Salento, San Gil (Rafting, Bungee Jumping, Paragliding + more!) – Colombia

From Medellin, i took the night bus to Salento.Salento is in the coffee region of colombia and that afternoon i did a coffee tour with a dutch girl Maud from my room. Although i don’t like coffee, its one of the main things to do in Salento, and a key colombian export. It was already too late to go to cocora, and it might be interesting!

Coffee tree boutique hostel, Salento and their awesome dogs, Tommy and Freckles!

A lime tree. I learnt that lemons and limes can both be green or yellow here.

Plantains and other trees are used to provide shade to the coffee plants, and to soak up excess water, in addition to providing extra produce to sell.

Got a job picking coffee beans! Here all beans are hand picked. In the main season they have around 35 pickers a day on this farm, at the moment about 10. They get free accomodation and food, and 500 pesos per kilo they pick (12p). They can pick 100-150kilos a day.

Coffee plants take 2 years to grow, then produce beans for 5 years. After these 5 years they can be cut, and they grow back again, with a decreased rate of production and quality. Some farms they do this process up to 5 times, here only twice.

In the hostel i bumped into Mike and Ira who i had met in medellin, the four of us went for dinner, and then went to Los Amigos bar to play Tejo.

The restaurant menu dedicated a whole page to explaining what curry is!

Tejo is a colombian game where you throw a chunk of iron at a metal ring target which has packets of gunpowder attached, trying to cause an explosion. The ring is surrounded by clay, to absorb the impact of the weights and stop them bouncing off.

Although there is a point system to make it an actual game, it was hard enough and we just played for fun, trying to get as many explosions as we could.

The next day, me and Maud went to Cocora valley, and did a 5 hour hike with Allan and Celina, who are from Costa Rica. Cocora valley has thousands of Wax Palms, which are the tallest palm trees in the world, at around 60m. We took a Jeep to the valley and back. They fill the jeep up and then a few people stand and hang on to the back.

The hike showed us not only the wax palms, but huge surrounding mountains and an andean condor, the largest bird of prey in the world – i also saw these at colca canyon in peru. We had to cross numorous questionable bridges.

I travelled to San Gil from Salento. San Gil is the adventure sport capital of Colombia. I chilled out in the hostel hot tub on the first night, in preparation for paragliding the following morning in the Chicamocha Canyon.

Anika (Swiss), Jan (Nurnburg), Me, Stefan (Munich), Colin (Vancouver), Mel (Washington DC)

Me, Colin and Lukas (another german guy from the hostel) tried the local delicacy of fried ants.

The avocados (and other fruit+veg) are huge here compared to at home

Me and Colin went to Barichara, a neighbouring colonial town of San Gil, for an afternoon.

Our hostel owner had organised a promotional event this weekend, whereby hostel workers from all around colombia came to san gil to try the activities etc for free. On friday night they had a party at the 70m bungee, and this was the first time they had done night jumps. After a few beers, me and Joris has the courage to do the jump. The scariest part was definitely going up to the top in the lift, and the feeling of being about to jump, rather than the actual jump itself.

Afterwards we went out to a club with Linde, Anika, Lukas and a couple others, whose names i have forgotten as i write this!

The next day a few of us did Hydrospeeding, which was essentially holding onto a foam board and going down the river through some rapids. Photos weren’t great as the points where we were in big-ish rapids, the instructor couldn’t really take photos whilst going through them himself on his kayak.

Lukas (Germany), Colin (Canada), Jesper (Sweden), Me, Oleg (Israel)

Me, Anika and Erica went caving and saw lots of stalagtites, stalagmites and many bats! Surprisingly, there was even some small fish in the water inside the cave. Was hard to get good photos in pitch black.

After returning from caving, we stumbled upon some sort of festival/celebration in San Gil.

For 4 days, each day we tried to go white water rafting, but there was too much rain and the river was too high. Consequently, on the day that we were actually allowed to go, the river was the highest it could possibly be that we were legally allowed to go! Fun! The river Suaraz is the best rafting river in Colombia, and has several sections of class 4 and class 5 rapids. It was absolutely incredible. There were 2 boats, with 6 and 8 people plus an instructor in each. We were accompanied by 2 support kayaks to recover anyone if they fell out. We were given an hour or so of briefing and training before heading out onto the river. There was generally around 200m of rapids, followed by a similar distance that was calm, so people could be recovered if necessary. We were able to jump out and swim in one of the calm spots, as well as jumping out and floating down one of the much calmer sets of rapids.

Must watch!

The kayakers, and the instructors steering our boats/giving us commands were clearly incredibly experienced and talented. They are soon going to be graded, and are hoping to make the colombian national team again. Its possible that they could make it to the world championships in china – the colombian government doesnt support them with this huge financial cost at all and so they are selling tshirts and necklaces to help raise the funds. I supported them and got a tshirt!