Steven Dudley has an article in the Miami Herald about the increasing number of tourists heading over to Colombia. There were 580,000 visitors in 2005 compared to 493,000 the year before.

Colombia made headlines a few years ago when eight tourists were kidnapped by the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) for a couple of months before being releasing. Now with a decrease in kidnappings and murders, the troubled South American nation is being seen as a more attractive tourist destination, despite being constantly in the news for the War on Drugs, violence and corruption.

Indeed, during a six-day return trek he took to the site of those kidnappings in 2003, the Lost City (Ciudad Perdida), the only discomfort Dudley seemingly had to endure was treating the blistered feet of a 52-year-old Colombian man on the same tour group and listen to a 25-year-old New Zealand backpacker opine that the “only people who warn you off Colombia are fat and stupid, or they haven’t been here”.

No doubt our 25-year-old Kiwi friend will continue on with his round-the-world trip, safe in the knowledge that he won’t actually have to live in a country that has been caught in decades of violence coming from all sides and in a spot where guides “whisper that the paramilitary commander in region — a large rancher and drug trafficker named Hernán Giraldo — is still collecting a piece of the $220 price it costs each tourist to do the all-included six day trek.”

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