zona Cafetera - The Coffee Zone. I think Salento is pretty much the nicest town you can stay in if you're visiting Zona Cafetera. We had a great time there just chilling out, visiting a coffee farm, hiking through the Valle de Cocora and playing tejo.

Mirador from Salento of Valle de Cocora

Salento

The Coffee Tour

We went on a coffee tour on a 100 year old farm just outside Salento. It's currently owned by Tim, an Englishman who has been living in Salento for the past 11 years. The tour covered everything from the process of getting coffee from the plant to your cup to information about the local area.

So what I can remember from the tour is that there are two types of coffee - arabica and robusta. Arabica is the best, it's got better flavour but less caffeine. Robusta, as the name suggests is stronger - less flavour, more caffeine. I think a lot of people make blends of arabica and robusta, trying to get the best of both worlds. So pretty much the best coffee you can buy is washed arabica (this means the country that produced it has enough drinkable water on hand to wash coffee). Colombia is currently the 4th biggest producer of coffee in the world and they only produce arabica. Most Colombian coffee farms are very small and can't support a supply to a specific cafe or chain so all their coffee gets mixed together and sold as one product. There are now modern coffee plants that have been genetically modified so they don't grow as big and are a bit tougher so you can plant them closer together. Traditional plants can end up getting quite big and are susceptible to more diseases. People are still growing a mix of these plants (although the government is trying to encourage everyone to grow the modern variety) and they all get mixed up together and sold as one because once they've been mixed you can't tell the difference.

The general process of getting coffee from the plant to your cup is:

Pick the cherries
Use a machine to skin the cherries and separate the beans from the skin
Soak the beans in water to get the sugar out (the beans are naturally sweet but if you left the sugar in it would turn bitter)
Dry the beans (at this point you can plant the beans to grow more plants. This is the form that coffee gets moved around Colombia)
Roast the beans
Ground the beans
Make the Coffee
Drink the Coffee

Modern Coffee Plant

Traditional Coffee Plant

Coffee Cherries on the tree

What's inside a coffee cherry - they're nice to suck on because of the sugar

Roasting the beans the old school way. This is quite a skill. The darker you make the beans the stronger they become and the less of them you have to use to make coffee (but I think they also taste worse). Apparently this is a trick Starbucks uses to save money.

Freshly Roasted Coffee Beans. These were then turned into the freshest coffee I will probably ever have. I am still not a coffee fan though so I was a bit sad I couldn't full appreciate it. Alex was loving it though.

Valle de Cocora

Salento is right next to Valle de Cocora, a beautiful valley full of wax palms that can grow up to 60m tall. We heard horror stories of people getting lost and attacked by bees but luckily we had a nice casual walk through the valley.

There were many river crossings on some dodgy bridges

There's a humming bird reserve along the way where your entrance fee scores you a free drink. We chose aguadepanela con queso - a hot drink made from cane sugar served with cheese. Another hot drink where you gotta dip your cheese.

The Humming Birds at this place were amazing. They had feeders out and they would bounce all around.

There was also a family of Coatis hanging around. They are so used to people now that they come up to you.

The view from La Montana.

These cows don't know how lucky they have it

Wax Palms

Tejo

Tejo is a traditional Colombian sport that is amazing. Sadly I don't think we could ever get it past health and safety to bring it back to Australia.

The general gist of the game is you throw your tejo, a metal puck (similar to a shot put) at a square of clay. The aim is to get your tejo in the middle of a metal ring. The twist is that little packets of gunpowder sit on the ring and if your tejo hits them in just the right way they explode! You get 3 points for an explosion, 6 points if you're in the ring and 9 points if you're in the ring and you got an explosion.

The other main rule of the game is that you have to be drinking the whole time. You don't pay to use the court, you just pay the for beers you drink. As novices we didn't stand that far back from the clay but we watched increasingly drunk locals log these chunks of metal across the room (well over 10m!) with surprising accuracy.