Salento is beautiful! Located up in the coffee region, about 1900m about sea level, so not too hot and humid, and the town centre is really cute! Its an old slave trading town so all the buildings have multiple doors, but the buildings are all painted white, and each of the buildings has its doors, window frames and underneaths of rooves painted different patterns; green and yellow, orange and blue, so it all looks really bright and colourful and pretty!

We stayed in a lovely farm hostel, La Serrana, which had a great view down the valley, and provided communal meals every night if you wanted them. We met up there with some friends Cat and Simon, and a few days later Charlie and Kelly as well!

We went on a tour of the Sachamama coffee farm, and it was really interesting. The guy just keeps it as a natural coffee farm, so lets all the plants grow where they want, as well as other plants, then goes out to pick the berries wherever they grow. He says its quality versus quantity, and it was VERY good coffee (and I didn't like coffee at all before I came away!) To be honest though he seemed more interested in drinking the coffee himself than selling it!

He showed us how the coffee bean is extracted, dried, shelled, roasted and ground up, all by hand, and we got to have a go too, and package our own coffee! That was a great experience!

One night in Salento we went with a group from our hostel to stay with a shaman and try ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is a plant containing highly potent hallucinagenics that is ritually used traditionally in healing, but also causes visions that supposedly can lead to religious enlightenment and whatnot. We arrived at the shaman's house, and all had mattresses laid out on a terrace outside with blankets. He led us, and some other Colombians, through a ceremony involving washing your face, arms and ankles with holy water, him mixing up the ayahuasca drink whilst chanting and saying blessings, and us all going up one by one to take our drink, which were varying in strength depending on something he seemed to see in you when you approached him!

Then everyone went back to their mattresses and pretty much went to sleep. Most people were sick at some point, I wasn't at all, which may explain why I had visions when a lot of other people didn't... Anyway I started off just with wierd dreams, but then woke up when the musicians started playing wierd hypnotic music, which I can only describe if you've seen 'the lion the witch and the wardrobe' as the same kind of music that Mr Tumnus plays to Lucy at his house when he's trying to hypnotise her to take her to the white witch. That's when I started having visions. They were mainly really colours and shapes, moving and dancing to the music, butterflies, lizards, a phoenix, a waterfall, a lizard that was my friend and started talking to me... Wierdly everything that I saw involved or was somehow related to lizards, no idea of the significance of that!

I didn't see anything horrible or bad, but started not to enjoy it when I realised I couldn't stop or control it, which I guess is the control freak in me! So I politely declined when offered a second dose half way through the night. It was definately an interesting and strange experience, but not one that I'd choose to try again I don't think!

Salento is the location of the second bar brawl I've witnessed on this trip, which is wierd as its a tiny town so everyone must know each other! We went out drinking and salsa dancnig one night, and the bar we went to had an outdoor area which had sort of fabric walls enclosing it, like on a gazebo, and a bit of a roof. Some guys were outside the area leaning on one of the material walls, having a conversation with some guys inside, when all of a sudden they started shouting at each other, then all hell broke loose! The outside guys started breaking down the wall to get inside, the guys inside started smahing glass bottles ready to fight, both groups started throwing glass at each other, everyone outside started screaming and running around, the men started beating each other up, and a group of women broke down the back wall to escape! It was all a bit crazy, and despite the fact that the police station was on the square where the bar was, the police still rocked up on their mopeds ten minutes later when all the fuss had died down! We came to the conclusion that it was probably all about a girl... It usually is!

We also found some abandoned puppies that had been left on the road up to our hostel. Six of them, probably about a week or two old, presumably left there by someone who knew there was a hostel and thought travellers would take pity on them! Well obviously we did and took them up to the hostel, and they were SO cute, but travellers can't take puppies along with them! They rang an animal shelter but they said they were full and didn't want them, so after the few days we spent looking after them I'm not sure what happened to them! Unfortunately a sad fact about South America is that they don't even have provisions for homeless people and children, they certainly aren't going to for animals!