From White Gold to Black... Coffee That Is

Trip Start Mar 28, 2010
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Trip End May 31, 2011


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Where I stayed
Mountain House Hostel
(Manizales hotels)

Flag of Colombia  ,
Thursday, May 26, 2011

As much as it would be a crime to travel to Argentina and not sample the meat and/or wine, so too would it be a crime to travel to Colombia and not sample the coffee. Coffee is the world's second most traded commodity behind oil and Colombia just happens to be the third largest exporter (behind #1 Brazil and #2 Vietnam). With this in mind and having just spent three weeks on the coast of Ecuador, we decided to skip the lengthy trip to the Caribbean coast and Cartegena in exchange for a few days in the Zona Cafetra, or Coffee Country. We arrived in Manizales, one of the launching points for visiting the area coffee plantations, after a stunning though occasionally nauseating ride through the mountains from Medellin. Though Manizales is supposedly 'nothing to look at’, we found the young university city to be quite intriguing and surprisingly easy on the eyes – the wealth of mountain scenery including a backdrop of snow-capped mountains and volcanoes didn’t hurt. Though the city is also known as a base for which to explore these mountains, Los Nevados, there is no doubt coffee is the region’s main industry – there’s even a Juan Valdez Café
Coffee fruit
Coffee fruit
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Unfortunately, our original plan to spend the night on a plantation was thwarted by a cranial cramp with respect to cost on Lyndsey’s part. She tends to have trouble with numbers. Luckily, most plantations offer day trips so our coffee dreams were not entirely dashed. Despite the fact our hostel offered an option to tour an area plantation, we opted to do our own legwork and visit a farm independently. Our hope was by doing so we would avoid too many crowds and when we finally arrived at Hacienda Guayabal we discovered not only were there no crowds but there were no visitors – at all. Yet another indication that Colombia is still in its fledgling stages of international tourism. After brief introductions and a pretty decent cup of coffee we were off with our guide, Louisa, for an in-depth look at coffee production from seed to cup. Two and a half hours took us through the sprouting and planting methods, the maturation process of the trees, coffee fruit development and harvest, fruit and bean processing, and eventually exportation of the final product. Hacienda Guayabal is a non-commercial operation, meaning they only export to larger companies who further sell to the Starbucks of the world – sadly this also means none of their fabulous hand-harvested coffee was for sale to us. Though Shane had previously visited a plantation in Panama we both found the tour to be incredibly informative and entertaining, not to mention beautiful in terms of scenery. We can’t seem to get over how green this country is. After the tour we were treated to an incredible lunch at the Hacienda’s main house and yet another cup of incredible coffee. We would have loved to stay the night at the plantation but, alas, it is not in our cards this time around.

Fully caffeinated yet thoroughly relaxed, we returned to Manizales for one final night before boarding our last bus ride of the trip. Colombia has so much to offer and we truly are heartbroken that we don’t have more time here. But our homeward tickets have been long-ago purchased so Bogotá, here we come.
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