Cocora Valley, An Otherwordly Experience

I know I touched on Valle de Cocora a bit in my last blog post, but I wanted to go into a little more detail on our time there.  The main reason we ended up in Armenia/Salento which is kind of out in the middle of nowhere Colombia, was because of me wanting to see the super tall wax palm trees that grow up to 200 feet tall!  They are the tallest palm trees in the world and also are up in high elevation which seems so unreal to me.  I am pretty much obsessed with browsing Instagram and stumbled upon pictures of these trees doing a broad "Colombia" search for our upcoming trip.  They looked amazing and I wanted to check them out in real life.

We also learned the day before from our coffee plantation tour that these trees are dying off for many reasons (climate change, land abuse, etc.) so I was glad that we decided to visit before these trees no longer exist.

So, we chose to stay a night in Salento which is about 30-45 minutes away from the park where the tree grow, Valle de Cocora or Cocora Valley.   We hired a private driver to get to the park that we'd met the evening before (see my previous blog post on that).  It is recommended to get up there via a small SUV.  Most people opt to ride in Willys (Jeeps) from Salento town center, which we did on the way back, but our driver was so helpful and nice in getting us from Armenia to our hotel in Salento, we opted on the way there to just have him drive us to the park.  The road to the park is pretty narrow and has some pot holes/drop offs and is very windy.  I had to pop dramamine and ginger drops like crazy, so beware if you have any motion sickness.

Anywho, once you get close to the park entrance you can already see some of the trees, it really does start to feel like you're entering another planet.

Our driver dropped us off at the end of the road, from there it is about 1/3 of a mile walk to the park entrance.  It was about $1USD to enter the park.  There were several hiking paths (and even a horse path) to choose from.  Since I'm out of shape and was still feeling quite woozy from the car ride, we opted for the 3km route (the second shortest route).   It was pretty intense and about 3/4 of it was uphill.  I'd recommend bringing hiking poles if you're out of shape like me if you can.  We took it really slow.

The path was really clearly marked which was nice.  We saw a lot of horses and wildlife on the way (no idea why I didn't take any pictures of that).  They have fun little stopoffs to take pictures like with the angel wing swing and the Valle de Cocora sign.

Check out this video I took with my phone!

Mirador 1 (lookout point 1) is basically at the top of the hike and offered stunning views of the valley below.   We stopped here and I laid for a bit to get a much needed breather.

The hike down is pretty much straight down and man, my ankles were super pissed off at me at this point.  It also was thundering out a bit so made us feel a little rushed to get down before a storm/rain hit.

We finished the hike and I needed a long decompression because my body hurt soooo bad.   We enjoyed a surprisingly incredible meal at a restaurant with an awesome view (no idea what it was called as the lack of oxygen really got to me at this point haha!).  The trout dish we got was out of this world good!  So was the plantain and salsa dish.

We also of course rewarded ourselves with some beers.

I mean, how cool of a beer drinking view is this?!

So, was the difficult hike worth it?  Absolutely a must if you visit Colombia!  Take it slow, take lots of water and sunscreen and bugspray.  You won't regret it.  And visit sooner than later before this amazing otherworldly place no longer exists.  Salud.