Colombia

Harry’s first extended stay in South America, built around his brother’s wedding and turning into a vlog series that runs from the Caribbean coast down to Medellín. He arrives knowing almost nothing about the country and says so repeatedly; the through-line of the cluster is how far the place is from the reputation it carries in Britain.

Observations

From First Impressions of Cartagena, Colombia 🇨🇴

• Money and costs: his headline impression is that Colombia is one of the cheapest countries he has been to. A dinner with a drink should not come to more than about $7 (from video – unverified), and taxis are cheap enough that he remarks on it unprompted. The currency runs in thousands and sometimes millions of pesos, and he admits he is still doing the conversions badly several days in — which is itself why he overpays a few times.
• Prices for foreigners: he is candid that he is quoted gringo prices and that he mostly accepts them. He is dressed like a tourist, he says, so of course the number goes up.
• Safety: nothing about Cartagena reads as dangerous to him, and a local he asks says the same. This is the first of many times in the cluster that he contrasts what he expected with what he finds.
• Culture and people: street sellers approach constantly but are not pushy — one no gracias is generally enough. His summary of Colombians after a few days is vibrant, talkative and unbothered by what anyone thinks of them.
• Weather: hot in the day but in the windy season on the coast, which makes it bearable.

From You Must Visit This Beach in Colombia 🇨🇴

• Safety: the cluster’s first proper answer to the question. Harry argues that branding a whole country dangerous is a bad way to think — Colombia has dangerous areas exactly as every country does — and is careful to add that he is currently in tourist areas and that his read comes from those. He says he intends to go to rougher places later and report from them.
• Money and costs: the minimum wage is extremely low and making a living is hard, which is his stated reason for not haggling over small sums with street vendors — see don’t grind a price down to nothing.
• Culture and people: what surprises him most is the people — charismatic, confident, and highly social, going out in large groups of friends by default. He singles out salsa: not nightclub dancing, properly danced.
• Food: mango is eaten with salt and often pepper, and is much firmer than the English fruit.
• Street selling: vendors are everywhere in tourist areas and ask once. Harry’s read is that a large share of coastal income comes from selling to visitors.

From Solo at Night in Cartagena, Colombia 🇨🇴

• Safety, revised: the first qualification of the confident reading two days earlier. A motorbike rider tells Harry not to walk a particular stretch of Cartagena’s old city at night because his camera or phone will be snatched — and turns down the fare while saying it. Police are visible at the intersections; a local attributes that to the sex trade rather than to street crime.
• Drugs: he is offered cocaine and cannabis three times in one evening in the tourist quarter. Refusing once is enough each time.
• Food: Colombian food is generally not spicy at all. Lemonade is still rather than fizzy, served with lime and heavy ice. A meal with a drink in a mall food court runs about $10 (from video – unverified).
• Tourism: the first place Harry has been in two years with tourism at what he calls pre-pandemic levels — American accents and Hawaiian shirts on the street — and he reads the street-performing economy as living off it.
• Language: enough of a barrier that asking for ice cream got him walked to an ATM. He says he would stay longer mainly to learn Spanish properly.

From A Day In My Life Living In COLOMBIA 🇨🇴

• Money and costs: the cluster’s most useful price list. A co-working day pass with drinks and wi-fi around £4–5; a barber’s cut and shave 25,000 pesos, about £5–6; a substantial fish lunch $7; a private room in a jungle hostel about $60; a 45–50 minute taxi 120,000 pesos, roughly $30 — where a bus would have cost a fraction of it (all from video – unverified).
• Money and banking: Harry withdraws in 300,000-peso lots and prefers BBVA machines, calling them reliable with a good exchange rate. He repeats that the denominations are high enough to catch you out.
• Internet: around 12 Mbps down and up at the best connection he can find on the Caribbean coast, and he doubts better exists locally.
• Safety: a man walked alongside him at 10 p.m. in Santa Marta asking for money. Nothing came of it, and it is the only approach of its kind in the cluster.
• Migration: his barber in Santa Marta is Venezuelan — the one direct sign in the cluster of Venezuelan migration into the Colombian coast.
• Food: arepa with omelette at breakfast, and fruit with almost everything.

From Tourists Not Allowed In This Colombian Jungle 🇨🇴

• Indigenous Colombia: the video’s description puts indigenous people at 4.4% of the population across 87 tribes (from video – unverified). The community Harry visits outside Tayrona does not admit outsiders at all, and access to those that do has to be arranged well in advance through a local guide.
• Coca: grown, picked and dried by the community, used medicinally and at weddings, and chewed daily. The distinction between the leaf and the processed drug is made repeatedly and Harry passes it on carefully.
• Culture and people: the community lives largely off what it grows, buys supplies about once a month, runs its own school, and builds mud-and-bamboo houses that stay cool in serious heat.
• Access etiquette: some areas are closed to visitors on religious grounds; filming elsewhere was fine once he asked.

From Colombia Waterfall Hunt 🇨🇴

• Nature: Colombia has the greatest variety of birds of any country (from video – unverified). The Caribbean jungle behind Tayrona has giant bamboo used for building, trees the guides put at 600–800 years old, and unmarked waterfalls that only locals know.
• Money and costs: a handmade bracelet on the beach, 6,000 pesos, about a dollar (from video – unverified).
• Indigenous economy: the mountain communities are largely self-sufficient but come down to the coast to sell handicrafts to tourists, because cash is still needed for things like electricity.
• Etiquette: crossing private land on a shortcut, the guides stopped and asked at the house first.

From Sleeping on the Beach In Colombia 🇨🇴 and Hiking to a Nudist Beach in Colombia 🇨🇴

• National parks: Tayrona costs 70,000 pesos to enter, about £15 or $18. A passport and a yellow-fever certificate are officially required and were not enforced on Harry’s visit.
• Domestic tourism is substantial. The crowd at Cabo San Juan is mostly Colombian rather than foreign, because the beach works as a day trip from the coast.
• Money and costs: a hammock on the sand $8, a private cabin $50, a meal in the park about $10, a woven bracelet 10,000 pesos, a large bunch of coca leaf 5,000 pesos, a dinner platter in Minca about $8 (all from video – unverified).
• Coca again: sold openly to walkers by indigenous vendors inside the national park, and served as coca lemonade in restaurants.
• Weather: his first cloudy day in the country, three weeks in, on the Caribbean coast in early February.

From Naked Spa in The Middle of Nowhere🇨🇴

• Money and costs: a motor-taxi within Minca 10,000 pesos, about £1.50 (from video – unverified). He does not say what the spa day cost.
• Booking: an Instagram direct message asking for the best experience available was the whole of the arrangement — no site, no deposit, no fixed menu.
• Culture and people: a small mountain town living on backpackers, with a visible sustainability-minded incomer scene — the spa is run by a couple building an environmentally-designed house on the site.
• Roads: largely unsurfaced above Santa Marta; motor-taxi is the practical way up and around.

From My Brothers Wedding in Colombia 🇨🇴

• Weddings: the bundle’s record of the Colombian format — a late-afternoon ceremony, buffet and drinks, DJs, reception games putting questions to the couple in front of everyone, and “crazy hour” at 10 p.m., which is a standard fixture rather than something laid on for one wedding. Harry’s verdict is that they are very different from English weddings.
• Culture and people: several people warn him about crazy hour in advance and none will explain it, which he takes as part of the joke.
• Where Colombians say to go: asked for a recommendation, a Barranquilla spa therapist names San Andrés, the Caribbean island, describing its sea as having seven colours.
• Boat days from Cartagena: a chartered boat for 13–15 people with crew, drinks and a sound system runs a full day out to the islands. Vendors come alongside to sell lunch and are pushier than sellers on land.

From Solo in Colombia’s Best City! Medellin 🇨🇴

• Cost of living: the cluster’s strongest numbers. Medellín — an Airbnb at $20 a night with fast wi-fi and Netflix, two tacos and a juice delivered for about $5, a street meat skewer under £1, a printed shirt $5 (all from video – unverified). Harry’s summary is that this is why the city fills with digital nomads: cheap, liveable, good internet, plenty to do.
• Money: cash machines run out of money, and a specific bank’s machine is worth walking to only if it’s actually stocked. Withdrawals in 300,000-peso lots, about £60.
• Delivery: Rappi is the local food-delivery app, and it applies a default tip of about 2,000 pesos which Harry leaves in.
• Safety, the local formulation: don’t display valuables, don’t hold your phone up, stay out of the wrong areas. Harry passes it on, notes there is a set phrase for it, and doesn’t attempt the phrase.
• Safety, his own rule: stop exploring at dusk. He says this is general practice, not specific to Colombia.
• Culture and people: older Colombians are noticeably friendlier than younger ones — the reverse of his European experience. Medellín is famous for graffiti, and for a violent past that has become the basis of its tourism.
• Climate: Medellín is called the land of eternal spring — 20–30°C year-round (from video – unverified) — and sits in a mountain valley.
• Street food: eaten against widespread advice. His argument is that warnings about it propagate exactly like warnings about dangerous neighbourhoods — a friend of a friend — and are usually wrong.

From Exploring Colombia’s Famous Hood 🇨🇴

• The cluster’s closing argument: Comuna 13 went from one of the most dangerous places in the world to a tourist route inside a decade, and Harry says it sums up the country. The same video bounds it — safe with a guide, on the route, and not everywhere.
• Displacement: much of the district was settled by Afro-Colombian families pushed out of their home towns and by people displaced by guerrillas. About half the housing sits on land the occupiers don’t hold title to (from video – unverified), and some households pay no taxes or water charges.
• Policing: police and army stop people in the street and check ID numbers against records on a handheld device.
• Money and costs: an Uber across Medellín 11,000 pesos, about £2; an informal parking attendant 5,000–6,000; a shirt 25,000; a lookout swing 15,000, about $4 (all from video – unverified).
• Coffee: grown in Antioquia and, on the evidence of one café, served with Baileys, cream and caramel. Colombia is divided into 32 departments (from video – unverified), the equivalent of states.
• Escobar tourism is a live trade — branded merchandise is sold openly to visitors in Comuna 13.

Places

• Cartagena
• Bocagrande
• Santa Marta
• Tayrona National Park
• Playa Brava
• Cabo San Juan
• Minca
• Barranquilla
• Medellín
• Comuna 13