After returning to Pereira from Armenia we met up with another American couple who are looking for a place to retire. They are like me, they like the pueblos more than the city, so we are traveling together for a few days checking out the coffee region north of Pereira.
My girlfriend and I rented a car in Pereira and checked out of the airbnb and met our friends at their hotel. Our first stop was in La Virginia, a town about half an hour outside Pereira where we stopped for lunch at a roast chicken place and the food was actually pretty good. Cost 7,000 pesos each and more than enough to eat.
La Virginia is at the confluence of the Río Cauca and the Río Risaralda in a low plain about 1000 feet elevation. Hot and muggy at noon but by the time we left in late afternoon it was starting to cool off.
The most noticeable feature, other than feeling like you´re sitting in a flood plain zone, which we were, is the smell. Two distinct smells, one is the sugar cane mill north of the village that sends a dark gray plume of smoke and an acrid odor into the air. The other is the smell of manure being spread on the cane fields up and down the valley. The smell of pig manure is cloying and nauseating. Fortunately we had lunch before we got to the mill and fields, otherwise we would have bypassed altogether to escape the retched odors.
We took a side trip up a steep little mountain to the village of Belacazar where there is a rather imposing statue of Jesus called Christo Rey perched up on a knoll. We paid our fee and walked into the statue. First floor is a cute little chapel with only 6 small pews. Then a steep staircase leading up and up to the very head of Christ where you can go through a trap door into a anteroom and stare out at the view through the nostrils of Christ. Pretty heady stuff, (lol, couldn´t resist).
The view is actually quite awesome from the observation platform, with the Rio Cauce valley spreading out southward towards Cali, and the Rio Risaralda valley spreading out northward towards the highlands of Anserma and Río Sucio, in Caldas Department. The tour guide pointed out the tiny pueblo of Santuario on the other side of the Rio Risaralda Valley which was our destination for the night.
A quick lap through the village of Belacazar shows its just a thin strip of village running along the ridge for about 1/2 a mile. At the end of the strip is a park surrounded by parked jeeps waiting for whatever. It wasn´t clear what they were waiting for and we didn´t ask. Belacazar didn´t appeal to any of us as a place to live so we just looked around along the main drag and headed back down the mountain to the valley.
From there we headed up Route 50 north towards Santuario, supposedly less than one hour away, but in reality almost two hours driving because the road is absolutely wretched. Several places it is just rocks and dirt and potholes where trying to drive more than 10 mph was bone jarring.
At the little village of La Marina we turned left up the mountain to Santuario. Staying to the right would have taken us to the sister village of Apia, which we were planning to visit the next day.
At dusk our first view of Santuario was a cluster of lights up the mountain and off in the distance. It took us almost another hour to finally get there and we drove into the village and arrived at the principal park which has been completely remodeled and is really very nice.
We checked into the Hotel Montz for 27,000 per room including hot water. It´s a block off the park. There is another newer hotel in the park but we were concerned it would be noisy. The Montz turned out to be comfortable and the owners are Colombian but lived in the US for several years so it was interesting to talk to them.
We liked Santuario, despite its remoteness and difficult access road. None of us want to live there because it is so far out, about 2 hours at least from Pereira.
Around the park there are lots of restaurants and bars with sidewalk tables and lots of places to sit inside the park. The residents were very friendly and we met several people who had lived in US at one time or another, most of them had lived in Englewood, NJ which is not far from where I used to live.
Next morning we drove cross country on a dirt road that took us to the sister pueblo of Apia. We only stayed for an hour, to have breakfast and look around. Apia is unique because of the gradient of the park. It is very steep. from the uphill side you can stare across the rooftops of two story houses on the downhill side. The church is about 150 feet wide and on the uphill side there are four steps leading to the front patio but on the down hill side there are 24 steps, a drop of about 15 feet in a 150 feet run.
In Santuario and Apia we saw a noticeable number of indigenous families, short and squat with colorful dresses. Carrying their babies in shawls wrapped over their backs. We thought about driving further north to the village of Pueblo Rico which is on the frontier to the department of Chocó. Puerto Rico has a large population of indigenous, but we decided instead to head for the village of Viterbo, back in the Río Cauca valley.
Viterbo is a smaller version of La Virginia, very hot in the valley floor so we just drove on through and then back south through La Virginia and headed back toward Pereira with a plan to turn back to the north to visit the village of Marsella.
Just outside of Pereira we drove by the airport and turned back north to a tiny village called Combia, which is just a group of stores and houses and fincas at a crossroads. Supposedly Combia is famous for Rhumba Bars and for traffic congestion because all the garbage trucks have to squeeze through this one little intersection to get the state landfill a couple miles further on. We stopped here for lunch and it was typical Colombian fare, 7,000 per plate.
Outside of Combia heading towards Marsella we started really getting into the coffee country. Mile after mile of coffee farms. Very pretty scenery as we climbed high into the mountains on a switchback highway that has been newly paved, but showing signs of breaking down again already. Little ridges forming like frost heaves we see in the northern US are actually caused by small earthquakes. Rather sobering to think about the frequency of earthquakes in these mountain passes.
From Combia to Marsella takes about 45 minutes and I counted at least 200 curves. It is the crookedest road I´ve ever been on. Arriving in the park in Marsella is like a breath of fresh air though. There are lots of sidewalk cafes and places to sit and watch people going about their business. This village was the scene of the filming of a telenovela called Las Hermanaitas Calle. Its about two sisters named Calle. Very charming little village, one of the prettiest I´ve been to so far. My friends and I like it and would live there if it weren´t so far from Pereira, about 1 and a half hours by bus or slightly less by car.
The really big problem with Marsella though is the Internet. It is only available by satellite by one provider and not very reliable according to several we talked to. The signal is only available if your rooftop has a direct line of sight to the roof of the municipal building where the broadcast antenna is mounted. Several people we talked to said it was hopeless to get a signal in many places in the village and surrounding farms, and the top speed signal is very slow. We talked to one satellite user who said last 12 months his internet has been out of service a total of 14 times, usually for 2 to 4 days each time. Cell phone service is only 3G and also slow, so getting internet on cell phone is sort of like old fashioned dial up. I would not be able to operate my business with such slow internet so i have no plan to consider Marsella as a retirement spot.
We stayed over in a hotel a block off the square that cost 35,000 per night per room with hot water shower. Next morning we flipped a coin to see if we would go back to Pereira then head north to Santa Rosa de Cabal, or if we would go overland to Chinchiná in Caldas Department, then turn south to Santa Rosa and then on to Pereira.
The overland route won out and we´re glad it did. There is beautiful scenery going from Marsella to Chinchiná. We saw a very high waterfall off to the right as we left Marsella, very beautiful tumbling down through coffee trees. Later on we crossed that little river and it was one of the most picturesque i can remember ever seeing. Again, miles and miles of coffee farms and long range vistas. From the high ridge tops we could see at least 25 miles all the way back to Mt. Tatama which is an extinct volcano back towards Santuario, and in the other direction we could see the snow clad slopes of the Nevada del Ruiz, an active volcano about 30 miles north of Manizales.
We had lunch in Chinchiná and enjoyed walking around a bit. I had heard that Chinchiná is a poor, crime ridden village but it really didn´t appear that way to us. It actually looked pretty prosperous. There is a nice big hospital and a huge coffee processing facility there.
Chinchiná is called the heart of the coffee region, but we hear that all the time. Everybody wants to claim that title. My girlfriend and I want to visit Chinchiná again, and then spend some time visiting the other pueblos around Manizales. Maybe next month.
Leaving Chinchina we could turn north to go to Manizales only a half hour away, but our friends had a flight from Pereira the next day so we headed south on Route 29 to Santa Rosa and then to Pereira to drop them at a hotel near the airport, then we doubled back to spend the night in Santa Rosa.
Santa Rosa is a big pueblo or even could be called a small city. There are several high rise apartment towers and several more apartment towers under construction. We drove up one street above the village where they are building 200 new apartments in three towers with excellent views overlooking the village and surrounding valley. The central park is okay, but there aren´t any sidewalk tables. We stayed in a hotel two blocks away from the park in the El Centro and it was clean and comfortable and hot shower for 50,000 for the two of us.
The shopping district is about four blocks by six blocks with just about anything you would need. Downhill from the park there is another shopping district called La Galleria where the campesinos shop. Lots of jeeps parked along the side streets waiting for rides to the fincas and granjas outside of town.
In the center of the Galleria we wandered through a large building that takes up a whole city block. It was almost like a big city permanent flea market, aisle after aisle loaded with vendors and shops of just about anything you can imagine.
I remembered reading a post here on this forum that you could get a cheap haircut in the gallery so I did. I paid 5,000 pesos for a trim and the lady did a good job. I joked to my girlfriend that in Colombia it costs less than $5 and takes 20 minutes for a haircut, but in United States it costs $20 and takes 5 minutes. She was puzzled, but laughed anyway.
In the evening we headed back to return the rental car. The highway from Santa Rosa down the mountain to Pereira is pretty exciting. It loops back and forth down the mountain and the down hill side is a two lane highway with both lanes going downhill, and on the other side of the little valley is the two lanes going uphill that go up on a huge bridge that makes a complete circle and then goes through a tunnel. The bridge is called a helicoil and first one I had ever seen. Well worth a visit just to see the thing.
Next month we are planning to visit pueblos around Manizales. Then in June we are going farther north to the pueblos around Medellin. So far we still like Quindio best, probably Circasia or Quimbaya, but we are going to take a second look at Chinchiná in Caldas and maybe Santa Rosa in Risaralda, even though it seems a bit large for what we have in mind.
My six month tourist stay ends in June, so hopefully I´ll have made up my mind if I want to retire in colombia and where I will want to live. My girlfriend is originally from a tiny village an hour from Popayan and she wants to take me there to meet her family so we´re heading there next week, after the holidays. We might even go as far south as Pasto and then cross into Ecuador for a few days. We´ll see.
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