Salento is situated west of Bogota. A fairly lengthy 6-8 hours by bus, depending on your luck. In order to save time, I flew from Bogota to Pereira, then took a 1 hour bus ride to Salento, with a bunch of people from the plane. The bus driver was actually so kind that he found out where the hostel was that I was staying at was and dropped me off right at the corner so I only had to walk about 100m – not that it was a far walk from the bus terminal anyway!
It is a small village but is super colourful and pleasant. It seems that nearly each house in town has a different colour scheme and decorates the outside of their houses with bright colours. It is really wonderful to see.
A half an hour Jeep trip into the Valley of Cocora is where the hike to see Colombia’s National tree starts. What tree is it you may be asking- the giant wax palms that grow up to 60m in height! The jeep has two benches inside, 6-8 passengers inside and 2-3 hanging off the back step!
The anticlockwise hike starts with a downhill section, then continues through muddy trails – trails that got much muddier as it started raining 10minutes into our hike and continued for the next 2 hours! I did the walk with Tobias- a Swedish fella who has also been travelling for the last 6 months. So we did some note comparing as to what we have seen and what our favourite places were. We did not stop and take the hummingbird detour as it was still raining and we didn’t think any of them would be out, and did see some on the top of the hill- beautiful turquoise green with long tails. Stunning! You can hear them flying past before you see them usually as their fast beating wings make some noise.
The top of the mountain should yield stunning views of valleys and wax palm trees…but with the low hanging clouds all we got was white. Somewhat disappointed, wet and very muddy we carried on, hoping for the best. Eventually as we arrived to a couple of viewpoints we got a good view of the palm forest and were rewarded with the huge palms and great views of the valley.
