2015 has been a great year for the Colombia Travel Blog: we’ve had more visitors than ever before to our blog, more followers across all of our varied social media platforms, we’ve traveled more than ever before around Colombia, we reached 1000 blog posts, and we’ve had some really successful and popular posts about a wide variety of topics, from photo galleries to Colombian-Spanish lessons. So here are our Top 10 Most Popular See Colombia Travel Posts of 2015 (in no particular order) – click the title to read the original post. Enjoy!
1. A Gringo’s Guide to Speaking like a Colombia
This guest post, by the author of ‘Colombian Spanish: Phrases, Expressions and Tips to Help you Speak like a Local’, Peter Low, went down a treat when we published it in July – an informative, accurate, and downright funny beginners guide to Colombian Spanish, this post is sure to be of help to anyone planning a trip to Colombia who fancies learning a bit of the local lingo and, trust us, Colombians will love it when you greet them with a cheeky “Q’hubo, parce” at the start of a new day…
2. 1000 Photos of Colombia: Our 1000th Post
When we reached 500 posts we put together a pretty darn popular post about the 500 Reasons we Love Colombia, and when we reached 1000 posts earlier this year we knew we had to do something really big to better it! Enter: “1000 Photos of Colombia.” We gathered up 1000 incredible images of this country to show the diversity, beauty, and magic of Colombia, put them all together in a blog post and ‘bam’ – instant popularity! 1000 photos of Colombia for just 1 click – you can’t really argue with the value!
3. Interactive Quiz: Name that Colombian Fruit!
These days everyone loves a quiz, right!? Right! So we thought we’d get on board with the internet’s massive quizzing vibe and put together some interactive Colombian quizzes for your problem-solving, question-pondering pleasure. We started out with the also-popular “Which Iconic Colombian are you?” However, it was our interactive Colmbian fruit quiz that really got people talking (then questioning and answering). Know which fruit got Mark Twain all excited? No? You’d better take the quiz and learn some fruit facts then…
4. Is it Safe for Women to travel in Colombia alone?
US travel writer Kim Merritt wrote us this guest post in April and it proved to be very popular. An article that, whilst not suggesting that Colombia is the world’s safest, simplest country, aimed to show people that many of their fears about Colombian travel were exaggerated and that, in fact, traveling to Colombia as a solo female traveler can be an incredibly rewarding and worthwhile experience. Just take the same precautions you would elsewhere and bob’s your uncle!
5. The Tayrona Park blog-post bundle…
Tayrona National Park remains one of the most popular sites for travelers to visit on a trip to Colombia, so we though we’d make the experience even easier for potential Tayrona visitors, and put together an exhaustive 4 part guide to visiting Tayrona National Park – the Complete Guide to Tayrona if you will. Part 1 was all about how to get there, Part 2 dealt with where to stay, Part 3 was a guide to Tayrona’s beaches, and the final part was all about what to do in Tayrona. All your Tayrona needs, in one (well, four) place.
6. Santander’s Cano Cristales – The Rivers of Guadalupe
Most potential Colombian travelers are familiar with Cano Cristales (at least from guidebooks or promos about Colombia) – the stunning red river that escaped from the Garden of Eden and set up shop in Colombia. What fewer people were familiar with was that there is also a stunning series of red rivers just a few hours by bus from Bogota in Santander department. Once people saw the photos, realized it wasn’t Cano Cristales and they could actually visit on the cheap, this blog post proved exceedingly popular!
7. 10 Things every Gringo learns when they move to Colombia
Our former editor Paul reminisced about his first time moving to Colombia in this popular post, specifically the main things that a gringo (read: foreigner) learns when they move to the country for the first time. Of course there are hundreds of lessons to be learnt from moving to Colombia, but this Top 10 dealt with the most pertinent and initial ones
8. How Big is Colombia really?
Weird question, right!? Not really…Thanks to a funny little mapmaking quirk named the “Mercator Projection” the maps we accept as standard don’t actually show countries’ size in relation to each other all that accurately. Basically, towards the north and south of a standard world map, the countries are distorted in size, and countries near the Equator are shrunk…so, in fact, Colombia is a lot bigger than many people realize…this blog post used a cool map-comparison website to show the true size of Colombia compared to many other countries…you won’t believe Colombia vs. Antartica!
9. 5 amazing day-trips from Cartagena
People still really love visiting Cartagena! And we totally get it – the beautiful old walled city of the Jewel of the Indies is as magical as it ever was, and a stroll around it’s cobbled streets are surely a must on any Colombian traveler’s ‘must-do’ list. However, with a few days in Cartagena it’s nice to get out of the city and see a bit more of the surrounding area: this list offered 5 amazing and diverse day-trip options from Cartagena, from Palenque to La Boquilla, Cartagena has so much to offer any visitor…
10. 7 Radical Differences between Colombian and German Culture
Another Paul post: after living and working in Colombia for several years our former editor moved to Berlin in Germany. This was, naturally, a bit of a culture shock…so he wrote us a post about it: 7 radical differences between Colombian and German culture!
Chris
