description format size download Video (23 min.) La Zona Cafetera in Quindio *.wma ~ 40 MB [download] [stream] Presentation: Café-Show (16 min.) *.wma ~ 28 MB [download]

Colombia - A country famous for his coffee. But from where exactly does the best coffee of the world come from? Well for sure not from Bogotá. Therefore you have to travel a little bit more ... to the coffee zone, the "Zona Cafetera", about 8 hours from Bogotá. Well we wanted to see more than that so we decided to make a tour through the complete zone in Quindio. Overnight we stayed in a "Finca", very beautiful with swimming pool: On the day when we arrived, we just went down to Armenia, a nice town near to our "Finca":

Armenia ist not that big, but also not that small. For sure you cannot compare this with Bogotá. The weather ist pretty warm there.. even hot. On the way we wanted to eat something there, so we saw this "trustfull" shield in the street: "Perros Calientes Y Algo mas", in english "Hot Dogs and something else", well this "something else can create problems in your stomache!

After the mosquitos prick me the whole night long, we went to the "Parque de la vida", the park of life, which is in the middle of Armenia.

After that, we drove to the small village Salento, where you can see and live the typical life of colombia:


To finish the day very nice, we drove 2 hours more with the car, to the hot thermae. The hot water comes directly from the mountains so we had the oportunity to swim in that warm water. They told us that it is recommended, to avoid a headache you should leave the warm water and have a cold shower for a few minutes, and this every 20 minutes, because the water is really really hot there.


So the first day was over now, and we went back to hour Finca. We arrived there pretty late in the night, so we didn´t have that much sleep that night because we had to get up at 8 o´clock to go to the "Parque del Café" - The coffee park.

My photo with Juan Valdez. His face represents the coffee in colombia.

Hier you can see an old kitchen few hundret years ago where they made the coffee with the hand.

This park is really really big, so prepare yourself that your feet will hurt a little bit because you have to walk a lot to see everything there. But that´s worth it to see so many plantations of coffee.

Hier you can see the machines, where they produced the coffee hundret years ago:

Left: Old habitacion. Right: Old kitchen in the past

Few more pictures with my friend JUAN.

Huge coffee plantation, coffee everywhere!!

In the end I bought some souvenirs for my family outside the park like a "Sombrero"

A llama?

In the end there was a Show of "Rodeo". It was amazing what these "cowboys" can do with the horses. Really great.


And again we entered into a nature park. The main attraction were the butterflies. You could also feed them, and some where really big, I have never seen that in my life ;)

Who goes to Colombia, definetely has to go the to "Zona Cafetera". A really nice experience and you will see things which maybe you have never seen before in your life before.
For sure I took a lot more photos there but it wasn´t possible to put them all online, would be to much.

Interested? Questions? Comments? Let me know here...

You can download my video (23 Min.) here... (~ 40 MB)

Dominic Krimmer
8th July 2006 / Bogota D.C.