View Full Version : Colombia: Hard Work Pays Off
Now for a short break for some good news:
Colombia's economy grew 5.75 percent in the third quarter from the year-earlier period after expanding 5.62 percent in the second quarter. Total investment rose to 22 percent of gross domestic product in 2005 from 15 percent in 2002, according to the government.
``The country's better growth prospects are largely a result of significant and sustained improvement in domestic security that has, in turn, led to renewed domestic confidence and double-digit growth in private investment,'' S&P analyst Richard Francis said in a statement.
NousDefionsDoc
02-23-2006, 19:54
LINK (http://www.fiftiesweb.com/elvis/elvis.wav)
Bill Harsey
02-23-2006, 20:38
NDD,
another understated classic.:D
CoLawman
02-23-2006, 22:25
:D
There is a reason Colombians are considered the businessmen of Latin America. In fact Colombia has enjoyed a stable growth of 3% for the past 20 years.
On my last trip in August, I was hanging out on a finca up on the paramo with a VP of a banking conglomorate and he was very optimistic in regards to even better growth and investment and as the article indicated it's tied directly to Uribe and his policies.
Can anyone identify this place?
The Reaper
02-24-2006, 08:47
Can anyone identify this place?
Bogota from La Calera?
TR
Bogota from La Calera?
TR
Looks very similar and is a little deceiving, especially given my comments about the paramo; however this photo was shot overlooking Medellin.
Moreover, La Calera is actually the route I took back from the finca up on the paramo. I'll look around to see if I have any photos from La Calera overlooking Bogota. I know I shot some video on the last trip; however not sure if I have any digital stills. I might be able to pull a still off the video for comparison, will see.
If it wasn't for it's problems, IMO Colombia would be one of the premier vacation destinations for gringos.
Take a look at these other photos and note the diversity in terrain.
Nice pics FILO! I like the neat bridge.
CoLawman
02-24-2006, 10:04
Beautiful Pics!
The Reaper
02-24-2006, 10:07
Beautiful Pics!
Beautiful country.
And he didn't even post any of the women there!
Bogota in the spring, with the micro-faldas.:cool:
TR
Beautiful country.
And he didn't even post any of the women there!
Bogota in the spring, with the micro-faldas.:cool:
TR
Technically those are all females in pic #2, albeit the four legged variety. :)
I happen to be married to one of those ninas. Being the smart guy that I am, I tell her that she is most beautiful Colombian and thus by default, the most beautiful woman in the world. :)
Oh to be young and single again, I would be burning tracks between Bogota and Medellin. Even my wife concedes that I can look when I'm in Medellin. :D
Great pictures!
It's a shame that some of the most beautiful places on earth (Colombia, the Philippines, Nepal...) are plagued by insurgencies.
Peregrino
02-24-2006, 11:03
Technically those are all females in pic #2, albeit the four legged variety. :)
I happen to be married to one of those ninas. Being the smart guy that I am, I tell her that she is most beautiful Colombian and thus by default, the most beautiful woman in the world. :)
Oh to be young and single again, I would be burning tracks between Bogota and Medellin. Even my wife concedes that I can look when I'm in Medellin. :D
It's the green eyes. Even the ordinary (for Medellin) women are attractive but the ones with the green eyes can take your breath away. I'm glad Colombia is on the way up. I enjoyed the time I spent there and would love to go back. It's a beautiful country with phenomenal potential. My .02 - Peregrino
Damn......looks like I won't be making it down there as I hoped. My branch manager is sending me to 3rd vs 7th. Oh well can't be too picky. :D
Beautiful pics. From the pics and documentaries I've seen I'd love to visit. A co-worker worked at the embassy in Bogota on a few occasions and said it was by far his best tour. He met his wife there and is looking around for a way to snake his way back as a retiree.
Lets not forget the fella's that are still held by the guerillas, I'm sure some guys are making a daily effort to recover them and we appreciate it.
It's the green eyes. Even the ordinary (for Medellin) women are attractive but the ones with the green eyes can take your breath away. I'm glad Colombia is on the way up. I enjoyed the time I spent there and would love to go back. It's a beautiful country with phenomenal potential. My .02 - Peregrino
The esposa has green/gold eyes with dark brown hair and I when I first saw her, I said: "hello the next Mrs...........;" I was persistent and I can't believe she finally gave in and married me. :)
NousDefionsDoc
02-24-2006, 17:06
Filo,
was that first one taken on the road from Rio Negro?
Nice pics.
Filo,
was that first one taken on the road from Rio Negro?
Nice pics.
No, from the other side. The first pic was taken coming back from Santa Fe de Antioquia; the location of the river and bridge. Pretty incredible ride from Medellin to that location and back.
Medellin has to be one of my all time favorite cities. Without question is the cleanest city I've ever been in. The city has a train system that is absolutely spotless. As mentioned earlier, even in Colombia, Medellin is known for it's chicas.......:cool:
This article provides a good description of the coffee region and provides a different perspective then the usual headlines from Colombia.
http://www.southflorida.com/travel/sfl-coffeetrailfeb26,0,7817250.story?coll=sfe-travel-wire
A peaceful place
Colombia For years, only the most adventurous travelers made their way here. But an interest in coffee is attracting a new crop of tourists.
By Juan Forero
The New York Times
Posted February 26 2006
E-mail story Print story
Our guide, Daniel Giraldo, is only 12, but he knows the terrain, all the hazards and turns of this steep, 4-foot-wide trail. The horse I am riding has done this before and uncannily finds the best passage along rocky corridors where the footing seems uncertain, or the safest path through the narrow but fast-moving waters of the rivers we cross.
Until recently, the only people who would have negotiated this path were stoic farmers in rubber boots, bedraggled army patrols or the occasional band of Marxist guerrillas. This is Colombia, after all, a little-understood country whose very name is synonymous with cocaine traffickers and civil conflict.
But this coffee-growing region tucked into the mountains of central Colombia has rarely known violence. Now, local businessmen and hacienda owners, who for the last decade have made the region a vibrant tourism destination for Colombia's middle class, are trying to lure visitors from abroad by touting the beauty of its rolling hills, venerable coffee farms and row after row of shimmering coffee bushes.
So I have little concern -- other than for my horse's footing -- as we climb on this crisp November day. We have already traversed a tapered green valley, the fields on either side rising abruptly into sharp-peaked mountains. Parrots and what locals called yellow-eared sparrows fly past the odd, 200-foot wax palms that are native to these Andean mountains. In the distance we can see the fincas, or farms, whose owners grow coffee and potatoes and raise prize bulls that pass through the nearest town, Salento, on market day.
At 8,700 feet, we reach Acaime (pronounced ah-cah-EE-meh), an outpost for biologists and, increasingly, tourists, where we sip agua de panela, a hot sugar cane-based drink, and watch hummingbirds hover at feeders. Omar Guzman, the caretaker, explains how this lovely corner -- largely unknown to the outside world -- is slowly being discovered.
"People want to learn, to see what we have," says Guzman, who like others here is lean and nimble, better to negotiate steep trails.
Three days more on horseback and we would be climbing Los Nevados, at 17,440 feet one of the great peaks in the Andes, a trip increasingly on the menu for eco-tourists. That is if adventure is what you're after.
A diverse land
Of course, the problem with Colombia as a tourist destination is that for as long as anyone can remember it has offered too much adventure. A civil conflict made kidnappings a real hazard. The conflict is far from over, and the risks remain in several otherwise beguiling regions, like the vast cattle plains and the rebel-infested Macarena hills, where cold mountain streams roll over a beet-red bed of submerged flowers.
But Colombia is huge, twice the size of France, and offers perhaps more cultural and geographical diversity than any other country in South America.
Its capital, Bogota, has been transformed in recent years into a cosmopolitan city, full of museums and restaurants. The walled Caribbean city of Cartagena rivals the old quarter of Havana with its centuries-old buildings. Colombia's little-known Pacific coast is rugged and heartbreakingly beautiful, with islands that, like the better-known Galapagos to the south, are full of ecological wonders.
In many areas of the country, a three-year government offensive has pushed rebel groups back. There are now a few safe pockets beginning to attract foreigners.
Among them is the Eje Cafetero (the "coffee crossroads"), made up of three diminutive states -- Quindio, Risaralda and Caldas -- about 100 miles west of Bogota, recognized as the source for some of the world's best coffee. In the smallest and most charming, Quindio, beat-up World War II-era Willy Jeeps carry loads of bananas and heavy sacks of coffee to market on meandering country roads. The state's 11 towns are simultaneously charming and a little worn on the edges.
Montenegro, one of the liveliest, has a bustling plaza, where musicians play lovelorn ballads as teenagers gather under shady trees and weary farmers sip coffee at the many cafes. Salento, almost everyone's favorite, is built on the razor's edge of a mountain, its houses and church glistening white in the distance and framed by towering mountains.
On a slow drive across Quindio, the spectacular panorama bursts into view at unexpected turns. Plump hillsides teem with banana trees or coffee plants, many of them decades old. Slender gullies feature the cartoonish guaduales, giant bursts of bamboo topped by delicate foliage.
"There are 12 tones of green, wherever you look," Maria del Rocio Baena, the owner of one farm, tells me.
For visitors from frenzied cities like Medellin or Cali, coffee country is an oasis of sorts, a journey back to a more tranquil and traditional Colombia, where most people lived on farms and coffee was king.
The central experience in coffee country is staying at the haciendas. They are old and creaky farmhouses, virtually all of them painted in bright, whimsical colors, their porches overflowing with orchids and ferns. Many of them are working farms that offer tours of the coffee fields and the surprisingly old-fashioned steps taken to turn a bright red bean into a valuable commodity. The 20 best make up the so-called Haciendas del Cafe.
The owners are usually the descendants of settlers who arrived in the 1800s to found small, tight-knit communities and embark on the production of what would become Colombia's economic engine for decades.
Coffee farmers formed cooperatives and commercialized their coffee. The National Federation of Coffee Growers, the organization that markets Colombian coffee, paved roads, built schools, founded a bank and owned an airline. All of this was easy half a century ago, when coffee went for $5 a pound at today's prices and accounted for 80 percent of the country's exports.
The good times, however, did not last and by this decade, coffee prices had tumbled to less than 50 cents a pound, half of coffee's value from the late 1990s (the price of coffee is now back up to $1.30 a pound). Farmers here turned to bananas, macadamia nuts and berries. And they also turned to tourism, realizing that their haciendas could easily double as bed-and-breakfast inns.
One of the haciendas, El Balso, belongs to Julian Morales de la Pava and his wife, Sara Espinosa. A century-old two-story farmhouse with five guest rooms on 27 acres outside of Armenia, Quindio's capital, it is painted red and white, with blue trim.
The big veranda is filled with old leather chairs, a hammock and tables. The rooms are outfitted with antique brass beds and mahogany dressers. There is no glass in the windows, just wooden shutters that, when open, overlook a luxuriant garden of mango and guayaba trees. In the distance is a small, well-kept pool.
"You just don't even want to turn the radio on," says Octavio Largo, a retired university professor, who goes there for the tranquility, the light breeze coming off the mountains, the multicolored gardens. El Balso's other key attraction is that it continues to churn out coffee for export.
"This is my life," Morales de la Pava, 69, explains as he leads me out into the field for an instructive tour. "It's what my father did, what my grandfather did."
Such tours are full of the unexpected, since each farm has its own ways of collecting and preparing coffee for market. Each farm, too, serves coffee. But visitors should not expect coffee tastings or even very good coffee, for that matter. The paradox about Colombia is that while it is known worldwide for the quality of its coffee beans, outside of a few choice restaurants in big cities, Colombians have yet to master the art of making a good cup of coffee. What you usually get is a very light cup, too soft on the coffee to offer much taste. In coffee country, there are no espresso machines or baristas.
At Morales de la Pava's farm, Marinela Rojas Martinez, the young, energetic housekeeper, cooks up a plentiful breakfast of scrambled eggs with onions and tomatoes, what Colombians called pericos, along with cornmeal arepas, fresh-squeezed juice and bread. But there is no lunch or dinner. I wander over to the Fonda Mirador, a short drive away, for lunch. An expansive, rustic restaurant built of bamboo, the Fonda offers a stunning view of five tall Andean peaks. In Colombia, as in Argentina, steak is king, and here the cook specializes in succulent cuts, served with rice and beans, avocado and plantains.At one of the several restaurants in the valley, you can order up the brook trout famous in Salento's foothills.
Getting around coffee country is easy. Inn owners themselves often offer to drive visitors to nearby towns, or to see the sights. Innkeepers can also call local cabbies, who charge about $6 an hour to take visitors on tours or drive them to local attractions, which range from horseback rides into the countryside to whitewater rafting on the region's many rivers.
My driver, Francisco Ruiz, 34, tools on Quindio's narrow roads while offering hotel and dining suggestions and remarking on the region's rich history. One key stop on his tour is the Coffee Park, outside Montenegro. The Coffee Park's carefully tended 128 acres are dedicated to coffee and other native plants, and feature a train, a museum and a cable car.
Luxury is not expensive
Still, for most people the central attraction is the accommodations themselves. They range from backpacking havens to sprawling all-inclusive resort hotels to the historic haciendas. Nothing is expensive, with even the best haciendas costing less than $50 a night.
One of the most lively and cheapest I came across was the Plantation House, a five-room hotel run by a former British businessman in Salento. Built on a bluff and painted green and yellow, the inn is postcard pretty. Coffee plants grow in a garden, along with oranges and lemons, giving off a pleasant fragrance.
The day I arrived at this 120-year-old restored plantation, the porticos and rooms were teeming with mountain bikers. In the kitchen, I found two young foreigners, David Botzer, 29, an Israeli computer programmer, and Peter Meek, 24, a mechanical engineer from New Zealand. Colombia had been an afterthought for them, mysterious and risky. But both said they found the spectacularly rugged coffee country to be safe and the people courteous.
The most fanciful place I found was the 119-year-old Finca la Cabana, outside the town of Calarca. Hugging the farmhouse are rows and rows of coffee plants that, along with banana and other fruit trees, form a 321-acre farm. With seven rooms, the hacienda may sound small, but it sprawls.
Its owners, the Sierra family, have used every nook and cranny to house an array of artifacts that evoke the elegant life the coffee gentry enjoyed until a couple of decades ago. Rooms are decorated with old religious engravings, black-and-white photographs of past occupants, ceramic statuettes and musty books. A sitting room features Art Deco furniture and old hats and furs.
The wall of La Cabana's bar is cluttered with engravings of matadors, posters of 19th century damsels and mariachi hats. Its caretaker, Dona Ernestina, fawns over guests, offering hearty meals cooked in a 100-year-old wood stove and steady refills of fresh-squeezed juice.
"It's got a little pool, but that's not what you go for," says Chris Marshall, an Englishman who has lived in Colombia for two years. "You go for the atmosphere, you go for the history."
Back in Salento, I choose to stay in another old hacienda, the Alto del Colonel, loosely translated to mean the Colonel's Perch. From its wraparound porch, cluttered with antique furniture, I can see an exuberant valley and the verdant mountains that enclose Salento. Classical music wafts from a stereo, and I can hear children playing in the streets below.