After almost 50 years of solitude, the country's central coffee-growing region is now safe for tourists. Kevin Rushby finds its old farms and coffee plantations make charming places to stay
By the time the first fireflies were stirring, we were coming up the dusty, jungle-lined road that led to the hacienda. Over to the east, the Colombian cordillera had been brushed by the last rays of the setting sun. The jungle was beginning the deep, resonant hum of irrepressible nocturnal life and we were rattling up the cobbled road into a plaza bordered on two sides by luxuriant foliage and on the others by the deep verandas of the two-storey pantiled house. I had, I realised, inadvertently stumbled into a Gabriel García Márquez novel.
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