CHAPTER 19
The road between Bogota and Pereria was long and winding, twisting itself up and over the Cordillera Blanca, the northern extent of the Andes mountains. After an 11 hour drive, we arrived at the hotel we had picked out of the book to find the gate locked and the lights off. It was pouring rain and getting dark, and we were quite frankly not in the mood to go “looking around” for the best deal in town, so we pulled into the driveway of a new and crisp, yet homey feeling, finca, or coffee farm, that was just down the road. Before we knew what was happening, we were ushered in out of the rain by a cheery elderly couple, sat down at their dining room table, and a cup of steaming Colombian coffee was placed in each our hands. We were shocked! It was like showing up at your grandma’s house, and being doted on like her favorite grandkid. After several attempts to feed us dinner, irrespective of our insistence that we had already eaten, they finally made us sit in their living room with them and finish watching the TV program that we had interrupted with our arrival. By this time it was way past asking our usual “hotel” questions, like how much a room would be, or if they had hot water. We were incredibly in the presence of a Colombian family we never knew we had- and just as our own grandparents, it would have broken Rafael and Martha’s hearts if we had driven all this way and not stayed the night.
Finca Villa Martha was beautiful, hand built by Señor Rafael himself on the site of an old coffee farm, with a cursory amount of plants left to provide a harvest of beans for their own use. The buildings were constructed primarily out of bamboo, there was a pool, a hot tub, and the view of the valley was something off of a postcard. In the morning, after a sumptuous traditional Colombian breakfast, Kacey and I began to wonder how much this amazing oasis of serenity was costing us… Kacey went to ask, and returned to the porch of our cabin, where I was relaxing, with a rather dejected look on her face.
“What’s the damage?” I questioned.
“70.”
“Wow, 70,000 pesos? That’s like $35 bucks.”
“No, $70 dollars, US dollars.”
My jaw dropping to the floor was enough of a response for her- she walked past me into our room and began packing our bags. It was quite an amazing thing to sit in the lap of luxury after all those months on the road, if only for a night, however blindly we had stumbled into it. And it was rather hard telling our self-adopting grandparents that we had to leave- but when you are used to spending $10 to $20 on a place to lay your head, blowing a week’s worth of our accommodation budget on one night just couldn’t go on. We said our goodbyes, and promptly drove south to the small town of Salento, where we spent the next two nights camping in a farmer’s field with his three cows. Now, $70 dollars for a glimpse at paradise would ordinarily seem like a steal-of-a-deal, but when the longevity of your trip depends on conserving all those precious pesos in your savings account, you learn to find paradise in other ways, even if that means sharing it with livestock.
The area that we were in is famously known as Colombia’s Coffee Valley. Being such, we thought it appropriate to visit a coffee farm and learn all the black magic that goes into every cup of joe guzzled down at Starbucks and the like. La Finca de Don Eduardo turned out to be run by a jolly English guy who gave us a personal tour of his hillside coffee farm, showing us the various types of coffee bean, and the drying and roasting process. His newly acquired land had been used to grow coffee for over a hundred years, but he had new intentions for this traditional coffee finca. His million-dollar-idea was to sell individual coffee trees via the internet in an “own your own coffee farm” scheme. Once you buy your tree, he’ll grow, harvest, dry, and roast the beans from your plant, package them up, and FedEx them to your doorstep. Not loving coffee, I couldn’t quite see the promise of it, but Kacey, and I’m sure the rest of you, will make old Don Eduardo his million bucks in due time.
Our time was running short, and the road to Ecuador was a long one. My mom, Kathy, was flying into Quito to meet us for Thanksgiving, and we were excited to find her and show her a taste of our traveling lifestyle. Two more long days of driving brought us to the Colombia-Ecuador boarder, but we had one more site to see before we said adios to our first South American country. The Iglesia Nuestra Senora de Las Lojas looks like a neo-gothic European cathedral precariously suspended between the two sides of a deep canyon. A long paved path leads down to the massive stone bridge that spans the gorge, and on the walls of the path, there are thousands of plaques cemented to every available spot. The plaques are put there by family members of a recently deceased person, some with pictures, some with poems, but all asking for a blessing to be placed on the lost loved one. We really didn’t have any idea what we were about to see, and needless to say were completely taken aback by this fairy tale church in the backwaters of Colombia. After taking some photos and asking for a few blessings of our own, we ran back up the path to the truck and drove off to the boarder.
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