52 Countries in 52 Weeks, Part 5: Colombia

In Which I Love The Varied Geography, And Consider The Recent Tumultuous History

“What happens when you write something the government doesn’t like?”

After driving 200 kilometres across the northern Colombia coast over two separate days, I had covered a lot of ground with Ricardo Romero — a middle-aged driver I found in Santa Marta to get me to and from a national park and adjacent beach resort — enough that he knew what my job was, and what I covered.

But this question was delivered with a little bit more seriousness than the breezy conversations we had been having about why Canada still has King Charles as its head of state (I tried to summarize the 95-year-old King-Byng affair the best I could), what types of new fruits I had been eating (dragon fruit and were brand new, while mangos covered with salt, pepper and tajin was a revelation), and how I was dealing with the weather (my soft Vancouver body has still not adjusted to humidity).

“Well, they might not answer my calls for a couple of days, or some of their supporters might insult me online. Maybe once in a while they’ll complain to my boss. But eventually, I’ll write something that they like, and then they’ll forget why they were angry at me.”

He chuckled, a little ruefully.

“Here, they can still get shot.”

In fact, around 100 journalists had been killed in Colombia over the past thirty years, including five in 2022. It was a reminder of both my personal privilege, and the privilege of a free press. But it was also one of the reminders of the ways Colombia’s evolution is an ongoing process.

Which was a big reason I wanted to be here in the first place.

The city of Bogota from the summit of Monseratte.

The infamy of Colombian violence in the 1980s and early 1990s, centred around both the drug trade and anti-government guerrillas, is still pervasive enough that people have been asking me on Instagram “how safe is it?”, and when I told friends and family my itinerary, more than one person said “are you sure?”

Which, yes, I was sure. Over the past three decades the political culture of Colombia has incrementally stabilized. According to global metrics published by the Global Peace Index, the country’s crime statistics are comparable to Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, and a few other places that have been considered “safe” by most Canadians for a long time, so long as you don’t go far away from your hotel at night and generally keep your wits about you.

More than that, it’s an extremely interesting place. The more I researched it, the more I wanted to spend a decent amount of time there.

So I took 10 days in total, with about half of it in the capital city of Bogotá, and the other half on the northern coast, first in Cartagena and then the aforementioned beach resort next to Tayrona National Park.

This may strike some well-versed in global travel as a bit surprising, as cosmopolitan Medellin is usually seen as more fun for tourists than the country’s more reserved capital.

But if you’re into city building and urban planning — which, guilty as charged — Bogotá is one of the most interesting metropolises to visit.

About 25 years ago, the city underwent a transformation, led by former mayor Enrique Peñalosa, where they built hundreds of kilometres of bike lanes, created a sprawling bus rapid transit network, invested money in parks and urban renewal, creating a cottage industry of thinkpieces about how to build better cities and how cars stood in the way of that.

Wandering around Bogotá for a few days, my sense of the city was a bit more muted than the tributes I read — the bike network is actually pretty minimal in the urban core, with few lanes that are actually separated — but still plenty positive.

A lot of that had to do with its bus rapid transit system, called the TransMilenio. The basic premise is dedicated bus-only lanes across the city, with stops every kilometre or two, and traffic lights engineered to eliminate most red lights. Buses typically come every five to ten minutes, and instead of the lanes being on the side, they’re in the centre, with electronic passes giving people access to each station, with each ride costing around a Canadian dollar.

It was of particular interest to me because TransLink — the transit authority for Metro Vancouver — is currently pushing the idea of creating a similar network, though they acknowledge it will require plenty of money and local buy-in to create such an extensive system that upends current road use on a number of busy corridors.

The sheer number of people using the transit system seemed to my eyes to be a point in its favour. So too was the relative calmness of the city.

Bogotá has 7 million people, and yet its centre felt infinitely more orderly than Mexico City. Its traffic congestion seemed to be lighter than Toronto. The vendors on the pedestrian-focused streets were lively, but manageable.

It’s not a place that hits you over the head with beauty or nightlife, which is probably why more people go to Medellin, yet it felt like the sort of place I could stay in for a long time, which is probably a better metric for a world-class city than the types of ambitions lots of mayors have when they want their city to be world-class.       

(Though it probably helped that the currency exchange made everything very cheap for me, including a 4-star hotel that cost less per night than the hostels I stayed at in Canada and the United States)

The stunning colours of Cartagena

The orderly metropolis of Bogotá was contrasted by the anarchy of Cartagena, where every 20 metres I was asked “what do you need?” by mysterious people in somewhat menacing tones that I only realized after the fact was probably due to the less than savoury services they were offering.

In spite of that, the city was an amazing kaleidoscope of colours and sounds, centred around the old town, with walls built by the Spanish over the course of centuries, and with architecture from that era that is more preserved on a large scale that arguably anywhere else in Latin America.

It was a tremendous 10 days of passing through mountain ranges and coastal beaches, big metropolises and isolated towns, historic forts and urban renewal, in ways that were not dissimilar to my own province.

As for “how safe is it?”

I’m a single white male that keeps to himself, doesn’t talk to strangers, and has an attuned radar for unsettling situations, so it felt plenty fine to me.

Tayrona National Park

At the same time, that recent history of violence still informs plenty of what you see.

From Canada to America to Mexico, the number of visibly armed police on the streets of big cities slowly escalated, but in Bogotá it was at a magnitude I had never seen before. Days before I arrived in the country, there was an article in the New York Times about how bicycle robberies were becoming increasingly common.

Days after I left, there were huge protests against the current president, the country’s first leftist leader, with his time with the M19 guerrilla movement part of the national debate as to whether Colombia can fully transition from its most recent era of violence.

On my final day Bogotá, I visited their excellent national museum. A decade or so ago, they decided to drastically revamp their exhibits, which had been presented in the chronological order of the country.

Instead, they had rooms devoted to different themes — people, politics and power, transportation, biology — that touched on the way these themes had impacted Colombia in different ways throughout its history.

In this interpretation, Colombia’s various conflicts was not something that had been overcome, or had one key inflection point, instead revealing itself in different ways over its history.

The message was a nation’s story is less a straight line with a designated endpoint, and more a collection of factors that reappear again and again in different ways, as we stumble through a tenuous present.

But back to that taxi ride with Ricardo. As we were getting through the centre of Santa Marta to the bus station where I would head back to Cartagena, he saw his 6-year-old niece Ellie on the street during her lunch break, and picked her up.

“This is Justin, he’s a writer from Vancouver, Canada!” said

“They have lots of snow there!” she said in response.

Ricardo said that Ellie dreamed of travelling, and that he had always told her it was possible if she stayed in school and worked hard. It would sound a little trite, if not for the fact that I had sort of done the same thing, and was living out my dreams as a result.

Still, she was wondering about the snow, which Ricardo said Ellie had never seen with her own eyes, and one of the reasons Canada excited her.

The accurate response would have been to say that Vancouver doesn’t get a lot of snow. At the same time, there was an excited 6-year-old in the car.

So I scrolled through the photos from the trip so far, way back to the second day, and showed her a train going through the snowy mountain passes in the Rockies.

Ellie’s eyes? They went almost as wide as her smile.

I hope she makes it to Vancouver one day.

The reality may not match her perception, but one of the joys of travel is learning that countries are more complex than their image.