After a couple of days lounging by the pool in Calle 11 and prioritising where we wanted to go first, we booked one night in a hostel on a farm close to 'Minca'.
Minca is about 600m above Santa Marta and accessible by one public bus costing about 50c from Santa Marta. Minca region is known for its coffee and cocoa plantations, hiking, waterfalls and streams. After a couple of days in the searing heat and melting by the pool some cooler climate was appealing. We booked into 'Finca Carpe Diem', a large farm about twenty minutes up a very bumpy dirt track from a small village called 'Bonda'. The farm, we learnt grew everything from coffee to mangoes, grapefruit, cashew nuts, exotic fruits such as guanabana, zapote and nispero as well as vegetables. The also keep bees and various animals.
We set off with small backpacks, leaving our big bags in Calle 11. After a forty minute bus journey, with two local guys talking to us in thick Spanish (and us looking confused and politely asking them to speak slowly), they shuffled us off the bus at Bonda. We were approached by two young guys who looked about 14 asking us if we needed a 'mototaxi'. We did as a matter of fact and the mototaxi they were referring to was their scooter, us on the back and not a helmet in sight. We agreed the price of $3 or 10,000 pesos and got on. My guy whizzed off leaving Kirsty behind. My first thought was......this guy could literally drive me anywhere, and I had no clue where we were or who he was. Although I don't think certified mototaxi drivers existed in this little village and sometimes you just have to trust the adolescent Colombian scooter driver with your life. So I did. We scooted off and after about five minutes whizzing through the little streets we reached a very steep windy dirt track, littered with massive rocks. I could finally see Kirsty behind me looking less than comfortable clinging on to her 'driver'. My mototaxi driver then whipped out his mobile phone, continued swerving past the rocks with one hand and proceeded to play traditional Colombian reggaetone music on his Samsung. Standard. After a twenty minute, clammy (oh so clammy) clamber up we finally reached the small Finca. With numb bums we peeled ourselves off the young Colombians, paid and wobbled up to the reception to check in.
We had a small dorm room to ourselves complete with mossie nets above each bed. The farm was really quiet and had a lovely little swimming pool and more resident cats. My kinda place. All the staff were local and one lady took us through all the different hikes, nearby waterfalls and farms in Spanish of course. We decided to opt for a hike that looked reasonably manageable, about an hour and a half trail leading up to a look out where you could catch views over Santa Marta and the Caribbean Sea. Easy. We set off from the farm and followed the small yellow wooden signs nailed to various trees, we quickly realised this 'easy hike' was a clamber, up muddy banks and through thick bushes and trees. It didn't look like anyone had passed through the track in a long time. After forty minutes (a very sweaty forty minutes) we were almost at the top, I was powering on up the hill singing along to no song in particular when Kirsty suddenly told me to stop. And not to move. I looked down and about an inch away from the foot was a snake......F***K. Right there slithering in between my two feet....I've never moved to fast. I legged it about ten metres up the hill through the thick bushes and leaving Kirsty on the other side of the snake. We debated for a few minutes whether to carry on and after realising neither of us was fit enough or willing to carry the other down the mountain if a poisonous snake should bite us (tad dramatic maybe), we (reluctantly) decided to turn back and kept our eyes fixed to the ground, not one song was sang on the way down I might add.
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| A snake and lots of bushes separating Kirsty and I |
That evening we had a meal cooked in the restaurant, a burger of all things (although we're not quite sure what meat we had...goat/dog/cow/dog)?! It was good though and we had a very quiet evening with only six other people staying there too.
The next morning we walked twenty minutes along a creek in the forest to a small locally owned cocoa farm. We were told by the staff at Carpe Diem that you could just trot up and pay about $5 for a tour of the farm. We were greeted by a lovely local family and a lady called Dianna gave us a half hour tour of her farm, showing us the cocoa trees,we tried the slimey fruit, she explained the drying out, roasting and grinding process as well as where and who they sell their beans to (mostly America and Japan)! She was the loveliest lady and seemed to enjoy chocolate as much as we did (which is a lot)! We tried some of the cocoa beans, ground beans with cinnamon and sugar and we obviously had to buy some of the chocolates at the end to take away. We chatted to Dianna in Spanish about Christmas coming up, about the farm and the beautiful butterflies whizzing around us (she had no English so we made it through with mine and Kirsty's Spanish combined)...I think!
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| Learning about growing, roasting and grinding cocoa to turn into chocolate |
We mentally prepared ourselves for our mototaxi and more reggaetone back down the bumpy hill and caught the bus back to Calle 11, safe in the knowledge that there should be no snakes lurking around the pool here.
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| Bargain feed for $3 |
Next Stop: Back to Rodadero (Santa Marta)
Food/Drink: Mest and vegetable soup, fresh juice and standard chicken/fish/meat, plantain, beans and rice for a bargain of $3 in Rodadero. Cooked in the hostel.
Bars/Restaurants: Finca Carpe Diem restaurant, Charles Pollo for local food in Rodadero.
Stayed: Calle 11 in Rodadero. Finds Carpe Diem in Bonda/Minca, $11 for a 'dorm' to ourselves.
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