Let me describe last Saturday for you.

Fifteen staff members. One family of seven, husband, wife, five kids. Me and mi mujer, alone in a palapa with two sodas and a book, watching the kids try to teach themselves how to bodysurf with the kind of stubborn commitment that makes you remember why kids are better than adults at almost everything.

That was the entire population of the beach for the whole day.

No vendors. No bracelet kids. No tour operators with parrots. No skimmed cards at the beach bar. No women putting their hands on your shoulders every six minutes. Nobody trying to sell us anything except more lunch, and even that, only once.

I’m not a costeño. I was raised on this coast, but my family is from the interior, Bucaramanga, Boyacá, Cali, Medellín. Mountain people. I know these beaches the way the kid who grew up on them knows them. I judge them like someone who can leave. And in twenty-some years of going to Caribbean beaches in this country, I have never been to one this quiet.

The beach is called Playa Calderón. It’s twenty minutes on foot from El Rodadero, in Santa Marta. This is the second article in my Caribbean coast series, the first was about Inca Inca, a clean, civilized, twenty-dollar day at a private club a few minutes up the coast. If Inca Inca is the gateway drug, Calderón is the dealer’s living room.

Getting there

Two ways. A lancha from El Rodadero will run you about 20,000 pesos one way ($5 USD) and takes five minutes. Or you do what I did and walk, twenty minutes up a coastal trail that climbs, descends, and drops you at the cove. Nothing extreme. If your legs work, you can do it.

The walk is the right call. You watch the land change as you climb, sea grape, dry brush, hawks looking for something, the smell of salt and burnt grass. By the time you arrive, the place has earned you. Half the gringos in Colombia never see what’s actually between two points in this country because they’re always in a taxi.

The water

The Colombian Caribbean is famously kind of brown. Pretty in photos, less pretty in person, brackish river runoff, sediment, the usual. Cartagena’s water three days out of five looks like watered-down chocolate milk with sunscreen swirls.

Calderón doesn’t look like that.

The water is the color you came to Colombia expecting it to be. Clear enough to see thirty, forty feet down. You spot fish without a snorkel. Sand and rock bottom, no mystery scraps. You walk in and the afternoon downgrades from anxious to amused.

The visit (and the most counterintuitive sales lesson on this coast)

Here’s what I actually did at Playa Calderón last Saturday. I went to scout it. I didn’t plan to stay. I went with mi mujer, walked the trail, looked at the menu, looked at the water, figured I’d stay a couple of hours, and that’s all I did.

We bought two sodas. That was it.

Plates ran 60,000 to 71,000 pesos ($15–$18 USD), not cheap. There was an actual chef working. The menu went beyond pescado frito into pasta, hamburgers, real plates instead of the deep-fried-anything most Colombian beaches throw at you. The staff didn’t push us to order food. Nobody handed us a menu twice. Nobody hovered. When my phone died, we asked for a charger and one appeared in under a minute, without commentary. We sat in a palapa, talked, swam, watched the family on the sand, and left after a couple of hours because we already had plans.

And here’s the strangest thing about that visit.

Because nobody tried to sell me anything, I’m going to spend three times more at Playa Calderón than I would have if they had pushed me.

I’m going back for my birthday.

This is a sales lesson the entire Colombian Caribbean has forgotten. In Cartagena, the second you sit down on the sand, the pressure to buy is so aggressive and so consistent that your defensive posture is to spend the minimum and leave. You finish your beer fast. You eat at a restaurant outside the touristy zone. You skip the boat tour. You build walls all day. By the end of the visit you’ve spent money, but resentfully, in survival mode.

In Calderón I bought two sodas, paid for the palapa, and walked out planning to drop 350,000 pesos there in three weeks.

Trust converts. Pressure repels. The fact that this isn’t obvious to half the businesses on this coast is the entire reason the other half are quietly winning.

Why nobody knows

Calderón isn’t on TripAdvisor in any meaningful way. It’s not in Lonely Planet. It’s not on the first three pages of Google when you search “Santa Marta beaches” in English. It’s not trending on Instagram. The only people I met were the family and the staff.

That’s not an accident. That’s the strategy.

Someone made a deliberate decision that being undiscovered is more profitable than being famous. No ads. No influencer trips. No volume play. The owner charges enough to keep the crowd small and runs an operation good enough that the right people come back on their own, without being chased, without being upsold. That’s a model the rest of the Colombian Caribbean should study and never copy, because the moment everyone copies it, it stops working.

So I’m going to do my part. I’ll tell you the beach exists. I’ll tell you it’s near El Rodadero in Santa Marta. I’ll tell you the price range. I won’t drop a Maps pin. I won’t post the photo with the location tag still on it. I won’t tell you the trailhead.

If you want the rest: walk down to El Rodadero in the morning. Ask the boat captains at the dock. Greet them properly. Don’t haggle. Tip the man.

They decide whether you get in.

The verdict

I don’t soften reviews. If a place sucks, I write that. Calderón doesn’t suck. After two hours of looking around, my notes had zero complaints. Trail manageable. Water clean. Staff professional without being stiff. No hustle. No scam. No noise. No upsell.

I’m spending my next birthday there. Full day. Real lunch. Whatever the chef recommends. The cold beer count won’t be polite.

The list of beaches on this coast that deserve serious writing keeps getting longer, beaches run by people who figured out that the Caribbean’s last competitive advantage isn’t infrastructure, marketing, or another Hilton.

It’s silence. And the discipline to not sell.

Dios te bendiga, amigos. More gems on the way.

She didn’t ask. She just put her hand on my shoulder, started kneading, and said “sólo siente la presión, mi amor.” Just feel the pressure. I said no. She kept going. I said no again. She finally walked away, but two minutes later her cousin showed up with the same script. By the end of the afternoon I’d said no to maybe twelve people. Massage women, bracelet kids, coconut guys, a guy with a parrot who wanted me to take a photo with it for a “donation,” and a tour operator very personally offended I didn’t want to see the Rosario Islands at his special foreigner- cachaco price, even after I told him in Spanish that I was Colombian from Santa Marta.

That’s Cartagena’s beach. That’s the postcard that put my country on every gringo’s bucket list.

I left that afternoon thinking the same thing most expats think after their first Boca Grande visit: this is what people are flying twelve hours for? Then I went home. The next weekend I sat at Inca Inca, four hours back up the coast in Santa Marta, and remembered why I never tell anyone to swim in Cartagena.

Let me show you what 25 dollars buys you when you go where I go.

Inca Inca

Inca Inca sits just past El Rodadero, the main beach strip in Santa Marta. You get there two ways: hike about 15 minutes along a coastal trail (beautiful if your knees still work) or take a lancha, small fishing boat, for five minutes from the main beach. The lancha runs 15,000 to 20,000 pesos depending on the captain’s mood ($3.50–$5 USD). Pay with a smile. Don’t argue. It’s a beer’s worth.

A few years ago someone with money walked into Inca Inca, looked at the sand, and built a private club. I know how that sounds. Private club on a Colombian beach reads like everything wrong with how this coast is getting commodified. Stay with me, what they actually built is the closest thing to peace you’ll find on a Caribbean beach in this country.

Entry is 80,000 pesos for the whole day ($20). What you get for that: a palapa, a thatched beach hut with an actual bed inside it, not a plastic chair, not a sun-bleached towel, an actual mattress where you can take a real nap with the waves doing the heavy lifting on your nervous system. Lunch on site runs 30,000 pesos ($7.50) for a full plate of fried fish, patacones, coconut rice, and a side of salad nobody eats. A cold Pola is supposed to be 10,000 but if you treat the staff like humans it drops to 5,000 ($1.25).

Total damage for a full day with food and drinks: under 100,000 pesos. About $25.

But that’s not why I’m writing this. The real reason is what you don’t experience.

Nobody touches you. Nobody approaches your bed every six minutes. There’s no parade of vendors with bracelets and coconuts and unsolicited body work. The volleyball game on the sand is families, not a hustle. The hammocks have books and beer cans and quiet people in them. The water is clean enough that you actually want to be in it. You exist as a person, not as a walking ATM with sunscreen on.

That alone is worth the 80,000 pesos.

Why my coast has two faces

Here’s the part the guidebooks won’t write, because they’re written by people who’ve been to Cartagena three times and called it Colombia.

Cartagena got rich. Or some neighborhoods of it did. The walled city is a Disneyland for couples on their second honeymoon. Real estate in Boca Grande went from cheap to absurd in 15 years. Tourism dollars flooded in for two decades, and the people who didn’t get a slice of that pie, most of them, by the way, learned one survival strategy: the foreigner is the resource. Extract maximum value per interaction. Never let one walk past without an attempt. It’s a hustle culture born from watching prosperity arrive in your city and skip your house. I don’t blame the people doing it. I blame what tourism did to the city.

Santa Marta is still mostly poor. Still mostly slow. The roads are bad. Half the downtown smells like fish on a hot afternoon. Half the businesses don’t open when they say they will because the owner had a long night. There’s no walled city, no luxury hotel arms race, no Instagram boulevards. And precisely because of that, the locals haven’t been sharpened against the visitor yet. Vendors here are sometimes annoying but they’re not predators. They walk by, offer once, you say no, gracias, they move on. Nobody touches your shoulder. Nobody runs the long con.

It’s not a moral difference between the two cities. It’s an economic one. Less tourism = less hustle pressure = a beach where you can read for two hours without anyone attempting commerce on your body.

I’m not going to pretend I want my hometown to stay poor forever. Santa Marta needs better roads, better hospitals, better schools. But I genuinely hope it develops without turning into Cartagena’s beach economy. Because once a city learns the hustle, it doesn’t unlearn it.

What’s coming

Next weekend I’m hitting Playa Calderón. Even quieter, even less known. The kind of place where ten gringos show up per month and five hundred locals already know exists. I’ll write that one up too.

After that, more. I’m building a small library of the spots most expats never find because they listen to the same five Cartagena influencers who keep recommending the same six restaurants where they get a free meal for the post.

I won’t be blowing these places up. I won’t be geotagging them into oblivion. The whole point of having a costeño parcero, somebody who grew up on this coast, who knows the boat captains by name and the lunch ladies by their kids’ names, is that you get the real version, not the version Google rewards.

If you’re heading to the Colombian Caribbean, do yourself this favor: spend one day in the walled city of Cartagena if you must. Eat the arepa de huevo, take the photo at the Reloj. Then get on a bus or a flight to Santa Marta and find Inca Inca. Pay your 80,000 pesos. Eat your fish. Drink your “fría” or “Pola”. Watch the water.

You’ll understand why no one from my hometown actually swims in Cartagena.

Dios te bendiga, amigos. More gems on the way.

So there’s this whole thing blowing up right now in Medellín. Some American influencer posted a video saying locals should be grateful for the Passport Bros because, hey, at least they’re bringing money in. His whole argument was basically: Medellín isn’t a real tourist city anyway, it’s mostly just about sex tourism, so what are you complaining about?

That’s when I knew this conversation needed to happen. And not the sanitized version everyone’s pretending to have on Twitter.

Let me be straight with you first: the gringo’s not completely wrong. But he’s also not completely right. And that’s the part that makes people uncomfortable.

I’ve spent time in Medellín’s tourist zones. The vibe is clear if you pay attention. And yeah, there’s actual tourism happening: Provenza, La 70, Guatapé, Comuna 13. But here’s the thing nobody says out loud, there’s a reason Medellín and Cartagena are both known as tourist cities AND both have some of the highest prostitution activity in the country. That’s not coincidence. That’s not random.

So when the gringo says sex tourism is a huge part of the economy? He’s pointing at something real. But then everybody loses their mind instead of asking the actual questions.

Here’s what gets me, though: the response from locals is to blame the Passport Bros for everything. Rent going up? “Blame the gringos!” Property prices insane? “Blame the gringos!” Everyone wants a simple villain.

Except that’s lazy thinking, parcero.

The real story is messier and darker, and it actually requires you to look at what’s happening underneath.

Follow the money, it doesn’t go where you think

Last year I was looking at rentals in Medellín. You can find places for 5 million pesos (roughly USD $1,200) all the way up to 60 million pesos (USD $14,500) for a nice apartment. Properties selling for millions of dollars. G-Wagons everywhere. Ferraris in the street like it’s nothing. Mercedes with tinted windows.

Now, Colombia makes things. Colombia has entrepreneurs. That’s real, I’m not saying the wealth is fake. But you’d have to be blind not to see what’s actually happening: massive money laundering operations. And I’m talking about massive.

The cocaine production under the Petro government has gone through the roof, we’re talking record numbers. And all that money has to go somewhere. You can’t just deposit USD $10 million in a bank and say “don’t ask questions.” So what do you do? You buy property. You buy cars. You start businesses. You open bars and clubs and “massage” places. You buy apartments and rent them out.

This is what people should be angry about. Not the gringo looking for a girlfriend.

The “security” everyone keeps praising? Yeah, about that...

Here’s the thing nobody likes to say: Medellín feels safer than Bogotá. It feels safer than Cartagena. And most tourists feel that difference immediately. They walk around, they go out at night, and yeah, it’s fine.

But why?

Because there are roughly 400 criminal band structures operating in that city, and they’ve made a pact. With the mayor’s office, with the government, with whoever’s in charge. These groups have basically agreed: we control security in our territories, we keep it manageable, we don’t make big scandals, and in exchange, you let us operate. We bring tourism dollars, we keep things “calm,” everybody wins.

That’s not safety, amigos. That’s a business arrangement. It’s organized crime providing a service.

And yeah, compared to other Colombian cities where there’s chaos and robberies happening every night, it works. It’s efficient, even. But it’s built on a foundation that’s completely rotten. The gangs use tourism as a front, it gives them cover to move drugs, move money, move prostitution, all while the hotels and the influencers and the tourists take their pictures.

It’s a perfect ecosystem for money laundering.

So who’s really responsible for the prices?

When rent goes from 2 million pesos to 5 million pesos in two years, and everyone screams “PASSPORT BROS!”, they’re missing the actual story.

The locals are the ones jacking up the prices. A landlord sees gringos coming in with dollars, and suddenly they’re thinking “why am I charging 3 million when I can charge 8?” A property owner sees foreign investors buying, sees the money floating around, and they’re not thinking about their countrymen, they’re thinking about profit.

The Passport Bros are just the excuse. The locals are the ones using them as a reason to extract money from the economy and stick it somewhere that gets cleaned.

But here’s what really pisses me off: people won’t admit this because it requires looking in the mirror. It’s easier to blame the foreigners than to acknowledge that your own neighbor is choosing to price you out of your own city.

The regional pride thing, and why it’s keeping you blind

This is where I’m going to sound harsh, but it needs to be said: a lot of Colombians, especially Paisas, carry a pride that feels good until you realize it’s the thing keeping you from seeing clearly.

“Medellín is the best!” “Paisas are the hardest workers!” “We don’t need anybody!”

That kind of pride stops you from asking the real questions. You want to know what actually moves you forward? Recognizing your problems. Working with people who aren’t from your region. Learning from other places. Humble competence beats proud mediocrity every single time.

A person is good or bad based on what they can do, not where they’re from. A city improves when it’s honest about what’s happening inside it, not when it defends itself against outsiders.

Medellín’s a beautiful city. It’s green, it’s got incredible weather, it’s got real entrepreneurs and real culture. But it’s also got massive drug production feeding criminal organizations that have basically taken over the economy. Both things are true at the same time.

And until locals stop pointing fingers at Passport Bros and start pointing them at the actual systems that are broken, the prices won’t come down. The money laundering won’t stop. The structure won’t change.

What should actually happen?

First, stop with the tribalism. Medellín vs Bogotá, Paisa vs Costeño, it’s baby thinking. You want progress? Work with everybody.

Second, look at what’s actually happening with money. Not all of it is criminal, but enough of it is that it’s distorting the entire economy. And that’s not the Passport Bros’ fault. That’s a policy problem.

Third, understand that tourists are going to come. Some will be there for beautiful reasons, some for gross reasons. Both are happening. You can’t change human nature. What you can do is make sure the money that comes in actually develops the city instead of just cleaning it.

And maybe the hardest part: admit that your own people are choosing profit over community. That’s where the real shame is.

The gringo was right about one thing: there is a lot of sex tourism in Medellín. He was wrong about everything else. But instead of arguing about whether he’s right or wrong, maybe ask yourself why that’s even true. And who benefits from keeping it that way

Dios te bendiga, amigos. Keep your eyes open.

Real numbers. My actual spending. Not a curated lifestyle post. Not “you can live on $1,500 if you eat arepas every day and never leave your apartment.” The actual breakdown of what it costs to live well in Colombia AND run a business from here at the same time.

Here’s this month:

Let me break this down so it actually makes sense.

What’s Business, What’s Life

First thing you need to understand: that $13,300 isn’t me eating wagyu and driving a Range Rover through Bogotá. That number includes everything - my personal life AND my entire business operation mixed together, because that’s how it actually works when you run a company from your apartment in Santa Marta.

The $7,071 in payroll isn’t me living extravagantly. That’s my team. I run a BD company focused on Latin America and that payroll covers the people who make the operation function. Real humans. Real salaries. Plus Sofía - my AI employee who just booked her first meeting last week, but that’s a different story.

The $919 in software is every tool I need to actually work. Apollo for leads, Claude for AI, every subscription that keeps the machine running. People never talk about this. They show you their rent and their food and pretend that’s the whole picture. It’s not.

If you’re running any kind of remote business, you’re paying for infrastructure. That’s real money every month that doesn’t show up in any “cost of living in Colombia” YouTube video.

Business Meals at $811 is legitimate and anyone who’s done real business in Latin America knows why.

You don’t close deals on Zoom here. You close them over lunch, over coffee, over a meal where you actually looked each other in the eyes. That’s not entertainment. That’s how business works in this part of the world.

The Travel at $295, Marketing at $179, Employee Benefits at $177, Legal at $100 - that’s the invisible weight of running something real. Nobody posts their software receipts on Instagram.

Now here’s what it actually costs to live.

The Real Cost of Living Well in Santa Marta

I’ve bounced around Colombia like a lost tourist who finally made money. Cartagena, Medellín, Bogotá, Bucaramanga, now Santa Marta. I’ve paid rent in all of them. I know the numbers.

Rent:

Here in Santa Marta: 1,500,000 to 1,800,000 pesos monthly. That’s about 420-500 USD at the current tasa. Decent place, nothing fancy, but somewhere I don’t wake up wondering about my safety. I live with my girlfriend - she’s studying full time so I cover everything - but when you’re calculating what a real apartment actually costs, that’s the number.

Compare that to Bogotá where I paid 2,400,000 pesos (670 USD). Medellín was 2,800,000 pesos (780 USD) back when I was there. And the problem with those big cities beyond the price?

Real estate agencies run everything. Minimum one year contracts, they want your life story, your employment history, basically they want to audit your existence before they hand you a key. Try finding month-to-month in Bogotá without an agency. You can’t. Not as a local, definitely not as a foreigner.

Santa Marta? I could find something on a handshake. That flexibility matters more than people think.

Utilities:

Electricity in the Caribbean region is brutal, parcero. Just to keep the AC running - and you NEED it, this isn’t negotiable - I’m paying about 300,000 pesos monthly (83 USD).

Water: 176,000 pesos (49 USD).
Gas: 50,000 pesos (14 USD). The only cheap thing.
Internet and phone: 100,000 pesos combined (28 USD).

Total utilities: roughly 626,000 pesos (174 USD).

Food:

Here’s the real number. I do groceries twice a month - 600,000 pesos each time, so 1,200,000 pesos monthly (333 USD). That covers everything for the apartment.

Weekends I go out or order domicilio - maybe 250,000 to 300,000 pesos per weekend (70-83 USD). Multiply by four weekends and you’re at roughly 1,100,000 pesos (306 USD).

Total food: about 2,300,000 pesos monthly. That’s 639 USD. Eating real food, not performing poverty, not eating at Andrés Carne de Res every night either. Just normal.

The honest personal total:

Rent + utilities + food + personal expenses: you’re looking at 1,500 to 2,000 USD monthly to live well in Santa Marta. Real apartment. Real food. Not stressed. Girlfriend covered.

That’s the number nobody tells you because it doesn’t fit the “Colombia is crazy expensive now” narrative OR the “live like a king on $800” fantasy. The truth is in the middle and it’s genuinely good.

The Make Dollars Spend Pesos Formula

This is everything, amigos. This is the entire game.

The tasa is sitting around 3,600 pesos per dollar right now. If you earn in USD - contracting, remote work, running a business with American or European clients - your expense ratio is ridiculous in your favor.

Every dollar you earn is worth 3,600 pesos the moment it hits Colombia.

I make dollars. I spend pesos. The business operates in USD. Life operates in pesos. That gap is where the real advantage lives. Not in the cheap beer. Not in the low rent. In the structural arbitrage of earning in one currency and living in another.

A founder running the same operation in San Francisco is burning $8,000 just on rent before they’ve paid for a single tool. My cost of experimentation is near zero by comparison. I can run three half-working ideas at the same time, fail at two of them, and not feel the financial pressure that makes people skip the learning phase.

That’s not luck. That’s deliberate. Colombia isn’t just cheap - it’s a structural advantage for anyone willing to build something here.

Why You Should NOT Live in Medellín or Cartagena

Medellín is expensive now. The influx of digital nomads and dollar earners over the last five years has inflated prices in every neighborhood a foreigner wants to live.

El Poblado is basically a theme park at this point.

Cartagena is a tourist trap masquerading as a city. Beautiful for three days. As a place to actually live? You’re paying tourist prices for everything while locals quietly resent the extraction happening around them.

The best cities to live in aren’t the famous ones. They’re the second-tier cities. The medium cities. The ones that still have a local soul. Santa Marta. Bucaramanga. Pereira. Manizales.

Cities where you can build actual relationships with actual people who aren’t calculating your dollar earnings while you talk to them.

The Safety Math Nobody Explains

Two types of foreigners get robbed in Colombia. Both making the same mistake from opposite directions.

The first tries to live on 500 USD a month. Rents a room in a poor neighborhood, tries to blend in by living like the local poor.

Doesn’t work. The neighborhood knows immediately. A foreigner living cheap is a foreigner with a hidden stash. You become a target.

The second flashes money. Bottle service, designer clothes, buying rounds for strangers.

In Medellín they don’t rob you at gunpoint - they befriend you first. Get close over weeks. Then one night something goes in your drink and you wake up having lost everything. Escopolamina. It happens regularly.

The middle ground saves you: middle-class comportment. Decent apartment, decent neighborhood. Not ostentatious. Not broke. Just normal. You call no attention. You’re just a person who works.

How to Build Real Safety Here

You need time and real Spanish. Not tourist Spanish - real Spanish where you can read between the lines of what someone is actually saying versus what they’re telling you.

You need one real local friend. Not someone from a hostel bar. Someone you met naturally over time - at the gym, at a recurring place, somewhere you saw the same person month after month until friendship developed because neither of you was trying to extract anything.

Find friends at the gym. Go consistently. See the same people. Let it happen naturally. That person becomes your navigation system for everything you don’t understand about how Colombia actually works.

The Full Breakdown

Business:

• Payroll: $7,071

• Uncategorized: $1,830

• Software and Subscriptions: $919

• Business Meals: $811

• Travel and Transportation: $295

• Marketing and Advertising: $179

• Employee Benefits: $177

• Legal and Professional: $100

• Business total: ~$11,382

Personal living (Santa Marta):

• Rent: 1,500,000-1,800,000 pesos (420-500 USD)

• Utilities: 626,000 pesos (174 USD)

• Food: 2,300,000 pesos (639 USD)

• Everything else: varies

• Personal total: 1,500-2,200 USD

Combined this month: ~$13,300. Not every month. But this is what a real month looks like.

The people telling you Colombia is still dirt cheap are living in 2018. The people telling you it’s unaffordable are living in Poblado comparing it to Iowa.

The real answer is in the middle: Colombia is an extraordinary place to build a life and a business if you approach it honestly and stop performing for social media.

Make dollars. Spend pesos wisely. Live in a real neighborhood. Cover your people. Build quietly.

That’s the formula, parcero. Everything else is noise.

Dios te bendiga,

BowTiedColombia

Alright amigos, so I went to Medellín a few months back. Full tourist mode - Guatapé, Piedra del Peñol, Comuna 13, Plaza Botero, all of it. You know how it is when you’re trying to really know a city that’s not yours? You get an Uber and suddenly you’ve got a captive audience, haha. And let me tell you, the drivers there are bored. They want to talk. And that’s where things got weird.

I had two encounters that stuck with me. Both left me thinking, “Que descaro, Colombia. What are we doing?”

The Guy Who Worked for the Devil

First driver. My girlfriend and I hop in, heading somewhere downtown. This guy’s got a sticker on his steering wheel. Not just any sticker - Pablo Escobar. And he’s talking about him. With pride. Like the man was some kind of hero. Like he built hospitals or something

Here’s the kicker: he lived in Santa Marta for a while. My Santa Marta. And get this - he went to San Luis Beltrán. Same school I went to as a kid, parcero. Haha, small world.

Turns out he now runs some of Pablo Escobar’s museums in Medellín - the actual tourist spots that thousands of people visit every year. So when he was talking about “the boss” with that pride, it wasn’t just some guy performing a myth. This is literally his business. His livelihood. That sticker on the steering wheel? That’s his brand.

My girlfriend and I start getting tense. Like, is this guy going to rob us? Is he serious? He’s rattling off crime stories like they’re bedtime tales, counting them like accomplishments. And you can’t tell if he’s bullshitting or if he actually lived that life. So I played along - asked him about Popeye, asked about some German narco I can’t even remember the name of. Real specific questions about the drug trade.

And here’s the creepy part: he wouldn’t answer directly. I’d ask him something straight up - something he should know if he really ran in those circles - and he’d dodge it. Not like he was scared. More like... he was performing. Like he’d curated this whole story about managing Pablo’s museums, protecting them, knowing the criminals. But when you pressed him on details? Nothing.

It was like asking someone “what time is it?” and they respond with “the sky is blue.” You’re sitting there thinking, hermano, that’s not what I asked. But he kept doing it. Over and over. Talking with all this pride about the shopping centers built, about how “the boss” never touched his own product, about robberies at the museums. Showing me chat logs of motorbike thieves who’d robbed tourists at his place. All suggesting he was important.

And honestly? I think he was a good dude. Real friendly. Treated me well because we had the Santa Marta connection. I think he’s gonna do fine in life. But that whole vibe was strange, amigos. He wasn't performing for us exactly. He was just... living inside his own story. This identity he’d built around proximity to something dark.

That’s Colombia, though. That’s how it works sometimes.

The Homeless Industrial Complex

Second driver takes us to Plaza Botero. Different vibe, same weirdness.

This guy explains why Medellín has so many street people: the climate. No, seriously. He says it’s not too hot, not too cold. Perfect for living on the streets, basically. And then - here’s the thing - the city basically encourages it. The mayor’s office sets up these shelters, feeds them, gives them everything. Three meals a day. Drugs. Good weather.

So street people from all over Colombia come to Medellín. Venezuelans, Americans who got hooked, people from other cities who figured out the system. Why work? Why try to change your life? The city’s basically said, “Stay here, we got you.”

And I’m not saying this guy was wrong. I think he was describing something real. Medellín’s got a homeless population that’s actually growing because the conditions are better than anywhere else. The city’s trying to do something humane, which is decent. But the unintended consequence is you’ve created a poverty trap. You’ve made it too comfortable to stay at the bottom.

There’s no incentive to leave. No pressure to push forward. Just three meals, a bed, and whatever escape you want. Bendito Dios, that’s a dangerous combination.

What I’m Getting At

These two rides, back-to-back, showed me something about how we live down here. We’re all kind of performing our lives, no? The guy with the Pablo sticker is performing his connection to power. The homeless system is performing compassion while accidentally building dependency.

And look - I’m not a saint. I make dollars, spend in pesos, and I like cheap beer as much as the next person. But this stuff matters. How we talk about the narcos, how we handle poverty, how we incentivize people to stay stuck.

The craziest part? Both drivers were honest. They weren’t trying to trick me. They were just... describing their reality. The world as they see it.

That’s scarier than an actual robbery, amigos.

Dios te bendiga,

BowTiedColombia

It is not a surprise that the major issue he notices is how expensive everything is. He says that gas, food, and everyday expenses are out of control. Just consider that when he left, one gallon of gas was $9.000 and now is around $16.000, which in a term of 3 years is a significant increase. I understand his surprise, almost doubling in gas prices is scandalous I guess while we live here everyday, we complain but nothing much that can be done. Petro’s government has been a disaster and has been unable to control how expensive the gas is.

In the same way, food prices are too high. He’s been getting surprised by how much more a regular meal is at any restaurant. Same in the grocery stores, trying to do a simple grocery haul for a week you cant get nothing much for $100.000, an amount he was used to spend before. Not only in grocery shopping. Going out for lunch is been a bigger surprise. Any simple restaurant you cant get anything for less than $30.000, taking as an example, a meal for two for hamburgers, fries and soda costed $70.000, in his experience was too expensive.

On the bright side, he noticed at least in Bogota, tons of roads being fixed and built. And is true, a lot of improvements had been made in Bogota, just to mention the Metro is finally being build, but also Transmilenio is expanding which can help the traffic in Bogota. Obviously traffic has always been chaotic and probably is worse than ever with all the road closures, but at least the city is getting improved.

When he left, the Venezuelans migration crisis was at the worst moment and where he used to live (close to the Terminal de Transportes) the situation was out of control, migrants were scattered all over the place and security started to decline. But as he noticed, his neighbourhood is better now in that regard, he didn’t encounter the same situation as before.

Also some small details he can notice after being aways for some time, cars tend to be old and pollution is noticeable. Weather is wormer than usual (but is probably biased as he lives in Canada and winters are too cold). Lots of new buildings have been made. Sense of security is the same, lots of people mention how much more insecure is but it always depends on the area where you are.

Overall, changes that have been happening can be materialized in rising prices, inflation and insecurity (but mostly in specific areas of the country). Rising prices in food and gas are out of control and everything that the government does looks like they didn’t care about it. We are getting used to pay for expensive food and gas, but lifestyle is not really improving, salaries are not growing at the same rate, unemployment is rising and companies are being dissuaded to leave the country.

I fully understand the surprise of my friend. We are use to it now but we always have to remind to ourselves how incompetent are the politicians on charge of the country. The main alternative for me, and what I can recommend to you, is always try to make dollars and spend in pesos, even if everything is getting expensive, living with USD$5k monthly you can live like a king, even in Bogota, one of the most expensive cities.

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In Cartagena, agencies are a den of thieves. They whip up crazy contracts to rip off foreigners, exchange students, and even me, a “costeño” from Santa Marta aunque mis padres son de Bucaramanga y Boyacá.

They jack up your bills, overcharge you, and trap you with shady clauses. A total plague, I swear.

But this apartment? A rare win. I dodged the crooked agencies and landed a flexible deal straight from the owner.

How’d I pull it off in a city crawling with scammers? And what’s my next move to make this place work for me?

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It was a “big” apartment, around 70 square meters, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, living room, dining area, balcony, pool, and all that stuff.

Here are the photos… but in the end, I decided not to take it.

I want to tell you that Cartagena has the most dishonest people in Latin America.

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I’ve already lived in Bogotá for over 10 years and in Santa Marta for more than 10 years. I’ve also lived in Medellín and Cali, but only for short periods and a few years ago. I need to revisit those places.

Well, I’m in Cartagena now. It’s been about a week, and honestly, I don’t like it very much.

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Yesterday, I made a small shopping trip to PriceSmart, which is essentially Costco in Colombia—literally the same company operating under that name.

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I literally scheduled a doctor's appointment ( January 13th), and I had it yesterday. I do this every year to get all sorts of blood and urine tests done.

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Life moves slower here. Everything happens at a slower pace. Just yesterday, I finally made it back to the gym, and I saw some stunning women.

One of them was a tall, strikingly beautiful woman—almost my height—with huge legs, like a football player. But the most interesting thing was what she was saying.

She’s a woman from a poor neighborhood in Santa Marta. I don’t want to go into too many details, but guess how she makes her living? She got pregnant by a Dutch guy, separated immediately after, and now lives off the money he sends for their child.

What’s shocking is how shamelessly she talked about it, saying she’ll have an income until her child turns 18. I mean, it’s incredible to me—how someone would intentionally get pregnant as a business plan to live off their child.

It made me realize that for some women, there’s no mercy when it comes to making money or accessing it.

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Here’s the truth: Living in Colombia while earning dollars is exactly that.

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Dios te bendiga,
BowtiedColombia

A true paisa through and through, and on top of that, he was a pilot in the U.S., a motorcycle racer, and a car enthusiast.

I will leave his contact information at the end of the article.

He’s retired both in the U.S. and Colombia.

This guy is a genius. Months have passed, and I still remember him. I’ve never met someone like him, and I feel like he’s a cultural representation of what Medellín means. He loves motorcycles, cars, women, and has unstoppable energy.

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I've seen many tweets from people complaining about gringos because they go out with prostitutes and party until 6 a.m. in Medellín.

There's a video I don’t fully understand—apparently, they’re complaining because the women are underage, but the truth is no one knows if they are or not.

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People fake a status they don’t have to capture the attention of women who, in Latin America, seem unreachable. The goal of this article is to teach you that life is full of opportunities and that it’s not necessary to be a millionaire or athletic to be successful with women.

Let me give you an example. In Colombia, and particularly in Medellín or Barranquilla (la gente los llama (“espantajopos”), men go to a farm, take many pictures from different angles, and post them on their Instagram stories multiple times a year. They literally repeat the same Instagram stories, and the women don’t notice.

I myself saw with my own eyes how women fall for those traps of faking status haha. It makes me laugh because it’s incredible what men do to have sex in Colombia. It’s absurd.

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I don’t know where they got the idea that a Latina is a trad wife just because she cooks for them haha🤣. I honestly know countless women who cheat on their American boyfriends or husbands.

I think there’s a huge lack of understanding of the street smarts in LATAM.

This is the most wanted hitwoman in Santander. A beautiful woman. If you ask me, I would never think she’s a hitwoman. Well, the same thing happens in Latin America. A woman can seem like one thing but be something entirely different.

I'm not saying there aren’t good women to marry in Colombia. What I’m saying is that foreigners tend to focus more on whether she cooks for them than on her principles. If you want to understand what a woman is truly like, you need to meet her parents (both of them). If she grew up without one, there are usually issues.

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They are 27 years old, single, don’t speak Spanish and are very gringos. Saying this, what they know about Colombian (latino) culture is very limited and probably I am one of the closest reference to what and how a Colombian acts and thinks (They have been in Cancun in a all inclusive resort, but I don’t consider that a real way to get to know latino or Mexican culture). So because they are young and single, their priorities were to get to know the city and go for party at night.

You can imagine the preconcieved image of what Colombia is and has to offer: beautiful women, the classical cocaine and Pablo Escobar stereotype, Narcos (the Netflix show) and thinking Spanish is a cool language that sounds cool when I speak it. So when I told them stories of how Colombia really is, they got more than intrigued and decided to plan a trip.

They went for 3 nights in Bogota and 5 nights in Medellin. The airbnb in Bogota was in Parque de la 93, and in Medellin in El Poblado, next to Parque Lleras.

My safe tips and recomentions are the same I always mentioned to you here, don’t be naive because here people can take advantage from you, be wary of scopolamine, try to avoid dangerous zones and “don't give papaya” (no dar papaya).

Here is what they did and think about Bogota:

First impression after leaving the airport was how crazy the traffic is, people driving all over the place, motorcycles and traffic. I know how crazy driving in Colombia is and they are not wrong, Bogota is a city you need to really know how to drive. They are Canadians, they are used to people following the traffic signs, giving pedestrians time and space to cross the streets and using the Stops signs. all of that, don’t really happens in Bogota.

Because they stayed in Parque de la 93 is in a safe area, they feel walking around was cool and got a good impression about the area, specially for the variety of bars and restaurants. Because they didn’t speak Spanish, they feel how difficult could be to live there without the language. Daily interactions feel sturdy and even tho people were trying to help, doing everything by Google translate felt inconvenient.

They also felt they stand out from Colombians, specially one of them is 6’3 and white. He argued he felt observed when walking around and makes sense, we still find bizarre to see foreigners around, even if the tourism is booming and now you see more foreigners than ever. But they felt people were trying to be helpful, helping to show the prices and directions when they were lost or confused about it.

Food and prices

Prices are a standing and main shock, some things in Colombia are really cheap compared to Canada. Cigarrets, beer, street food (and food in some restaurants) were shockingly cheap. Just to put in perspective, cigarettes in Canada cost $23 while you get the in Colombia for $3 . Same with beer, they were lucky to be next to an Oxxo and buy beers for $5 while in Canada a six pack Corona is $16.

But how cheap Colombia can get is variable, they went to restaurant and paid $50.000 Colombian pesos for lunch, but you can also get lunch for $12.000 if you know where to go. Because they were on vacation and money wasn’t really an issue, they decided to go for restaurants with a higher price.

Regarding the food, they say they liked it, they didn’t really have in mind what traditional Colombian food is but they get to try arepas, empanadas, chorizo, buñuelo and so on. They mentioned how good the soda Colombiana is and how much hey liked refajo (colombiana with beer).

Nightlife

Besides the fact they didn’t stay long in Bogota, they were happy with the first impression of what Bogota nightlife has to offer. Every city has its distinctive ways to party and spend the night, I recommended them to go to El Mono Bandido, a bar where you can send messages in napkins to the person you wanna meet.

They were beyond excited with this dynamic. And I can understand because it gets easy to break the ice and just shoot your shot. And keep in mind not only they are gringos in Colombia but also good looking guys, so the excitement just got higher as they received 3 or 4 napkins from girls trying to meet them.

Not only they meet new people there, they assure me the women they see around the bar and the area were beautiful.

Party nights usually start in a bar or at friends house drinking and then going to the club, so I recommended Presea, which is known for dancing regueton, which I thought would be a good plan for them, clubs in Canada don’t have that type of party. Again, they liked it a lot. Right away they told me how much women like to dance and how much we Colombian like to party, they stayed until closing at 5am, which I can imagine how surprising it is as clubs in Canada close at 2am.

Walking around Downtown Bogota

Centro in Bogota is a good place for tourist to know and walk, all the area from the Septima from the Calle 26 to Plaza de Bolivar is a walkable and interesting place to know. They walked a lot, not knowing nothing about the history of the city or what building is each one. Because I wasn’t there to guide them and tell a little bit of the area, you can get a tour, which are usually locals that walk with you and narrate you the history of each place.

That’s why Downton Bogota is easy to get lost, you walk a lot and if walk to a random street, probably you will end up in a dangerous area. And that happened to them, completely lost walking around they end up in what seems to be a street full of homeless people and drug addicts, good thing it wasn’t too far for them to go back.

But in general they argued they never felt that experience before, Downtown Bogota felt like an organized chaos, everyone living their own life with a lot of things happening at the same time, street vendors, music, working people, students, homeless, commerce. They never felt that vibrance before and even tho it was shocking, it makes sense that they liked the feeling of chaos, too many random things happening at the same time.

Again, not speaking Spanish is a barrier when traveling alone, but it won’t impede you to enjoy Colombia. People always try to help as much as needed. At least in Bogota they didn’t felt like people tried to take advantage from them, for being gringos and not speaking the language.

This concludes how you feel in Bogota for the first time when you have never been here, don’t speak the language and is your first time getting a taste of latin culture. Overall nightlife and party would be a good impression, feeling of safety and security gets reset as you need to be sure that a lot of things can happen here. If you are white and tall (gringo) you will stand out. Safety will depend on the parts of the city that you go, but if you play your cards right, nothing will happen to you.

Next mail is a continuation of what it feels to be for the first time in Medellin, so keep in mind to read both of this mails.

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