Armenia, Colombia, South America

I had a great, and exhausting, day of walking around the Valle de Cocora! I went with Laura (English) and Spencer (Oz) from my hostel at 9am and walked into Salento to get a jeep out to the Valle de Cocora. There was basically a convoy of these “Willys” going to the valley at the same time. By the time we got there, only one seat was still available in the jeep, so Laura took that and Spencer and hung off the back of the jeep for the ride. It took about a half hour to get down there, and Spencer and I definitely had the best views.

We got down to the valley and had some really terrible directions to follow from the hostel. We made our way through some farm lands, over a river on some old rickety Indian Jones style bridges, through the jungle, and up some mountains to make it to a place called Acaime. This was recommended to us as a hummingbird sanctuary, and a place to stop that is about half way through the hike. It wasn’t so much a sanctuary, as a house with a few bowls of sugar water in front of it that attracted some hummingbirds. It was really nice to take a seat and have a drink though. It had gone from really hot at the base, to pretty cool at the top, so we all had a hot chocolate before heading down the trail again.

We didn’t have to backtrack on ourselves too much as we took another path to a place called La Montana. The name should have given it away, but we didn’t really think about it. After a pretty tough 2.5 hour hike up to Acaime, we found the hardest part of hike at this point. La Montana is a house that is on top of a mountain, and this was no small mountain. It was painful getting to the top, but it was pretty rewarding once we got there. It was a beautiful little house that was surrounded by beautiful flowers, which attracted loads of hummingbirds. If we’d known, we could have skipped the hike up to the other house and just come here!

The strange thing about La Montana is that they were making no money at all. They weren’t selling drinks or postcards or anything. It was just a really nice house that had dozens of travelers walking through every day. It seems really strange they are not trying to make money at all there. We got the best news of the day here though, it was all downhill from La Montana back to Cocora! We were so exhausted at this point, I’m not sure how much more uphill we could have taken.

The walk back down to Cocora was absolutely stunning, and we finally got to see some of the world’s tallest palm trees, the wax palms. These trees can grow over 45m high (150ft) and they are incredible. We finished our walk down in this field with sporadic palm trees and nothing else around. It was so strange to see such tall structures standing alone and not in the middle of a forest. It was beautiful. The three of us sat in this field for about ten minutes just enjoying the serenity of where we were. There were no other people around, no other sounds, just nature. It was so relaxing. That’s not a very easy thing to find when traveling around, so we relished the opportunity to enjoy it.

We got back down to Cocora just in time to get the 4pm jeep back to Salento to complete our six hours of hiking for the day. My knee was in a lot of pain and swelled up pretty good, so I was glad we were finishing our trek then. We got back into town and were absolutely starving so we went straight to a restaurant for dinner, at 4:45pm. We went to an italian restaurant that was absolutely phenomenal! They make all their own pasta and breads, and the food was excellent! I’m sure it didn’t hurt that we had just walked for six hours with no sustenance, but I think it would have been good regardless.

We got a taxi back to La Serrana, I got my bags and headed back into town to the bus terminal. I got a bus to Armenia without having to wait very long, so that was very nice. It was about an hour to get here to Armenia, and I had to do everything I could to not fall asleep on the bus. I got to the Armenia bus terminal and got my ticket for my night bus tomorrow back to Bogota. Apparently it’s going to be a busy bus because the company I was expecting to go with was already sold out for the night bus. Luckily I was able to find another company to go with though.

I got a taxi to my hostel, called Casa Quimbaya Backpackers Hostel. It seems like a pretty cool place to be. There is a bar downstairs in the basement, that is part of the hostel, but it is full of people who are not staying here. They have live music every night from 8-10pm as well, so that was pretty cool to see. I went downstairs for one coke, listened to the band, and then just had to go to bed. I’m exhausted after that day in Cocora, but it was so worth it. That was an amazing day!