The New Tourism Trend

Since San Agustin is also an agricultural centre growing primarily coffee and sugar cane, we took advantage of the opportunity to tour the area by horse back to get a close-up look at the local crops. Interestingly, we were also offered a “close up look” at the processing of Columbia’s most popular export when our Park guide asked us if we would like to observe the processing of the coca plants. For $100 US each, we could observe them transform coca plants into pure cocaine – the process takes about 2 ½ hours.

As a special bonus, the $100 also included a substantial “taste test” of the final product – guaranteed to be “the most pure cocaine we had ever had”. As “virgin cocaine users” that would have been a safe bet wouldn’t it? Although we really were quite interested in seeing the process, we weren’t interested in the “taste test” and certainly weren’t interested in running the risk of spending the rest of our lives as guests of the Government of Columbian so we gratefully declined the offer and moved on.

Here is the official display of coca leaves and the necessary limestone from sea shells...