Hello, and welcome to Western sev I recently completed a trip to Columbia's the
first major trip that I've experienced really since covid Hammer went down a couple of
years ago, when things just got massively off the rails. So I wanted
to put a supplemental out there just kind of with my thoughts of the experience
and some historical sites that you might consider visiting if you're interested in traveling there.
There's a lot of interesting quirks about traveling to Columbia that I thought I
would pass along to anybody who's interested. Now I'm recording this both as a
podcast and as a YouTube channel, offering if you're interested in seeing the images
that I'm going to be talking about, and you're listening to this on the
podcast right now, you might want to click the link in the show notes
and watch it on YouTube, because that's where the pictures are going to be.
If not, it's no big deal, and I'm putting all the links
from the show notes for anything important that I'm talking about. So with that
caveat, let me just go on here. I'm going to give you some
basics. So, first of all, there is an online document that you
need to complete when you get into Columbia. Is very difficult to find information
about a lot of this stuff online. I googled it and still some of
it wound up surprising me at the time. And I will say, in
general, I think that Columbia is going to change a lot in the next
five to ten years as more and more people, especially from North America,
start to travel down there. A lot of the things that I'm going to
mention are probably going to be altered. The name of the forum is called
Checkmate. Takes like two minutes to fill it out. The reason that I
know that it takes two minutes to fill it out and by the way,
they might not ask you for it. They did not ask me for it
when I arrived in Columbia. They didn't ask the person ahead of me,
and they didn't ask the person behind me. But that doesn't mean that they
won't ask for it at some point, so it's worth filling it out.
The problem that I ran into was that we're having a very difficult time finding
flights that would work to get into Medain, which is one of the cities
that we went to, and so it took a chance on Spirit which turned
out to be a huge, huge mistake. Unfortunately, the employees wouldn't let
me board my flight in Chicago, which was going to Florida and then from
Florida to Medain because they said I needed the Checkmate customs form filled out for
Columbia, even though I was just flying from Chicago to Florida and Florida is
not part of Columbia for those of you who are not aware. And unfortunately,
in this case, it was just an employee who had the wrong information
and didn't understand and wouldn't let me get on the plane. So I wound
up essentially losing a day of travel. So don't go with that airline.
It's terrible experience. Sure, whether happens, mechanical issues happen, but if
the employees are so poorly educated about the necessity of what you need to travel
that they won't let you get on a domestic flight without having something needed for
international, then I strongly recommend going somewhere else. Also, when I came
back for the subsequent flight on the same airline, no one asked for the
form, and no one ever asked for the form, so go figure.
Another piece of advice that I received going into the trip was that you don't
need cash everywhere it takes credit cards. That was about the worst piece of
travel advice I've ever received in my entire life. You need to bring cash.
Bring cash, change it at the airport, or just change it before
you leave. The fact of the matter is, well, a lot of
places do take credit cards. It is not everywhere by any stretch of the
imagination, and most people will take it with a lot of grumble. So
I don't recommend trying to get by with credit cards. You can in most
big restaurants and things like that, but you're going to want some cash and
it's just way easier. I recommend you, know, if you're going to
go for let's say five to six days, changing maybe three hundred dollars worth
of you as cash, the exchange rate is phenomenal. It is a very
very very cheap trip, as I'll get into a little bit more in a
moment. So if you're looking to budget, this is the place to go.
You get anything that you could want to throughout the Caribbean or South and
Central America for a fraction of the price. So I do recommend it from
that extent, but you do want to have some cash. Do not consider
renting a car under any circumstances. People drive lake It's Mario Kart. It's
very it'd be very dangerous if you didn't know what you were doing. It's
very normal for taxi cabs to cross into the opposing lane of traffic to go
around something, and so on and so for you don't want to engage in
that, trust me. The last thing I'm going to say is that you
probably do need some Spanish in order to get by. There is I mentioned
before. I think five to ten years this is going to change to a
large extent is more people from North America come on vacation. But it's not
there yet, so most of the people who are on vacation there are people
from other Central and South American countries. There's some Americans, some Europeans,
but that percentage isn't high enough yet so that a lot of people speak English.
You need some intermediate Spanish to be able to get around. What I
do recommend for flying is to fly Avianca, especially when you're in Columbia itself.
The flights are like one hundred bucks. They're extremely cheap. It's very
easy to get around. You can take a bus, but it's going to
take you eight times the amount of travel time and it's not going to save
you that much money. So check out Avianka to get around when you're there.
One of the first two cities that we went to was Mediine. I
definitely recommend this. I did not go to Bogata. I talked to a
number of individuals who did. They didn't recommend it necessarily. If you want
that mountain experience, Medine and Cali are much more appropriate. You can use
ubers to get around everywhere in Medine. It was fantastic. I don't recommend
buying souvenirs within the city itself. I'll explain why in a minute. The
neighborhood that we stayed in, and this is in the show notes, is
El Pablando, which is you know, definitely like a tourist more party places,
but there's lots of restaurants, there's lots of bars. It's extremely walkable
if you stay in that area, so I do recommend it. It's a
city, though, just like parts of Chicago or Philadelphia, and certainly New
York City or San Francisco, it can be very gratty at times, so
it's not cancoon and that's to be expected. I'm in terms of medicine restaurants
Lakausa, I highly recommend Al Embique. These are both in the show notes.
It's their beautiful restaurants and they do a wonderful culinary scene. But here's
where I really want to come back to. One of the big benefits of
going to Columbia is that you can get what would probably be a hundred and
eighty to two hundred dollar dinner there for about seventy bucks US because of the
exchange rate. So it's really a place where if you are looking to hit
some of the more top tier restaurants in a region, it's very doable there,
and so I recommend it. But those are two of my favorites while
we were there. Very popular. You don't necessarily have to have reservations,
but it can be very useful at times. A couple of things I recommend
doing while you're in Medain. One is a coffee tour. We did one
that was just outside the city. I think you can go to more picturesque
locations that are further away, but if you want a half a day experience,
they certainly have that there, and that's what I would recommend These are
easily discoverable on trip Advisor. I also recommend going to Quatape. Quatape is
kind of a giant rock. It's actually, I believe, the third biggest
rock in the world. It's maybe about an hour and a half from outside
of Medine. The tour that we did included a visit to Guatape itself,
which is a nearby village. That's where I recommend buying the souvenirs. There's
excellent artisanal crafts there. If you go with a tour group, everything's very
reasonably priced and it's easy to find things that you would like. We loaded
up on stuff for family members there. It was wonderful and you can also
couple it with a boat tour. Guatape is kind of based in what is
today we would call large reservoirs man made actually, and so you could take
a boat tour if you're interested in sort of seeing some of the sites.
If you're watching on YouTube, the bottom right hand picture, it's actually a
picture of one of Pablo Escobar's old encampments, which you can see from the
boat. It was bombed by a rival group in the government simply never rebuilt
it. They're going to do something with it apparently at some point, which
is another point that I wanted to bring up, which is Pablo Escobar.
Yes, a lot of people are interested, especially because of the Netflix show
Narcos, and they want to ask questions about him and so on and so
forth, And I would say most people are more than willing to talk about
his involvement in the countries and the way that you know, the narcotics sort
of played a role in the fracturing of the country in the nineteen eighties and
nineteen nineties. But you know, it's kind of like in the United States
if you were not from the United States and you got off the plane and
all you wanted to do was ask the guide about you know, American shadow
slavery and racism. Yeah, you know, some people are willing to talk
about it, but not everybody wants to. So just be aware that there
are individuals who may have lost family members as a result of some of those
conflicts, and you don't want to, you know, you want to be
a little bit sensitive about bringing some of those topics up. But Gatapa is
an excellent tour. I highly recommend it. I'm switching out to Cartagenia which
is the other location that we went to. The first night that we've got
there, we spent an evening on the main island that's directly adjacent to the
harbor and Cartagenia. Cartagenias, on the northernmost coast of Columbia, borders the
Caribbean Sea. It's beautiful city. As we'll get into. Tierra Bomba is
the name of the island. There is shockingly little information online about this island.
Here's so let me give you the basics and all the stuff that I
wish I would have known before we went. So, Tierra Bomba is a
mix of private and public beaches, but a lot of them are public,
so nobody can stop you from walking back and forth and so on and so
forth. It's a big island, so really the only ways to get around
the island are by boat, so sort of the boat takes you from fishing
village to fishing village or spot to spot. Do not expect to go there
and be able to walk across the island. It's simply too large for those
sorts of things. Generally speaking, people go in the morning, they party
during the day, they hang out during the day, and they go back
at about five or six. The island effectively shuts down between five to six
pm because that's when the boats take you back, all right. And speaking
of boats, when I read about the island, it says you go to
the harbor and you get on a boat and they take you across. There's
not really a harbor, it's a beach and the boats pull up. So
you're going to get wet getting onto the boat. You know you're going to
get wet up to your shins. Depending the times that we went, the
seas were very calm. It was easy. It was a ten minute ride
back and forth, no big deal. But you're going to have to get
in and out of the water to get there, So be mindful of what
you're bringing on that day if you can avoid it. I would avoid bringing
huge suitcases. Certainly there are guys there who will help you with them for
a dollar or two. But it's a lot easier if you're going to spend
the day there to leave your stuff at your hotel room, or if you
just flew in. There's a lot of hotels that for five bucks will just
watch your bag for you until you get back, and so you can just
take a backpack with whatever you need for the day and so on and so
forth. It's much much easier that day. There's not really a place to
buy a thing. There's no convenience stores once you get to the island.
I highly recommend buying water and bringing water with you as you go across.
Also, most places won't yell at you. If you bring your own bottle
of alcohol. It's a lot cheaper than buying it there, so you can
certainly do that. Essentially, when you go to the island, you can
book a place at what they call beach clubs and you get to spend the
day. They're sort of relaxing. That's that's the essence of the island.
You can stay overnight, but only at a few locations. And please note
if you stay overnight, it's it's probably going to be you in a security
guard there and any other families who happened to be there at a time.
I think this will change over the next five years, but right now,
Tierra Bomba is really just a daytime location. We stayed at the resort called
Marine Beach and they had online glamping and I've got a picture of it there
and it was perfect. It was wonderful. You can actually get a view
of this the city from the island overnight. I've got that picture there.
I really do recommend it, but it's it's therefore relaxing. Just understand that
once the sun goes down, there's very few people around. There aren't bars
to go to, There aren't restaurants necessarily to go to. You have to
go with what you've got. So let's talk a little bit about Cartagena itself.
Then I recommend taking a taxi or taking an uber down and getting a
hotel in the old city, in the walled city. So it's it's relatively
small, but that's where everything is that you want to see. And once
you're in the old city within the walls, you can walk everywhere. Never
take a cab. It take you longer than if you just walk. The
streets are extremely narrow, there's a lot of people around, especially in the
evening. And I will say this also, since we're talking about people,
you know, I kind of follow the Chris Rock has a joke about,
you know, neighborhood is safe if there's you know, women out jogging alone,
and I kind of follow that same procedure when I'm traveling. If I
see a young woman walking by herself. Then it's a safe spot to be.
And everywhere that we went in Columbia there are plenty of people around.
Never felt the least bit unsafe at all, So I don't think that you'll
have a problem with it. It's it's any liked any tourist place. Of
course, you want to be mindful of your longings, but that's about it.
Once you get to the old city. There's a couple of key recommendations
that I have. First, there are a number of free city tours that
you can find online that are a couple of hours long. They'll take you
around and show you the main points. I would do one of those now
there's a caveat here. Sometimes they say that they're free, and they cost
twenty thousand pacos. It turns out when it's all done, now that's not
anything to worry about. Twenty thousand pasos is about five bucks US, so
it's not expensive, to say the least of what you would probably give someone
as a tip anyway. So I recommend doing a free city tour. I
recommend hitting the Museum of Gold. It's free, you can go in,
you can spend half hour to forty five minutes. They've got some nice old
artifacts there. Definitely, especially in the evening close to sunset, take a
walk. You can actually walk on the old city walls, most of the
ways around them. Tons of people out there in the early evening. You
can sit and have drink, watch the sunset over the Caribbean Sea. In
addition, there's an I mean, like any old city. You know that
Cartagenia was founded in fifteen thirty two. This is a city that's full of
old, beautiful churches. You can see them. There's tons of cheap sites,
there's tons of museums that you can go to. And again, because
of the price differential, they're all very inexpensive, so I recommend them wholeheartedly.
I'm in terms of food, there's a lot of different options here.
Seleli is definitely my number one recommendation. If there was one place you were
going to eat at in Columbia and he needed to make a reservation, it
would be there, hands down, best meal I've had in years. And
again, what would have cost probably three hundred dollars in the United States wound
up with full bottles of wine and everything costing just under one hundred dollars.
So I very much. Recommend making it reservation there. You can get them
relatively easily, as long as you're planning far enough in advance. Another thing
I recommend doing is walking around a nearby neighborhood. It's just outside the walled
city, maybe a five minute walk called gay Simone, Hey Simone. It's
pronounced with an h even though it looks like get Smani. There's a series
of neighborhood bars. Essentially, everyone just sort of puts chairs and tables outside
of their apartments and they serve alcohol. They're really inexpensive. There's street food
that's available for purchasing, and every Saturday night there's a dance competition that's one
hundred percent free. Teams from around the world. We saw one from Texas,
one from Chicago, another from Mexico who will come and they'll perform their
customary indigenous dances. It's all free and you can watch the whole thing.
It's right, you can't miss it. Once you enter into the neighborhood,
you hear it for blocks around and you'll see all the people. You can
go watch for a little bit, eve, go get some food, come
back. Highly recommended. Last few recommendations again, bring cash because ATMs are
there, but they're not necessarily reliable. One evening we had to go to
three to find one that functions. Got to enjoy the people and walk around.
Everyone's very nice, but just be prepared to say no good assias a
lot, because I think I was offered a hat at least I don't know,
twenty seven times per day that we were there, so that's rounding us
out at about I don't know two hundred times over the time period were there.
It's fine, you just say no goodrassias and keep walking. It's not
a big deal. So those are the recommendations that I have. I think
it's a lovely trip and definitely worth considering if you're looking to find a lot
of history. There's a lot of interesting things there. These were just some
quick pieces of advice if you needed that in advance of the trip, and
as I said before, all the links are in the show notes. W