The Moment Everything Changed
I was sitting in a café in Laureles, Medellín, nursing my third coffee of the morning—not because I'm a coffee connoisseur, but because I'm a chronic procrastinator who uses caffeine as an excuse to stare at nothing—when a mate named Diego slid into the seat across from me.
"You look like someone who needs to stop being a tourist," he said.
I laughed. "Mate, I've been here four days. I've already got that look."
"Exactly," he grinned. "Come with me tomorrow. I'm doing something stupid."
Diego, it turned out, had arranged a full day that would shuffle me sideways through Medellín in a way that made my original itinerary look like a theme park. No Instagram spots, no sanitised narratives—just the real sprawl of a city that's spent the last three decades writing itself back into existence.
Walking Into the Actual Story
The next morning, we met up with a guide named Carlos for the Comuna 4 Walking Tour Medellín Comuna 4 Walking Tour Medellin. I'll be honest: I was nervous. I'd read enough headlines to carry that particular baggage, the kind that makes you feel a bit gross for even being there. But within twenty minutes, that feeling got properly dismantled.
Carlos grew up in Comuna 4. His sister runs a community centre two blocks from where we started. His mate Felipe makes art on the walls we'd walk past—massive murals of community heroes, political slogans, and enough colour to make you forget you're looking at houses stacked on a hillside like a game of Jenga played by someone who doesn't care about winning.
What struck me wasn't the history of invisibility—though that's real and it's heavy—but the present-tense defiance. People were out. Kids were playing. An old bloke called Alfonso had a stall selling arepas from his kitchen window, and he made us stop and eat two each whilst telling us about the time a journalist came through and only photographed broken glass.
"We are not the story of what happened to us," Carlos said as we climbed a narrow stairwell. "We are what we are building now."
I wrote that down three times to make sure I got it right.
The View from Everywhere
That afternoon, Diego convinced me to blow the budget on a Private Tour Comuna 13 with Cable Car Ride Private Tour Comuna 13 with Cable Car Ride. I say "blow the budget" like I have one—I mostly just check how much cash I've got left and decide whether to stay another week or eat only arepas.
The van ride through the hillside streets should've felt like poverty tourism, but our guide—a woman named Rita who'd moved back to the neighbourhood after fifteen years abroad—flipped the script entirely. She pointed out the cable car system not as "infrastructure in a struggling neighbourhood" but as "how we finally got connected to the rest of the city on our own terms." She showed us where residents had painted their homes in these intricate, detailed patterns—not for tourists, but for themselves, the same way you'd decorate your lounge room.
The cable car ride itself was ridiculous. I mean that in the best way. We climbed into this little pod and swayed across the rooftops, and I had that moment—you know the one—where you're so high up and so exposed that you can't help but laugh like an idiot. A Colombian family in the pod next to ours laughed back. That's when it hit me that this wasn't a tourist experience; it was just... a commute. I was using the bus system. I was getting a view of the city at the same time as someone going home from work.
Somewhere between the rooftops, I lost my left flip-flop. It went sailing off into someone's garden. I've lost seventeen flip-flops across South America. This one didn't even register.
Into the Actual Wild
Diego had one more move. He'd booked us onto the Howling Trail Hike The Howling Trail Hike, which sits about an hour outside Cartagena's tourist sprawl in Colombia's Tropical Dry Forest. The ecosystem there is bonkers—rain-starved, bone-dry, but absolutely alive if you know where to look.
We started at six in the morning because that's when the Cotton Top Tamarins are actually moving about, doing their thing, not melting into the midday heat. Eight hours of walking. My calves were already betraying me by hour two.
But then we saw them. These little white-topped primates bouncing through the canopy like they were powered by espresso, and our guide—a bloke named Hector who could identify every bird call within a three-kilometre radius—kept stopping us to point out things we'd have walked straight past: poison dart frogs that looked like they'd been painted by someone on very strong drugs, weird flowering plants with names I immediately forgot, a sloth that was so committed to doing absolutely nothing that it didn't even register our existence.
Hector told us the forest had nearly been cleared for cattle ranching in the 1980s. Now it's protected, and it's come back. "The forest is patient," he said. "It waits for us to stop being stupid."
I wanted to stay in that forest for approximately six months.
The High Point (Literally)
Back in Medellín, back at Diego's place, we were planning the next week when he dropped the hammer: we were doing the Private Guatapé & Paragliding: Epic Views & Thrills tour Private Guatapé & Paragliding: Epic Views & Thrills. Nine and a half hours. The famous rock, the colourful colonial town, and—somehow—I'd agreed to jump off a mountain.
I'm not a thrill-seeker. I'm the bloke who gets anxious in a cable car. But Diego had that look, and Rita (from Comuna 13) was coming along, so there was no getting out of it.
The drive to Guatapé from El Poblado is beautiful in that particular way where you're slowly leaving the city behind and remembering that Colombia is, you know, mostly not a city. We climbed the rock—this massive granite formation that juts out of the landscape like God was testing its structural integrity. The view is absurd. You can see the entire reservoir, the town curled up in pastel colours below, the mountains rolling out towards the Caribbean.
Then we went paragliding.
I'm not going to romanticise it. The first thirty seconds were terrifying. I was strapped to another human, falling out of the sky, and the only thing keeping me alive was the trust that this bloke had done this ten thousand times before and wasn't about to stop now. But then—honestly—it became the clearest moment I'd had the entire trip. No phone signal. No pretence. Just air and sky and the absolute realisation that you're part of something enormous and indifferent to your anxiety.
When we landed, I was shaking. Rita was laughing. The pilot asked if I wanted to do it again. I said no, very firmly, which everyone seemed to think was hilarious.
The Taste of Actually Understanding Something
Our last proper day, Diego pulled the final card: the Coffee & Chocolate Private Tour in Medellin: Genuine Experience Coffee & Chocolate Private Tour in Medellin: Genuine Experience. Not in the city itself, but an hour out into the proper countryside—two working farms, not a tourist operation between them.
The cacao farm was run by a family named the Gómez. The coffee farm belonged to these three siblings who'd inherited it from their parents and decided to actually learn how to run it properly instead of just cashing the cheques. Both places smelled incredible. Both places had problems—labour shortages, climate shifts, the global price of coffee dropping like a stone—but both places had this quality of people doing something because it mattered, not because it paid.
We walked the coffee rows. We tasted cacao pods straight off the tree. We sat under a tin roof during a sudden afternoon storm and listened to water drum on the metal whilst drinking the best coffee I've had outside of a dream.
One of the coffee siblings, named María, asked what I did. I told her I wrote about travel. She laughed.
"You travel to write," she said, "but really you're trying to understand. The writing is just what you do with that."
I'm still unpacking that one.
The Way Out
I've been to about thirty countries. I've done the backpacker circuits, the Instagram tours, the "authentic experiences" that are about as authentic as a three-dollar note. But Colombia—and specifically the way this slow path through Medellín and its surroundings unwound—reminded me why I started doing this in the first place.
It wasn't about collecting places. It was about letting places change how you think.
Diego drove me to the airport on my last morning. I was wearing one flip-flop. My luggage had somehow accumulated another fifty percent of stuff I don't remember buying. I had about seventy-two hours before flying to Ecuador, and I was already dreading leaving.
"You'll be back," Diego said.
"Yeah," I said. "Probably."
But I meant it. Because Colombia—the real Colombia, the one that shows up when you slow down and stop looking for the postcard—isn't the kind of place you visit. It's the kind of place that gets into your thinking and doesn't leave.
I just need to find a better place to keep my flip-flops.
