Thursday, May 17, 2012

Coffee Country, day two

Today we left the beautiful Hacienda Bambusa (where I could live forever, if you remember from the last post) to go on a Willys Jeep tour.  Now in case you were born sometime after the 1940s and you don't have an unnatural love like my husband for Willys Jeeps, let me show you what this 1940s-era, restored Jeep looks like:
Mac on the back of the Willys

I was in the front between Omar and Jimmy's mom.  Here's Jimmy caught in the rearview mirror studying the dashboard with total envy.  He's ready to trade our car in for a very impractical Willys Jeep.

The trip was amazing.  We rode along a national park road (dirt) that's surrounded by beautiful farms for miles and miles.  We climbed to 13,000+ feet, enjoyed coffee and lunch in a very modest, humble farmhouse, saw an abandoned FARC camp, and saw the towering wax palms that can grow to over 200 meters tall.  It was an amazing day in what is surely the most beautiful part of Colombia.

The Andes 

The Dragon Tree

traffic jam

a homemade loading chute for cows, covered in mosses

What Omar, our guide, said was the highest soccer field in South America!

the bleachers for the soccer field (or so I thought)

the spectators at the soccer field

the famous wax palms that the region is famous for

Standing underneath the palms makes you feel very, very small

Mac walking up the pathway that was originally used when Simon Bolivar was battling the Spaniards for control of Colombia

A very makeshift retaining wall holding up the road

the trading post!  This is the only store out in the countryside, and everybody knows the truck with supplies comes on Sunday afternoon.  So they came and they waited.  It was sort of like Little House on the Prairie.


the colorful town of Salento

more of Salento

more of Salento

the trip when Mac became a coffee-drinker

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