Beautiful, edgy Colombia is full of surprises
Fionn Davenport gets to the heart of Colombia and discovers a country rich in coffee, culture and colour... a departure from the gangster images that we see on our televisions
When I told friends that I was going to Colombia, the reaction was predictable: watch out for the guerrillas. Stay away from Colombian ‘marching powder’. Come back alive. When I told them that I was flying from Amsterdam, one of my friends suggested that I didn’t even need a plane to reach the required altitude.
There’s no doubt that Colombia has a troubled reputation to shake. This is a country that for most of the last 50 years has been synonymous with violence and bloodshed. Arriving into Bogotá’s El Dorado Airport after 11 hours of comfort aboard KLM’s newest 787 Dreamliner, I was expecting armed soldiers and a general vibe of suspicion and menace.
Instead, I found an impressively modern airport and an air of efficient calm that wouldn’t seem out of place in Switzerland.
‘Bienvenido a Colombia,’ smiled the officer at passport control. ‘Is it your first time visiting us?’
It was indeed. I’d been put off in the past by the civil war that turned the cities into militarised zones and huge parts of the countryside into no-go areas. But the government and the revolutionaries – the Farc – signed a peace deal earlier this year that put a putative end to the fighting: amid the post-conflict excitement I even heard of plans to launch guided tours of former Farc jungle camps – led by demobilised guerrilla fighters.
Cities are always that bit more attractive if the threat of bombing or kidnapping is negligible, and so it is with post-treaty Bogotá, the huge sprawling capital set on a high plain cradled by the Andes.
It’s a city so big that getting from one side to another feels more like migrating than commuting. To get a sense of just how big 1,700sqkm is, I took the cable car to the top of Monserrate mountain – home to a white-topped monastery that is a popular pilgrimage and