StampCollector

Let’s face it – Colombia is famous around the world for two things: coffee and cocaine, and not necessarily in that order.

Both of the country’s two major exports bring wealth and status to a handful of Colombia’s 44 million people. Each also offers employment to many other ordinary Colombians, those who work in the fields of coca and coffee. The coffee growers have legal employment, while those who work with coca remain outside the law and in danger of arrest – or worse.

Yet both crops have a role in Colombia’s burgeoning tourist industry.

Every tourism official in Colombia will direct visitors to the Zona Cafetera, an area of warm, wet Andean hills to the west of Bogota. The cities of Manizales, Pereira, Armenia and the town of Salento offer a chance to see how coffee is produced.

Visitors to Salento can see the contrast between the fincas, or farms, of Don Elias, a genial old chap with a few teeth and a few hundred coffee plants, and Don Raul, whose finca is right next door.

Don Raul is a wealthy, Porsche-driving absentee coffee farmer with organic certification and veritable jungle of coffee growing on his land.

Don Elias makes coffee by hand, the old fashioned way, drying the beans and grinding them by hand. Don Raul’s army of seasonal staff harvest the coffee before dumping it into machines to shell and sort the beans for export.

Elsewhere, in the humid jungles in another part of the country, a small, family-run cocaine “factory” is both a good money-earner and a chance to educate the foreign masses.

The “factory” is not in Colombia’s tourism literature but is an open secret among those travelling the country. Tucked away from the limelight, it retains an air of mystique that helps the family who run it make a tidy sum from passing backpackers.

No marketable quantity of cocaine is produced at what is, in reality, a small gazebo erected under a shady tree, where a young boy stores a few kilograms of coca leaves and a horrible-smelling collection of the chemicals used to transform the natural plant into an illegal drug.

Victor (not his real name) takes tourists to the gazebo most days, showing them the steps by which the green leaves are turned into an off-white paste that would get him (and them) arrested.

He makes little or no comment on the rights or wrongs of cocaine production or its effect on Colombian society.

His father, though, a former coca farmer turned devout Christian, is more outspoken.

He denounces the process, insists the drug is bad both for Colombia and for the health of anyone who uses it, and tells me he hopes the little “factory” he owns in the jungle can put tourists off the thought of using cocaine once they return home.

The sight of Victor setting the coca leaves sizzling with a dash of sulphuric acid, a quick dunk in a tank of gasoline, and a frantic whisk in a vat of potassium permanganate (last seen in 5th year chemistry lessons) is enough to put me off.

Offered a taste of the finished product, an off-white paste one step away from marketable cocaine, my first thought was for my oral health: what was the point of listening to all that advice from the dental hygienist if I was then to rub sulphuric acid all over my precious gums?

Back in Salento, Don Elias rubs his beans with a careful hand.

Unlike cocaine, which can make Colombian narcos into millionaires, he sells his lovingly-produced coffee to a merchant in Armenia for about £1.50 a kilogram. He could make more if he was certified organic, but he would have to let his land lie fallow for five years to gain the certificate.

Don Elias doens’t complain. He listens to me tell him the astronomical price of coffee in the West and shrugs his shoulders. He has everything he needs, he says, and doesn’t want for more.

In the jungle, Viktor is equally impassive when I tell him roughly how much one gram of cocaine costs in the UK.

He is more concerned that no-one in our little group reveals where his showroom is based, so the police don’t come and close him down.

It seems a shame. With a little bravery, Colombia’s government could use the foulness of the process to try and convince visitors to stay away from the drug when they leave the country.

I leave Colombia this week sold on its coffee and set against its cocaine. What is crucial for Colombia is how many people around the world make the same decision.

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