You´re going where for a holiday? You must be crazy. What on earth is possessing you to go there? That was the general reaction when I mentioned I was visiting Colombia. Crazy!

Crime, we certainly saw none; drugs, no; local civic pride, yes; poverty, yes, but sadly, everywhere you go in the world, you see poverty, with people sleeping in the doorways in even the wealthiest of world cities. Yes, the new administration under President Gustavo Petro, who took office on 7 August 2022 for four years, remains somewhat unknown, but as a country, it has come far and remains a “hidden gem”.

The only prevalence throughout Medellin (and Bogota, which I also visited) is graffiti, which, because of its artistry, is very much a tourist attraction. There was little, if any, litter, efficient and cheap public transport, excellent accommodation … yes, Colombia is nothing but fantastic. Well, providing you exclude car drivers. They are like the drivers in Rome or Paris – suicidal. Everyone has a smile on their face. Everyone is proud of what they are.

Medellin, in the Andes, some 1,495 meters above sea level, was home to the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar, at one time the richest man on the planet. However, the city (and Colombia as a whole) has turned around its legacy as the world’s Cocaine capital to become an incredible tourist attraction.

It is the City of the Eternal Spring, so temperate all year-round that it has no heating bills, because no building has heating. Medellin is now possibly now more famous for Fernando Botero, the prolific sculptor and painter of “fat” art, with a large municipal museum in the centre of the city dedicated solely to his work. Yes, there remain signs of Escobar’s association with the city, but the authorities are doing their level best to erase this somewhat murky blot on the past, not an easy task because of what he did for the poor.

The world-infamous District 13, where drugs, murder and mayhem ruled for several decades, is now the premier tourist attraction not only for foreign visitors but for out-of-town Colombians themselves. Access to this ramshackle, Favela-style city, with a population of several hundred thousand people, is now via a series of sedate escalators.

But this is just partially how Medellin (and the reminder of Colombia) has reinvented itself.

Perhaps the most expensive commodity in Colombia is electricity. Strangely, you see minimal (if any) lighting in most local shops (the large shopping malls are certainly the exception!) throughout the city. The region’s electricity company, owned by the city, generates (no pun intended!) in the region of $ 1 billion profit a year, which is ploughed straight back into Medellin’s infrastructure and transport (UK take note!). This is the reason they have a wonderful metro train and a cable car that costs pence to travel on, public attractions that are free - or as near as makes no difference to free to visit - a continual ongoing road improvement initiative and a one-way road system throughout the city metropolitan area. And it has a spectacularly low cost of living, with a three-bedroom, three-bathroom, three-reception house costing around £125,000/€148,000.

However, we were spoilt – we had the services of a private driver (highly recommended at $100 a day) for the entire week in Medellin, so we had a very full and well-planned itinerary. And so on to Cartagena on the “Caribbean” coast. The famous walled city, with its castle, has seen many a blockbuster filmed there, including “Romancing the Stone” (Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner), and more recently Netflix’s “Narcos” and Will Smith’s film “Gemini Man”. The old city has a tourist peninsula just over a mile outside the town walls with beaches, nightlife and well-known chain hotels. And across the bay, near the cruise terminal, is the business district with matching hotels that are less of a tourist attraction and more for those with corporate charge cards.

Unfortunately, what dirties the brush in Cartagena is the constant on-street harrying by people trying to sell you boat and coach trips, or trying to usher you in to their restaurants.

A trip to the Volcan de Lodo El Totumo (a dormant volcano filled with mud) is quite an experience. However, with the mosquitoes having had my legs for lunch on a visit to a coffee plantation outside Medellin the previous week, I found the mud masseurs relieved the irritation almost immediately.

Bogota, the capital, is a quite an attitudinal 8,660 feet (2,640 meters), meaning that when you land at the airport, your ears don’t pop. It is an enormous city, home to over seven million people. For those with little time for a working capital city, you won’t be impressed, although the ludicrously famous Bolívar Square, with its iconic cathedral, is the main tourist attraction in the centre, beloved by tourists, protesters, celebrants and the film industry alike – the cathedral has featured in absolutely hundreds of South American-filmed Spaghetti Westerns and crime dramas over the decades. Worth a visit is the Gold Museum, with its incredible exhibits that are so rare and fabulous that they actually cannot be valued. Personally, I loved the vibe, and my camera never stopped once!

We stayed in the suburban Dann Carlton Hotel, a quite luxurious five-star conference hotel. It was somewhat of a surprise to find that five coffees, a beer and a sparkling water left change out of £10/€12! But then, that’s prices in Colombia for you.

In summation, I really can but recommend Colombia. It really is not as “crazy” a destination as some may assume.