Salento

This is part 4 of our Cali trip. The day after we went to coffee park we headed back to Cali, but we stopped by a little town called Salento in the department of Quindio. This was a really beautiful place to visit and a good place to buy some little souvenirs. We highly recommend visiting this place. 

The air in Salento was so fresh and a little chilly because it is in the mountains. Also, May is a rainy month.

You can see a little river down there in this picture and the one above.

Don't be fooled...the dog just wanted food. He sneaked up under Chris' arm.

We saw a few pretty nice cars around here.

These cars are Willy's (later known as Jeeps) are from around the WWII era, and they were used a lot to transport coffee beans after the war.  There were several parked around the town square serving coffee. You could also pay for a ride in some of them.

This main street had a lot of different little shops to visit. Somewhere near the end of the street were the best crepes on a stick we have ever had!

It took us a while to get through this area.

When we got to the top of the main road, we stopped to grab some lunch with a view.

I don't know what this is all about, but it's strangely beautiful.

Parque Nacional del Café

Hey everybody! This is part 3 of our trip to Cali. One of the must see places in Colombia is the Zona Cafetera where a large portion of the coffee in the country is grown. We went to an a theme park there called Parque Nacional del Café, or National Coffee Park.

We were welcomed to the park by a big smiley face guy.

Father daughter shot

This is probably the only theme park in the world that you wait in a line like Disney to go ride horses.

All I can say is the wet floor sign wasn't there because they cleaned...

Los Rápidos! Caution: You WILL get wet. You will be dry again in an hour though.

Go-Karts

Of course this place is all about the coffee and the plants were everywhere, so we got a little education on how  the whole process works.

The coffee beans starts out as a flower...

Then they turn into a cherry! They are picked off the tree when they are nice and red.

Inside the coffee cherry are two little beans. These beans are dried out, roasted and sent off  around the world. Did you know that the Colombian coffee is fully traceable from the time it's picked until its delivered? Check it out!

We did one of those dress up photo shoots, but they let us take some pictures on our own too. 

I don't know what Stephany was reading...

...but it definitely wasn't this sign.

It's pretty amazing how naturally this park was integrated into the surroundings. At times it didn't even feel like we were just walking through a jungle.

The Juan Valdez estate here was beautiful!

Could someone please tell me what kind of flower this is? 

While our focus here is on the English preaching work, we take time out once in a while to visit different places around here too. After all, most of the people we talk to are foreigners in this country too, so it always helps to open a conversation about what to do while they are visiting Colombia. We just had our circuit overseer visit this past week and things went very well! We are making a lot of progress in our group and we just had a Bible study qualify to become an unbaptized publisher! It's a rewarding feeling being able to work hard for Jehovah and work towards starting a new congregation. If you have ever considered serving where the need is great, DO IT!