Why did I choose to live in Colombia?

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Hello Everyone!

My name is JL , please let me start by saying that I’m honored to be part of the See Colombia Travel Blog team and to work along such a diverse and superb group of lovers of Colombia, thank you for letting me join the club guys! As this is  my first post in this blog I thought it would be a good idea to kill two birds with one stone both  introducing myself to give you a little context and answering one of the questions I’ve been hearing the most in the last couple of months from my friends and family that know about my nomadic way of life: Why did I choose to live in Colombia?

Being the son of a sort of diplomat that had to move from country to country  quite a lot and quite often   – my dad worked for the U.N, the IMF, the World Bank among other international entities basically developing alimentary plans for underdeveloped or extreme weather countries – I spent my early  childhood convinced that it was absolutely normal for everybody to switch languages depending on your interlocutor, to move every few months to places that bared no resemblance to the previous one you lived in and to easily  leave things, people and places behind. It wasn’t until around  the time I turned up ten or eleven, when we kind of settled down for a while in Peru, my native country,  that I started to realize that such way of life was actually quite a privileged one and that I was developing a different life perspective in which love of travel and cultural diversity was vital, from that point on I promised to myself that I was never going to stop traveling ever!

Stubborn as I am – ask my wife – I managed to keep that promise for many, many  years traveling around the world first as a backpacker and later when I  turned my passion into my job, as a professional traveler. For some random reason I decided to establish that 7 months was the line that defined “living” in a country from just visiting it, under that perspective I have “lived” in nine countries, until I recently decided that Colombia was going to be the tenth …..and the last one.

When I talk about my former job I’m referring to Global Encounters,  the great Latin America tour operator that I co-owned until recently with Marc, Bart and Karin my very good friends and former business partners. During the last seven years, along with them,  I learned and traveled a lot more than before through  all Latin America, based most of the time in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Earlier this year, after a 3 month long stay here ( my fifth time in Colombia)  in which I irreversibly fell in love with the country  I seriously started thinking on not only moving, but actually settling down in Bogota. I was already getting  a little bored of Buenos Aires, a city I used to love with passion but that – to me- now lacked of the Latin, unpretending and relaxing vibe I was looking for. This time, as an adult, the decision of leaving all the many good things I had behind wasn’t that easy but I have always trusted my instinct and it was shouting to me that I had to come here, and so I did. I have never been happier with any other decision I’ve taken in my life.

Why did I choose to live  Colombia? Because this is  still a hidden paradise,  the last one in Latin America, that we as travel professionals need to look after so it doesn’t become a Tourist trap, so we don’t spoil it, so we keep it faithful to its roots and culture, so we can develop a responsible kind of tourism that benefits all equally.  Because people here are the most polite, generous, uninterested, unselfish people I have met in my whole life and in all my travels, because this is a country that breathes hope, because Colombians are more than willing to let everyone know that heir country bears no resemblance to the stereotype that is still in the mind of most people.

Why did I choose to live in Colombia? Because I see a lot of foreign people moving down here, investing in the country which re assures me  that in a few years  this is going to be the capital of South America.

But the most important reason is also the most simple: I feel HAPPY here. Wherever I go in Colombia, big city or small village, I can tell there’s a huge change going on in this country, a change that implies people are becoming proud of being Colombians, and a happiness I can’t describe floats in the air. And I want to embrace it.  And be part of it.

JL