After an epic failure in the last post and facing an unexpected dead end, we found our way back to the main road. We have spent few days in northern part of a city called Ibague. After driving on the shelf road with epic views of deep valley down, we got to the southern boundary of the Clouds National Park where we visited few weeks ago from its northern entrance. The drive was beautiful, but unfortunately the national park wasn’t accessible from the southern gate so we ended up staying in the parking of one of many camp/restaurant/hotel facilities in the valley.
The next day, we stocked up in Ibague market and headed toward Toche. The plan was driving West toward a very touristic part of Colombia on the highway and take a detour somewhere along the way toward north and carry on driving west toward Salento on a dirt track that we managed to find.
As we left Ibague toward Armenia on the highway 40 which is a wonder of engineering we kept looking down the deep valley on our right to find the little dirt road that supposedly could take us down the valley and across the river toward the offroad detour that we had in mind.
We finally found the entrance and had to do one of the scariest drive that we had done so far in our lives to get down the track all the way down to the river, over the river and back up zigzagging the side wall of the valley to the shelf road on the other side of the valley.
They have build an impossible zig zag road literally on the edge of the wall with really tight corners and no space to maneuver and obviously no way to turn around in case we wanted to change our mind and quit. We both experienced the scariest drive that we could imagine till that date!
Once we got to the other side of the valley, it started to feel much safer and we started to enjoy another epic drive in Colombia. The slopes were covered with coffee plantation with rows of banana trees in between. There were lots of potatoes harvested and piled up on the side of the road for delivery too. After 4 to 5 hours on the windy, muddy, slippery road with epic views, we started to spot the iconic Colombian palm trees in the distance.
As soon as we started to see the scenery ahead of us, we knew that taking the detour to witness all this in a remote area definitely worth it. It was almost lunch time when we arrived in a small town calle Toche. A beautiful sleepy town up in the mountain that we were planning to stay in for few days before heading to Salento.
After having a local lunch in the only shop/restaurant of the town we found a great camping spot in the farm on the outskirt of the town, where we had our own hot water spring and a beautiful location next to the river to call it home for the next few days.
The morning that we wanted to leave camp and head west toward Salento,we caught up with the farm owner and he said that the road from Toche to Salento is way worse than the road that we already took to Toche and because of the rain in the last few nights, there’s so much mud on the road. Once again, we learnt that we faced another dead end in Colombia. The only good news was the fact that there were a better way to take and we could skip the scary part of the journey back.
We got back to the epic highway 40 with stunning and numerous tunnels that they carved through the mountains. Colombians are masters of building roads in this impossible terrains. The next stop for us was Salento, the touristic charming little town that we couldn’t reach the day before via the back roads.The first task like always was finding a decent peaceful spot on the edge of the town. We secured a sweet spot next to horse stables where a nice Colombian family were arranging horse trekking tours to the nearby coffee plantations.
We called it home for a few night. The camp spot was calm, peaceful and clean. We also had access to their clean showers and toilets and it was only few minutes walk to the town center. That’s what any overlander dream of 🙂
Salento is also hub for coffee plantation tours. It’s really easy to arrange one. There is small tourist office in the town main plaza where you can book one of many places available and the jeeps lined up next to the plaza, are leaving every 10 minutes and take tourists to the nominated farms. We were the only people who were visiting the farm that we picked and had a great time learning about coffee after being in the middle of coffee plantations for the last two months.
From Salento, we had a quick stop in another little town called Filandia, had a quick tour of two of the main tourist hubs in Colombia called Armenia and Perreira that we didn’t liked but Filandia was really charming. After visiting Filandia, we stayed for a day in the farm of a Colombian overlanding family who are kind enough and offer a place to stay to all the overlanders that are passing by. Our stay was short but it was a great and refreshing change to our local routines.
After Armenia, we had to start heading south toward Ecuador annd unfortunately we had to pick our route strategically since lots of areas south of where we were, aren’t safe enough to allow us roam around freely. But we had to visit Cali to pick up some spare parts for our car which we could only do in Colombia and in Cali.
To do that and make sure that we are going through the southern part of the country safely, we had to cover a lot of kilometers in the next week before crossing the border to Ecuador.
In the next post, we’ll cover the last leg of our trip in Colombia before crossing into our second country in South America. Till then take care and have fun.
