Colombian Coffee

Next thing to do in Salento was to visit a coffee finca (estate). We decided to combine this with a horse ride since it was an hour away by foot and we were happy enough with our efforts from the day before. 

Here's us on our horses. Spaghetti O was rude enough to immediately forget her horse's name as soon as she learnt it. My horse was called Piel Roja which is probably one of the most boring names ever. It means red skin. Anyway I'd requested the fastest horse and that he was. 

So off we went towards the coffee finca through the beautiful Salento area. 

 

Here's me riding down through the banana trees into the Don Elias' coffee Finca.

We did a short tour where we learnt about the coffee plants (which originated in Ethiopia). Here's one of the plants. It flowers twice a year and each flower turns into a coffee bean. 

Please see below an excellent photo demonstrating the various stages of the coffee bean. 

All of the harvesting is done here by hand. They take off the outer skins and let the beans dry in a green house type thing like below. This is a nice change to Vietnam where they just chuck a tarp out on the road and dry them with the traffic passing by!

After that they get roasted in big pots and then either ground or sold as whole beans. I think he said they export 80% of what they grow. 

They also have lots of other plants in with the coffee plants like bananas to provide shade. I learnt that a banana tree only takes 9 months to grow (really tall), produces one big bunch of bananas and then dies! Whaaaat?

At the end of the tour we drank coffee obviously. And I met a cat. He's purring just in case you think this is an animal welfare issue. 

Oh and the other thing to do in Salento is to play a weird game called Tejo. You throw a metal puck thing at a metal ring (lodged in mud) which has four little packets of gunpowder on it. There were also some other rules which were clearly unimportant since we just wanted an explosion. Unfortunately we failed and so did the few locals who I gave the opportunity to demonstrate it to us. But here it is, the sport(?!) of Tejo...