Cocora Valley, Colombia 🇨🇴
One of the highlights of Colombia is the Cocora Valley which has the world’s largest wax palm trees. I was really excited to go, but slightly apprehensive with the 5-6hour hike and my stomach playing up again. I was awake a lot in the night and so we set off later than planned. We climbed into the Willy’s jeep again, fortunate to get a seat for the windy 20minute ride. Once we arrived you could see the palms dotting the horizon and we quickly found the path through the blue gate.
The path took us past a trout farm and then followed a undulating path along the Quindio river. We ducked down into shade and then the vegetation changed to almost jungle style with the river raging down rapids. It was a lot of fun crossing the shakey wooden bridges and I took a funny video of Lesley. Around 2 hours in we had to decide to take a extra hour round trip to see hummingbirds or to keep on the loop. I left the decision with Lesley as I have seen plenty of hummingbirds. Lesley voted to push on as we knew the next section was the steep part. They really were not kidding, this switchback path took us up about 500m and felt more like a mountain than a hill. After a few stops and slow pace we were rewarded with views of Cerro Morro Gacho.
We sat and ate our packed lunch watching the clouds sweeping by before pushing on for the valley. The hard part over, we kept a good pace on a steady decent into the forest of Cocora. I loved the Palm trees, just great thin trunks with a bunch of palms sat on top but very photogenic.
We got slightly detoured on the last part but miraculously ended up down by a bar where we could have a couple of cold beers to celebrate. We found the jeeps and took one back to Salento, both knackered after making the loop in 5 1/2 hours. We met a group of Colombian teenagers in the jeep, which were fun, they even insisted on having a picture of us once we had managed to clamber out of the jeep.
We both enjoyed hot showers before grabbing a quick bite to eat and tucking ourselves into bed by 8.30pm.
