Coffee Country

My final day in the Zona Cafetera - Coffee country. In 2011 Unesco added the Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia on the Cultural Heritage of Humanity list. Deservedly. 

This is a land of rolling green hills and coffee farms that have often been in the same families for untold generations. In a word, it’s beautiful here.

In Salento I took a coffee tour on the nearby Momota Coffee Plantation, and can now tell the difference between an arabica and robusta coffee bush on sight, 

as well as a mature coffee bean from a raw one, a first class bean from a second class one 

and what kind of trees offer just the right kind of shade to protecty the delicate arabica bush from extremes of sun and rain and from a disease called rust, which has been killing arabica since the 70’s,

One of the trees offering the best kind of shade is the yaruba - a rather lovely, tall with an umbrella of large, silver leaves on the top, which is now officially one of my favourite trees along with the gingko trees of Asia and a few others.

To finish off my tour of the coffee country, I visited Filandia today. Yes, Filandia! How could I not - coming, as I do, from Finlandia. They claim that the name Filandia comes from Filia Andes (daughter of the Andies) - which is patently absurd, as the next big town is Armenia! Clearly the name Filandia is just a tribute to Finland with a silent n.

Filandia had a cubistic viewing tower (where I’m sitting writing this on my ipad), 

which offered views of the village, 

as well as the surrounding countryside, where cowboys on horseback heard cows to greener pastures.

Greener pastures are not my next destination, however. Tonight I fly to Botoga and after a last day or two in the capital, it’s off to Finlandia, where it will take another two or three months for green to become the dominant colour in nature.

P.S. Did you know that the human eye is most attuned to the colour green? It can detect more shades of green than of any other colour. Probably this was very necessary in the hunting and gathering stage of our existance, to help us telll apart edible green plants from poisonous ones. Today I’m using that capacity to its full extent!