← PreviousTwo weeks in Palomino, between the school and the riverLeaving Palomino gave us a little pang. Two weeks is short, but it's long enough to grow attached to faces, to habits, to the sound of bread being kneaded at five in the morning. Yet we had to hit the road again, and this time the road wasn't going to make it easy.
We had badly underestimated Holy Week. In Colombia, Easter is not just a long weekend: it's a national migration. Every family in the country seems to take to the road at the same time, heading for the coast, the mountains or relatives, and buses are stormed days in advance. There wasn't a single seat left between Palomino, Santa Marta and Minca. We had to improvise a night in a hotel, in a frankly shabby establishment whose sheets we prefer not to describe, before we could finally head up into the Sierra. Travelling isn't always picture postcards.
18 April
An hour's drive from Santa Marta is enough to leave the crushing heat of the coast behind. The track climbs in hairpins into the Sierra Nevada, a waterfall tumbles down the bank, and you arrive in Minca, a village at just over six hundred metres of altitude lost in a deep green jungle. The air is cooler, the evenings milder, and you can finally breathe after weeks of humidity.
The land of coffee and hummingbirds
The hills around Minca are covered in coffee and cocoa farms, some dating back to the nineteenth century and still running their machines on water power. The forest is also one of the best places in the country for birdwatching: toucans, parrots and above all hummingbirds, which we filmed in slow motion, wings beating, hovering in front of flowers like tiny helicopters. You could spend hours watching them, and that's in fact what we did.
We visited two of these farms, one for coffee, the other for cocoa. You never look at a bar of chocolate the same way again once you've seen the journey from the pod: fermentation, drying, roasting, grinding, a whole craft for a product swallowed in two minutes. And if our photos are to be believed, the tasting ended with chocolate all over our faces. Our heads were spinning with it.
Endless sunsets
Every evening offered the same show: from the heights, the sun sank behind the ridges, setting the sky ablaze in red and orange, and the valley disappeared into shadow. You get used to a lot of things when travelling, but never really to that.
21 April
On Easter Sunday we got up before dawn to watch the Sierra wake up. Getting up was very, very hard, and we still had to climb all the way to the top, each of us on a motorbike, in the dark and the cold, on a battered track where we clung on at every rut. But the show was worth it. At 5:40 a sea of clouds covered the whole plain below, and the clouds spilled over the ridges like a waterfall in slow motion. We stayed there, wrapped up, watching the day break over this cotton-wool landscape, completely forgetting the short night.
