Channelling my inner Indiana Jones

The wax palm is the national tree of Colombia and the tallest palm tree in the world. It is found in the high altitude of the Cocora Valley and there are stunning hikes you can do in the area. To do the hike, first you have to get to the national park – so you take a willy! A willy is the name given to the WW2 jeeps that drive you there. After cramming in as many people as possible you make the bumpy 45 minute journey. Then you begin walking and admiring the views.

Unfortunately, as soon as we started walking the cloud descended and soon you couldn’t see more than a few metres in front of you. Instead of beautiful landscape views, now we had eerie atmospheric views. After climbing the relatively open hillside, we then descended into thick forest. Visibility became extremely limited as the heavens opened and torrential rain came down.

Then the fun really started. We came to a number of rickety bridges that had to be crossed. These bridges bounced and moved from side to side as you crossed. The worse “bridge” however was simply a narrow tree trunk that had fallen across a swollen river. There was no hand rail – simply a piece of rope that was just out of reach – grabbing for it made you think you were going to topple off. It was still raining hard as we traversed this trunk and it was incredibly slippery underfoot. I inched myself across very slowly. But due to the heavy rain, the path on the other side quickly turned into orange mud – steep orange mud at that and we realised we would not be able to get up it. We had no choice but to return and cross the trunk again. The reverse trip was worse than the first and I have never been so thankful to reach firmer footing.

After leaving the forest, the rain did stop but we still had to contend with flooded fields, cows in the way, climbing over barbed wire fences to avoid knee deep mud path ways and sinking in soggy grass. But we had such a laugh the whole hike through. This day has been one of the best days of the trip so far. After returning to our accommodation, we unpacked our very wet tent from the previous night to find a scorpion had got inside. Overland trips are always full of surprises.

The sun was shining the following day as we walked into the town of Salento and was able to appreciate the stunning mountain views from the top of the hill. We even got to see what the Cocora Valley looks like in sun – and it was impressive.