escape to mountains…

There was very little chance to leave Medellin as we were working Monday to Saturday on the workshop, however we did have one possibility, escaping the city up into the mountains deep into the heart of coffee country…

The landscape of the Cauca valley with the tail end of the Andes viewed from up high…Click on photo to get the full effect…

traditional construction for the processing and drying of coffee beans…

Was told by a grower up there that colombian coffee beans have an exquisite aroma but not so much flavour so that generally the growers create a blend mixing them with other varieties of coffee…so there you go.!

So the weather is hot and steamy, every morning, a heavy mist starts from the ground and raises up through the trees as the day heats up. The result the fertile, abundant flora of the rainforest.

The trees are covered in a multitude of parasitical plant species…you will recognise a myriad of house plants but here on another scale completely…

The fauna is also incredibly diverse. We found this stick insect (?) at least 40-50 cm long on our car. It stayed there for hours, we could not get it to leave…in the end we had to help it back to the folliage!

There are around 18,000 different species of butterflies in the world, Colombia has around 3,500 of them…