Colombia es pasión

That’s the national slogan, and it’s a good one. I had a really enjoyable time there last week, for a wide variety of reasons, most of which I won't go into here except to say that I had a very interesting and valuable few days at the university I was visiting, found everybody extremely welcoming, and have every intention of heading back for a longer period of time in the not too distant future – this post is mainly a tourist ad for a country which hasn’t got a great reputation internationally due to some unfortunate history, but which is a stunning and very welcoming place, and deserves far more visitors than it gets.

My visit was to Cali, which is the third-biggest city in the country, and sits in a tropical valley in between two huge and stunning mountain ranges:












Cali also has one of the best zoos in Latin/South America, according to various tourist guides and wikipedia (and wikipedia would never be wrong about anything!), so I felt the need to go and check it out - and, although it's the only zoo in the region that I've ever been to, I certainly agree with them. I do like to go to zoos when I travel, partly because they're always an interesting touristy thing to do and a nice afternoon walking among trees and stuff, and partly because I'm a sucker for a cute animal... But there are a couple of things that a zoo really has to balance in its design and operation - the animals have to have the sort of surroundings that they can be happy in, but they also need to be visible to visitors (rather than just being a tail poking out of a cave, or a foot sticking out from the middle of a tree). So, somewhere like Melbourne zoo has a lot of really happy but completely invisible animals, whereas zoo in China tend to have highly visible but clearly unhappy inmates. Cali zoo is one of the few places in the world I've seen which has the balance really right - the animals are in big enough enclosures with nice enough surroundings that they seem really happy, but they're also very easy to see. Some of them are pretty distinctively South American as well, and live in some very nice surroundings:











I also had the chance to get a little bit out of Cali to a couple of nice places in the surrounding(ish) countryside over the weekend that I was there - the Hacienda Paraiso, which is the setting for one of Latin America's most famous pieces of romantic literature:





And also the National Park of Coffee (Parque Nacional del Café), which is a coffee theme park up in the mountains, and (surprise surprise) produces some absolutely stunning coffee, as well as some of the usual tourist-park attractions, rides and stuff, but in a very nice tree-lined setting rather than the usual gaudiness and tackiness that usually dominates such places (yes, Luna Park, I'm talking about you). The first photo is me, drinking coffee, next to a coffee bush - which is a very nice situation for me to be in, I must say - and the surrounding scenery isn't half bad, either...












So anyway, what more can I say about Colombia..? It's a great place, the food is stunning (particularly fried plantain, but also the marinated steaks, the coffee, the fruit juices, and the ice-cream... ohh, the ice-cream...), and I never felt even slightly unsafe in any of the places I went to (in spite of all the dire warnings of the Australian government's official travel advice site). I don't think I'd be keen to do much driving there myself - the traffic is pretty manic - but taxis are easy, cheap and safe (if ordered correctly by phone). Being able to speak Spanish would be important for people who don't have local friends to show them around and look after them - but fortunately I did, so the fact that my Spanish has been obtained purely through academic reading (and so I went there knowing the Spanish words for 'X-ray diffractometer' and 'variance' but not 'breakfast' or 'yesterday') turned out not to be a problem. So, all in all, highly recommended for a visit, and I'll certainly be back.