Salento

Salento is a small relaxed old town in the coffee growing region of Colombia, there is a very nice hostel there "the plantation house", where most backpackers stay, that is where I also stayed, for three nights, the atmosphere was quite friendly and relaxed, people where cooking all kinds of food and delicacies and offering me some, can't complain about that, one of the Colombians working at the hostel, Andreas, is a chess addict, so were some of the backpackers staying there, and they started a kind of chess tournament, it had been a while since I played any chess, in fact the week before was the first time I played chess in maybe a year, but I joined the activity, and got hooked on playing, between eating, drinking and playing chess, my first full day in Salento was spent.

The town of the Salento is old but well preserved, it has a nice central square lined by Colored Colonial houses, men ware cowboy hats, and often stroll around town on beautiful horses, or hang around the pool bar, enjoying there favourite past time activity of French billiard, which some of them are exceptionally skilled at it. Trout fish cooked in different creative ways is the specialty of the restaurant around there, my favourite was Trout cooked in milk and garlic sauce, it comes in a bowl with a big flat Patacón (deep fried Banana like fruit called Platano).

The areas main attraction though are the very long slim palm trees, discovered by some guy during the 19th century, not that discovering these trees requires exceptional effort, they grow to a height of tens of meters, and there are a zillion of them covering the hills. There is not much transportation between Salento and Coroca, were the Ecological path for viewing the Palm trees starts, works on the road meant that there was even less traffic than usual, so I had to walk all the way to Coroca, which took me more than two hours, then I waked the path to see the Palm trees, which took about three hours, but it is quite worth it, the scenery on the way was simply stunning, walking along these unusually elongated trees, although in the beginning there was not much of a view, as I got to the view point at the top of the path, everything was shrouded in mist, only as I went down the path, did things started to clear up, and the palm trees came out of the fog, I had to pass through a finca (coffee farm) on they way, got attacked by two aggressive farm dogs, luckily the owner was close by, he called on them, and they backed away, after completing the circle and returning to the starting point of the path, I still had a two hour walk to do back to town, including a steep climb out of the valley were I was, I had to walk most of it, but luckily I manged to get a ride in one of the trucks working on the road, which saved me the last part of the walk, which was the climb back to the town.