Sometimes the most impactful parts of the journey are getting off the beaten path and discovering what real life is like. We're excited to share the next chapter from Dale of The Maritime Explorer on our Colombia and Panama tour. Check out this link for more info on this Colombia tour.
One of the reasons I consistently like to travel with Canadian tour company Adventures Abroad is that they make a real effort to get you off the standard ‘tourist’ itinerary followed by most of their competitors. Because the size of the group is small it is possible to get to places and experience things that are simply not practical for larger groups.
Jardin Colombia – Hard to Get To, But Worth the Effort
Like many places, the road less travelled is often rewarding. Tucked away in the Colombian heartlands, Jardin is a similar town that is hard to reach but easy to love. Many thanks to Dale of the Maritime Explorer for sharing his experiences in this small town with us after joining a recent Colombia tour. We hope you enjoy his post as much as we do.
This is the tenth post on a recent trip to Colombia with Canadian based travel company Adventures Abroad and before leaving I wrote This Post querying whether or not visiting Colombia was really a good idea or not. Now, having been in the country for almost a week, I can say unequivocally that it was the right time to visit. The Colombian people have bent over backwards to express their appreciation that tourists are at last returning to this extraordinarily beautiful and friendly country. This post is about the small town of Jardin which I originally was not going to write about because it was so damn hard to get to. However, on reflection and looking at my photos and the memories they generate, I realized that Jardin is exactly the type of place I should be writing about. It is not your typical tourist town, but I’m not sure it will stay that way once upgrades to the highway system make it more accessible. Here’s why you need to go now.
Valle de Cocora Colombia – A Hike Through a Unique Wax Palm Landscape
High in the Andean foothills, in a region bathed equally in sunshine and a cloud forest, we follow Dale from The Maritime Explorer as he shares his recent experience on an Adventures Abroad Colombia tour Thank you kindly to Dale for allowing us to reshare his experience on our blog.
This is my ninth post from a recent trip to Colombia with my favourite travel company, Vancouver based Adventures Abroad. In the last post, after traveling by plane and bus to the remote town of Salento, we visited the nearby El Ocaso coffee farm and I finally got a taste of just how good real, fresh coffee can be. In that post I commented that I wasn’t that enthused in advance about the coffee farm visit, but certainly changed my mind after being there. The subject of this post is just the opposite. From the time I looked up ‘hiking in the Valle de Cocora’ on my web browser after seeing it on the itinerary, I thought it would be a highlight of the trip and I can now confirm that it was. Please read on and I’ll explain why.
Salento Colombia – A Great Introduction to the Colombian Countryside
Ever wondered what a rural town in the heart of Colombia's coffee region would be like? Join us as we follow Dale from The Maritime Explorer to verdant hills with a quaint village on a tour to Salento Colombia. Thanks for sharing your experiences with us, Dale!
This is my seventh post from the country of Colombia and the first outside the environs of the capitol city of Bogota. Our Adventures Abroad group spent an amazing two days in Bogota, so much so that I was able to generate six different posts on just our time there. You can read them on this website. However, it is now time to venture into the Colombian countryside and see if the place is as safe and civilized as we found Bogota. Frankly, despite my extensive travels, I have very little knowledge of rural Latin America and am a blank slate waiting to have new experiences, good or bad, written upon it. Our initial destination is the small town of Salento Colombia in the heart of the Colombian coffee growing region. I hope you’ll come along for the journey.
Botero Museum Bogota – Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder
Not every piece of art is beautiful to every person. But it almost always can invoke some sort of emotion and usually, a conversation. We're pleased to present a blog written by Dale of The Maritime Explorer on a recent tour to Colombia with a stop at the Botero Museum. Thanks for sharing with us Dale!
This is my final post from the great city of Bogota, Colombia, an underrated and under-appreciated South American capital that is undergoing a renaissance ever since the end of the drug cartel wars over a decade ago. Alison and I are in Colombia on a tour with Canadian travel company Adventures Abroad and the first two days have been an eye opener for both of us. Colombians are very friendly, open minded and inviting towards the few tourists that have ventured back to their country after decades of internal strife made it unsafe for travel. In the last post we visited the incredible Gold Museum, of which I doubt anyone could quibble about its status as a great tourist attraction. The next one on the list is definitely in the “You either love it or you hate it” category. We are headed on foot through central Bogota to the Botero Museum which features the works of Colombia’s self-proclaimed greatest living artist, Fernando Botero. Come along and find out if you are in the love it or hate it camp of this controversial artist.
Gold Museum Bogota – Why Colombia was Home to El Dorado
Have you ever been on the hunt for El Dorado, the lost city of gold? Perhaps we all have been intrigued by this precious metal over the years.
We're so excited to have another post from Dale of The Maritime Explorer to have a closer look into one of our Colombia tours he recently embarked on. Have a look at his wonderful details of the Gold Museum, below. Thanks for sharing this with us, Dale!
This is my fifth post on a recent Adventures Abroad trip to the wonderful country of Colombia where I found the people extremely friendly and outgoing, the food amazingly good and the variety of things to see and do off the charts. The first four posts all deal with the city of Bogota and surrounding area. You can read them on my website. In the last post we wandered by foot into the oldest part of Bogota, La Candelaria, where the street art made me rethink everything I thought I knew about Latin Americans. In this post our group is going to visit the most famous museum in Colombia, the Gold Museum that houses over 55,000 works of which over 6,000 are on display. But first, we have some time for lunch and a quick look around the area of Bogota where the Gold Museum is situated.
