Wild Manizales

Manizales sits at the northern end of the coffee region, amidst green rolling hills and cloud forests. The city is built into the hills so its streets are a winding mess and due to a couple of catastrophic earthquakes, most of the buildings are new and fairly bland. Nonetheless, it is an obviously prosperous city. Our hostel, The Mountain House, was located in a nice neighborhood full of contemporary houses that looked like they were designed by Mike Brady. Just up the hill, a big high-end mall anchored the main street packed with upscale shops and restaurants, along with some bizarre contemporary art statues of oddly painted animals and creepy people.



Our first night was pretty boring – we just went for some bad fast food and spent some time online. The next morning, we took a couple buses to get out to the Recinto El Pensamiento, where we hoped to get a tour of the cloud forest sitting high above the city. Unfortunately, we showed up only to be told that the park was closed for a day off. It was a Tuesday. Colombian's work schedules have proven to be totally unpredictable.

We caught a bus back into the city and went down to the center to check out Manizales' contribution to the country's collection of big churches and plazas. The main statue in the central plaza, like so many in South America, is dedicated to Simon Bolivar. But while most depict Bolivar atop a triumphantly galloping horse, the statue here is a weird condor man on a column, with an oversized face mask of Bolivar jutting out the side halfway down.



The rest of the central city was like so many urban areas we've visited, a hodgepodge of random shops, markets, and general squalor. We walked around for a bit before heading back to our hostel, making some macaroni and cheese, and watching tv for a bit.

The next day we made our second attempt at visiting the park, this time with a group of three people from our hostel. They were open, thank goodness, and we got right into it with a guided tour. First we saw a medicinal plant garden containing plants and herbs used by indigenous Colombians. Our guide described each plant and what ailments it supposedly cured. In the middle of the garden, we came upon a coca plant and a marijuana plant, both legitimate members of the collection but odd to see being grown in an official capacity anyway.

From there we took a ski lift up over some thick forest, our feet brushing past the tops of the trees below.



At the top, our guide continued on, showing us a butterfly farm filled with too many butterflies to count, and on into the cloud forest.





We wound through a collection of orchids of all colors and sizes, many with names like the “Monkey Face Orchid” that described how they looked. Colombia has over 3500 varieties of orchids, the most in the world.



The tour ended at a mini zoo where they had Zebras, Llamas, and some crazy ostriches. We got up close and personal with the male ostrich, who twisted his neck around and snapped his beak neurotically for us and our friends before biting our camera lens.



We left the next day to venture further into the coffee region, to the tiny town of Salento.