Jardín

Three hours from Medellín and you are in a different country.

On the way southwest, Antioquia climbs and drops along the ridges for so long that you lose track of where you are. Then the last hill opens onto a valley with a small town in it, a white tower in the middle and green all around. Not green the way it is at home, where there is a forest and there is a field. Green with everything in it at once: coffee, banana trees, plantains, avocados, pineapple. It grows over and through and between itself and you cannot tell where the garden ends and the farm begins.

We stayed two nights and it was not enough.

A square you can spend the whole day on

The main square is painted in every colour and people sit on it.

The houses around it have wooden balconies and every one of them is painted differently: blue next to yellow next to green, shutters in a different colour from the wall. Wooden tables and chairs stand outside the bars, also painted, and those chairs are not decoration for visitors. Locals sit on them from morning to night, drinking coffee, drinking beer, talking, watching everyone else.

In the middle of it stands the basilica. Stone, neo-gothic, far bigger than a town this size should have, and that mismatch is what makes the square.

We were in no hurry to leave and it was the best part of the day.

Around the farms by tuk tuk

On the first day we took a tuk tuk and rode around the hills with no plan at all.

In Jardín a tuk tuk is ordinary transport, not an attraction. A motorbike with a cabin, a driver who knows where to take you, and roads that gradually stop being roads. You go up between the farms, past coffee bushes and banana trees, and the higher you get the further you see.

There was no programme and that was the point. You stop where you like it, you look, you carry on.

A café full of hummingbirds

Somewhere up above the town we stopped for coffee, and it was the best stop of the day.

A view down the valley, quiet, and hummingbirds everywhere. Not one, not two, whole flocks of them. They arrive, stop dead in the air, hang half a metre from your head for a moment and are gone. You hear the wings before you see the bird.

And the coffee grows on the hills you are looking at while you drink it.

Anyone who thinks they know this from a zoo or a documentary does not know it. Sitting with a cup in your hand among wild hummingbirds is something you still remember that night as you fall asleep.

Coffee, from the bush to the cup

The second day was about coffee and it was a different world from the café.

We went to a coffee farm and walked the whole road the bean travels before it reaches a cup. Picking, processing, roasting, brewing. All of it by hand, not as a presentation.

Picking is not romantic. You get a basket on your waist and you go up the slope. Only the red cherries come off, the green ones stay on the bush to ripen, so you do not pick row by row, you pick bean by bean. Every bush is gone over several times a season. After half an hour you know why the coffee costs what it costs, and why so much of that work is paid so little.

Processing is a craft. They showed us what happens to the cherries next: how the bean comes out, why it is left to ferment, how it is dried, when and how it is roasted. Every step can be done faster and cheaper, and every step shows it afterwards.

And then they brewed it. Coffee from the farm you are standing on, made by the person who grew it. The taste is somewhere else entirely from anything you can buy at home, but the real thing is that it is the first time you understand it. I know what I drank and I know how much work is behind it.

And a place to sleep

We slept in a local hotel, not a chain, and it was Colombian through and through: a painted house, wood, a courtyard, plants, and birds in the morning.

Exactly the kind of place that makes it worth coming to Jardín for two nights instead of one.