Colombia Outside the Guidebook

We've been told for months by other travelers that Colombia is the most beautiful and best country in South America, but we'll make no such conclusions until many more months of travel research.  In our quest to really get to know the beauty of Colombia, along with the exciting places, we're visiting a few of the un-exciting places, the ones guidebooks and most travelers skip over.  We figure that to really get a feel for Colombia (about twice the size of Texas), we'll head to some of the, well, lamer...  umm... more average places too.

Valledupar, Colombia is a nice enough small city with a few interesting restaurants, nice river-walk, and a once a year traditional music festival (think accordians, drums, and metal cans).  Kyle and I "worked hard" over breakfast coming up with an American version of Valledupar, and places like Peoria, IL and Wichita, KS came up, but we settled on Sundance, CO.  It's the sort of place that is nice enough, but you just wouldn't know much about unless you had a cousin there, except that they have this super famous festival.

Anywho, we CouchSurfed with a super fun English teacher and his wife.  CouchSurfing, if you're out of the know, is a sort of social networking site that connects people traveling with people that want to show people around or share their couch, or in our case their extra bed & air conditioner.


Our new friend Orlando was kind enough to cook for us, give us a bed to sleep in, and let us in to everything wonderfully average about his Colombian life.  He's got a great wife & kids, loves learning about other cultures, music, and watching movies on his flatscreen tv.

He like many Colombians, is supportive of the current president, Uribe, who is serious about weakening the guerrilla fighting in Colombia, and making them a safe and successful democracy.  He's also one of many happy to see the positive changes in Colombia in the past 5 years that enables people to safely travel to many parts of their country, and finally have it safe enough to get to know it and share it with the rest of the world.

Here's some photos of typical Colombia: Valledupar.


Oh, yes, and Halloween coming is very exciting for Colombians, school kids celebrate a week early parading around town.