By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 23, 2003; P01
The valley narrows as we move east toward the Andes on horseback, rolling pasture rising into virgin jungle. Along the ridgelines high above us march lines of swaying wax palms. Their towering trunks, topped by small tufts of fronds, appear like visions from a Dr. Seuss tale. It is cool, quiet, although my dusty brown horse wheezes from time to time as it dips and climbs through creeks, bogs and tight stone passes. I'm feeling very much a pioneer, imagining myself a century ago with bags of coffee stacked on the back of my nag, as I move through a stretch of breathtaking wilderness without the fear that usually haunts rural excursions elsewhere in Colombia. The truth is I'm no pioneer at all. The Valle de Cocora belongs to Colombia's coffee region, a tourist destination of increasing popularity for its historical and ecological richness. Having shed years of isolation imposed by surrounding civil war and the central Andean range that marks its eastern limit, coffee country has become the heart of Colombia's nascent "rural tourism" industry that fuses history, ecology and know-your-roots national pride. Each year more than 300,000 tourists visit Quindio province, the soul of the world's most famous coffee-producing region, making it Colombia's second most popular attraction after the walled Caribbean city of Cartagena. Only a tiny fraction of the visitors are foreign, however, leaving the hillside colonial towns, remote horse trails and frothy waterfalls, and the bed-and-breakfasts that were once working coffee farms largely untouched by the global tourist trade. The tourism itself is a sign of coffee's decline. Coffee built modern Colombia until a wave of political violence in the 1950s and then the equally dislocating economic forces of globalization washed through these valleys and wiped out thousands of small farmers. Global coffee supply has far outpaced demand, even in the age of Starbucks, and Juan Valdez, the prototypical coffee farmer plucked from these fields by Madison Avenue, has turned to tourism to make ends meet. Colombia's 39-year civil war, it is safe to say, has not done wonders for its tourism industry. The U.S. State Department warns Americans against traveling to Colombia, although it recently reduced its assessment of the risk for people traveling to the resort town of Cartagena or the island province of San Andres. The warning, as well as very real security risks posed by Marxist rebel groups in the countryside, have made Colombia among the least desirable tourist destinations on the continent. This is unfortunate, because Colombia is perhaps the most diverse destination in South America, reaching from the Caribbean to the Amazon, the plains against Venezuela's border to a wild Pacific landscape. Much of the risk can be minimized by traveling with agency-arranged drivers, who know intimately the roads and regions where they live. In Quindio, rows of squat coffee bushes, branches of ripening red beans appearing among dark green leaves, are still the prevailing feature of the landscape. But thousands of acres of coffee have been uprooted in recent years to make way for plantains and cattle pastures, while the antique Willys Jeeps, turn-of-the-century train stations and tools of the coffee harvest have become mostly props in the tourist trade. Hundreds of coffee farmers have turned their traditional farmhouses, distinguished by mossy red-tile roofs and wide verandas dripping with pots of geraniums, ferns and orchids, into comfortable bed-and-breakfasts where rooms usually cost less than $20 a night. Many of them are still working farms, like La Floresta near the provincial capital of Armenia, where 42-year-old Alvaro Ramirez tends horses. "If we had a five-star hotel here, it would change everyone's view of the landscape as well," Ramirez said over coffee on the farm's terrace, a scarlet sunset glowing behind him. "The idea here is to have comfort, of course, but in a way that emphasizes the traditional elements of the region without lessening the impact of rural tourism." In a straw hat and worn boots, Ramirez picked me up at the airport at the start of a recent holiday weekend along with my wife and three children, all under 6 years old. Given the fragile security situation in the mountains surrounding Quindio province -- Colombia's two guerrilla groups, who have been known to kidnap foreigners, maintain a presence along the mountain roads and in some remote villages -- the recommended transportation is by plane from the capital, Bogota, just an hour's hop over the central cordillera. Two airlines make daily flights, and tourism officials are arranging a route between Cartagena and Armenia so foreign tourists can more easily experience the full range of Colombia's distinctive paisa and costena cultures in one visit. Ramirez, born and raised in Quindio, is a fairly representative son of the region. His family sold two coffee farms a decade ago when prices began to dip. He could ride a horse before he could walk, and he has mixed that life with work as a tourist guide. He is gracious to a fault, and though we did not stay at the hotel where he works, he served as our driver and guide throughout the weekend. Our hotel, near the town of Calarca, was built a few years ago on a soccer field, although its architecture is historically faithful to the region a half-century ago. Hotel Karlaca is a series of single-story farmhouses, painted blues and greens with orange and yellow trim, set amid courtyards that are a riot of geraniums, hibiscus and bougainvillea. Rows of eucalyptus, planted as wind breaks, scent the air. We set off with Ramirez behind the wheel of his small Renault on an hour's drive to the National Park of Agriculture and Livestock, a seven-year-old theme park that has become a destination for urban Colombians seeking a better understanding of the rural life that has been the center of Colombia's struggle for decades. My kids, apartment dwellers in Bogota, were irrationally terrified of almost every sleepy-eyed ox or shaggy goat that wandered even remotely their way. The flock of ducks that pursued their popcorn appeared particularly fiendish. Orange groves, coffee and dense stands of native bamboo cover the park's still mostly wild landscape. In a variety of small arenas, the park's staff puts on educational programs. The first we attended featured large livestock, sponsored by a breeding company called Inseminar. Given the name, I worried the show might provide more rural reality than we city slickers were prepared for. But the parade of enormous oxen, dwarf milk cows, llamas and goats was a kick even for the nervous kids. In a sleek turquoise running suit and wraparound shades, Ana Maria Castrillon was pretty clearly not someone who broke mustangs or slopped hogs on a regular basis. But she and her husband, Jaime, are fairly typical of the upper-middle-class urbanites the coffee region is attracting. The two drove nearly three hours from Cali, Colombia's third largest city, for the holiday weekend. "It's something we'd heard about from our friends," said Ana Maria, 28, peering into a pen full of veal calves. "These are places in our own country that we'd never experienced. It's marvelous." The next morning, my wife and I left the children with a nanny at the hotel and headed with Ramirez to Salento, a colonial town about an hour from Calarca. Almost everything you want to see is within an hour of everything else in Quindio, a tiny province of about a half-million people. The drive on smooth roads paved by coffee money is spectacular. In the distance looms the dark wall of the Andes, some peaks snow-capped year-round, while the Rio Quindio hugs the roadside and waters stands of pines, palms, plantains and coffee. Clusters of thick-trunk bamboo with feather-duster tops climb valley walls. Farmers have begun exporting it to Germany, where it is used to make houses, as it is here. Salento sits on a plateau rising from the Valle de Cocora, which runs in a long green chute to the east. It is cattle country, higher than the witheringly hot Panaca, but lower than the potato-growing towns above it. It is also a place where the traditional has yet to give way entirely to the hippie tourist trail, although batik, patchouli, Buddha statues (this in the most Catholic place in the country) and other non-native kitsch is showing up in some of the many arts and crafts stores. The corner canteens still fill with farmers and the wailing lament of regional campesino music before noon. Business remains brisk in the feed stores and agricultural supply shops, whose balconies are trimmed gold and sky blue, on Plaza Bolivar. Nearby, a street vendor sells fruit shakes, ladling out milk from the plastic bucket used to collect it from the cow that morning. The Willys that once carried coffee now carry tourists through quiet streets lined with buildings dating back to the 1840s into the valley below, a suggestive sign of the times. Jairo Ocampo, a cattle rancher who has spent his 62 years in the place, says simply that "tourism is the future of Salento." "That's to say," adds Ocampo, a straw hat on his head and a peasant scarf around his neck, "we have cattle and some potatoes, but this is where the money will come from." We descend into the valley, past stands of eucalyptus, to the Bosques de Cocora, a restaurant famed for its grilled river trout. It is packed on a sunny Sunday afternoon, people filling tables to hear a local band mix flute, guitar and drums into a half-traditional, half-modern melody. The trout, topped with spices and a light cream sauce, is delicious and fills us for the ride ahead. The horse trail runs along the banks of a tributary to the Rio Quindio, fed by a waterfall that is our destination. Jagged rocky peaks appear as we bounce through the valley on horseback, then disappear behind streaming clouds. Yellow farmhouses perch on small hilltops. The otherworldly wax palms, some more than 200 feet high and 200 years old, glitter with the sun and sway in the breeze. It is the most beautiful, safe place I have seen in more than three years crisscrossing Colombia. We dismount along a muddy path in the tropical forest, damp and dark and full of animal sounds, wild bromeliads and birds of paradise. The hike to the waterfall is only a few minutes, and takes us by deep caves abandoned by bears when people like us started showing up. My wife and I gaze downstream, the roar of the waterfall behind us. So too, it turns out, is Sherri Gutierrez, a San Diego native married to a Colombian with whom she runs a cut-flower exporting business. "We had this picture on our wall for years of these really tall palms," says Sherri, who has several of her children with her as well. "So we had to come up here and see them." There are a number of things to do in Quindio -- rock climbing, hiking, bird watching -- but we only had three days. We passed up river rafting -- if your kids are afraid of ducks, you might, too -- in favor of a quick visit to a wonderful butterfly sanctuary and the National Coffee Park. The latter is more an amusement park, albeit one in a lovely natural setting, disguised as a history lesson. The roller coaster appeared to have many more visitors than the museum, which is devoted to the industrialization, marketing and ecology of coffee. The highlight was the nature walk through the "forest of myths and legends," a lush tropical setting populated by statues of the gremlins and wraiths that supposedly live there. Each one outlines the fables Colombians tell each other at night that always end badly for the unfaithful, the drunk and the gamblers. Yes, my children were frightened, except the 1-year-old boy, who seemed to have been waiting to see a monster all weekend. Scott Wilson covers South America's Andean region for The Washington Post.
Details: Colombia's Coffee Region
The best way to arrange a trip to Colombia's coffee country is through a Bogota travel agency, which can book rooms, arrange transportation to and from the airport and to theme parks, and recommend places to eat. The packages are usually less expensive than purchasing the components separately, although nothing in Colombia costs much. A recommended travel agency in Bogota with experience booking coffee country trips is IdealTour, telephone 011-571-619-3462.
At
The hotels all have very good kitchens, particularly in local specialties like bandeja paisa, an enormous platter of beans, rice, fried plantain, ground beef, sausage, pork skins, arepa (the Colombian tortilla) and avocado. The restaurants across from the National Coffee Park also serve delicious local food.