Salento and a minor hiccup

Off to Bogota airport first thing in the morning. Called an Uber, there in 5 minutes, polite, cheaper than the official airport taxis. 15 minutes to the airport. Many Transmillenia buses on the way full of people in their dedicate lanes!

We are flying Avianca to Armenia airport. No we haven't changed countries that's the name of a mountain city. We had arranged a taxi to pick us up after we negotiated on the phone with 3 drivers. Our driver was great and on the way to Salento we found more accurately our options of moving on

from him and couple of his cousins he called. No chance of taxi (extremely expensive as Salento is a bit touristy). And the bus to our next place Manizales was not direct.

We arrived in 40 minutes to our accommodation The plantation house is a hostel that also organises coffee tours on the Don Edwardo Finca. The 2nd is what brought us here but the accommodation was not to be. Water pipe broken therefore no room to go to. After some frustrated exchanges the lady, Cris told us they will get us to another accommodation but they could not find the key for that. To cut the story short they relocated us to this house that apparently was not properly cleaned but it was more than OK. They transferred us there and promised to get us a taxi if we needed to the bus station

This whole thing (which was minor) wasted us time and without a reason frustrated us so we decided to change our plan for the next day and go directly to Medellin. The reason we did not initially wanted to do that is that the bus was going to take 9 hours. But as we realised that our intermediate stop needed a change too we took the plunge when the guy at the bus station promised the bus to Medellin takes only 7 hours... Sure?

But finally the coffee tour time came and all was forgotten with Sabrina the host of the tour and an amazing store of knowledge transported us to a 3 plus hours of a journey to coffee history, methods of cultivation, coffee varieties, process of planting and growing the plants. Gathering and deshelling them, before selling them.

A bit of a make do roasting helped to make us some coffee after grinding on the spot.

We'll never take a cup of coffee for granted again.

Then we went for a long walk to the farm that was a long way down which meant a loooong way up after but we managed and was great learning the story of Sabrina's family and information about the harvesting and the workers at the farm.

As well as coffee there were many beautiful plants and fruits,( pineapple, bananas, strawberries, raspberries) and tobacco. The tobacco is primarily used to draw insects away from the delicate coffee plants.