Dear lilioftheworld. In the s, Medellin was often the city with highest murder rate in the whole world. To be specific the rate has its peak with people out of per year. Today this rate is just 25 and Medellin is an attractive tourist destination offering plenty of activities for every taste.
In order to set the right expectations about what you will read in this article, we will start with the program of the our trip we were a group of five. We landed in Medellin we wanted to avoid the chillier climate of Bogota. Then we took a flight to Santa Marta where we stayed 6 days for our beach holiday. We had one day in Cartagena before the return flight. Like in every other trip, we traveled only with hand luggage in order to see how we do this, you can read the section with Tips for travelling.
Here is some general information about travelling around Colombia:. If no visa is required for your passport which is the case for many world countries , there is only an arrival declaration to be filled-in for the customs the airline was providing the form before landing.
Bogota airport is quite big and in case you have a domestic flight after the long haul one, you need to go out from the terminal and then re-enter. Colombia is a big country with still underdeveloped road infrastructure, so it is better to take flights to cover long distance. We tried Viva air for our flight from Medellin to Santa Marta and it proved to be ok no delays, no specific problems with luggage permissions , so I can only recommend it. We tried only the subway in Medellin and we can highly recommend it.
The metro is a source of pride for the locals and they keep it extremely clean. Unlike other countries where the local transport is something you will not consider using, here in Colombia it is really acceptable. The roads are good at least where we travelled , but there are a lot of turns and this makes the journey quite slow.
