Day notes
Arrive in Bogota
After passing immigration and collecting your luggage, you will be met by an English-speaking guide who will take you to our airport hotel in Bogota for our first night.
Get a good night's sleep as we are heading out tomorrow morning to start our wildlife exploration in the Amazon.
Transfer from Bogota El Dorado International Airport [BOG] to Courtyard by Marriott Bogota Airport
Transfer
Bogota El Dorado International Airport [BOG]
Courtyard by Marriott Bogota Airport
Check-in to Courtyard by Marriott Bogota Airport
Day notes
Fly to San Jose del Guaviare, the Colombian Amazon
San José del Guaviare sits at the meeting point of the Amazon, the Orinoquía plains and the Guiana Shield, and this mix of habitats supports a good diversity of species. The wildlife experience here is subtle rather than dramatic.
The most regularly encountered species are monkeys, often seen along forest edges and near rocky outcrops, together with capybara around river systems and wetter areas. Smaller mammals such as agouti and armadillo are present. Along the rivers, there are Pink River Dolphins, with occasional sightings of species such as peccary or deer.
Birding is excellent. The region supports a rich mix of Amazonian and Guiana Shield species, particularly where forest meets exposed rock. A key highlight is the Guianan Cock-of-the-rock, associated with rocky outcrops and one of the most sought-after birds in the area. More generally, we can expect a variety of parrots, macaws and toucans, together with tanagers, manakins, flycatchers and mixed forest flocks. River margins add kingfishers, herons and other water-associated species. Early mornings are typically the most productive.
In this part of Colombia, the wildlife is best appreciated as part of the whole experience — subtle, varied and closely tied to the remarkable scenery.
Today, we will visit the Puerta de Orión and Nowen Bridge.
Puerta de Orión (Orion’s Gate) a striking natural rock formation located 9 km from San José del Guaviare. This imposing stone structure, 12 metres high and 15 metres at its semicircular base, features two superimposed openings, and the site is constituted by labyrinths, cavities and rock ledges.
Geologically, it’s part of the ancient Serranía La Lindosa — one of the world’s oldest exposed rock systems — and is a rock formation of marine origin, as this entire region was covered by ocean millions of years ago. The weathering and erosion of that ancient seabed over vast timescales has produced these extraordinary sculptural forms.
The walk is part of the experience. Along the trail, we will encounter the emblematic Flor del Guaviare — a highly recognisable endemic plant species found only in this region. This rare plant is so localised that researchers have individually numbered every known specimen.
The Río Guaviare & Nowen Bridge
As afternoon softens into evening, we make our way to the Nowen Bridge — but this is far more than a sunset stop. The Río Guaviare flowing beneath is one of the great biogeographical boundaries of the neotropics, a river that genuinely divides two worlds. To the north, the vast grasslands and gallery forests of the Orinoquía and Meta; to the south, the beginning of Amazonia. Standing on this bridge, your feet span one of nature’s most significant fault lines.
We will take time to explore the river margins on foot before the light goes. The Guaviare is boto country — Pink River Dolphins work these waters, and a patient watch of the river surface can reveal their characteristic roll and flush of colour as they surface. As dusk approaches, the river corridor comes alive with movement: mixed flocks of parrots and macaws stream overhead toward their roosts, herons and wood storks work the shallows, and the wide water begins to catch the last of the western light.
There is something else worth holding in mind as you watch the river wind south into the forest. The water beneath us has travelled all the way from the Eastern Andes — we will visit this high páramo and cloud forest when we return to Bogota. It is the same water system, and this is where it surrenders to the Amazon.
Check-out from Courtyard by Marriott Bogota Airport
Transfer from Courtyard by Marriott Bogota Airport to Bogota El Dorado International Airport [BOG]
Transfer
Courtyard by Marriott Bogota Airport
Bogota El Dorado International Airport [BOG]
Scheduled Flight from Bogota El Dorado International Airport [BOG] to Jorge Enrique Gonzalez Torres Airport [SJE]
Scheduled Flight
Bogota El Dorado International Airport [BOG]
Jorge Enrique Gonzalez Torres Airport [SJE]
Transfer from Jorge Enrique Gonzalez Torres Airport [SJE] to Hotel Quinto Nivel
Transfer
Jorge Enrique Gonzalez Torres Airport [SJE]
Hotel Quinto Nivel
Check-in to Hotel Quinto Nivel
Day notes
Cerro Azul
The ancient Serranía La Lindosa has been watching over the junction of the Orinoquía and Amazonia for hundreds of millions of years. But the rock walls of Cerro Azul tell a more recent story — one that begins 12,500 years ago, when the first humans to reach western Amazonia left their mark in vivid red ochre on the exposed sandstone faces. What they recorded was the world around them: the animals they hunted, feared, revered and depended upon. Many of those animals are still here.
The paintings are extraordinary in their scope and detail. Over 3,000 individual images have been catalogued across multiple panels, ranging from handprints and geometric forms to remarkably precise depictions of capybara, tapir, caiman, herons, monkeys, deer and snakes — every layer of this ecosystem represented, from river to canopy. Some figures appear to show creatures that no longer exist: giant ground sloths and mastodon-like animals from the final centuries of the last Ice Age, suggesting the artists lived alongside megafauna that would shortly vanish from the earth. To stand before these panels is to stand at a remarkable junction of deep time.
Our four-kilometre trail winds through the formation, passing through the natural rock passage that connects the painted faces — a cool, dark corridor through the ancient stone — before climbing to the summit viewpoint, where the forest stretches away to the south in every direction, unbroken to the horizon. This is Amazonia as it should look.
But the walk itself is as much about the living forest as the painted one. The species on the walls are not museum pieces — they are out there in the trees and undergrowth around us. Troops of monkeys move through the canopy. Motmots and trogons sit quietly on low branches. Caiman rest on the creek margins below the outcrop. The people who made these paintings knew this landscape with an intimacy that took generations to accumulate. Walking slowly through it, with their record on the walls beside us, we begin to understand why they felt compelled to paint what they saw.
Day notes
Reserva Los Túneles Naturales & Los Pozos Naturales
The Serranía La Lindosa has one more revelation to offer. Beneath the same ancient rock that sheltered the painters of Cerro Azul and framed the gateway of Orión, water and time have been at work on a different scale — carving and sculpting the quartzite from within to produce a landscape unlike almost anything else on earth.
The Reserva Los Túneles Naturales challenges the eye at every turn. The surface is broken by extraordinary rock formations — vast boulders balanced on impossibly slender pedestals, stone arches and labyrinths sculpted by billions of years of equatorial rain and heat. This is pseudokarst terrain: a dissolution landscape normally associated with limestone, here formed instead in some of the oldest and hardest rock on the planet. Beneath the surface, a network of interconnected passages — high enough to walk upright, floored with clean sand, cool and hushed after the heat outside — runs through the rock in every direction, its walls alive with roosting bat colonies. Moving through these tunnels, with forest sounds filtering in from each opening, the labyrinth has an unmistakably sacred quality.
The day then moves from darkness into brilliant colour at Los Pozos Naturales. A single watercourse has spent millennia carving a sequence of pools, channels and cascades into the ancient rock — each pool distinct, connected by rushing water and deep crevices worn smooth by the current. Minerals dissolved from the Guiana Shield give the water a shifting, extraordinary palette — amber, black, deep red — that transforms the light below the surface.
Day notes
Caño Sabana — Río de Colores and return to Bogota. Drive to Sesquile (near Chingaza)
There is a plant that grows in only two places on Earth. Rhyncholacis clavigera — a delicate aquatic species anchored to the riverbeds of the Serranía La Lindosa here in Guaviare, and the Serranía de la Macarena to the west — transforms the rivers it inhabits into something that defies easy description. In September, with the water running full and nutrient-rich, it reaches its most intense expression: the riverbed alive in fuchsia, deep pink and vivid green, the colours shifting and deepening as the current moves over the stone.
Caño Sabana, just eight kilometres from San José del Guaviare, is where we experience this phenomenon on our final morning in the region. The river is intimate in scale — threading through rocks and small cascades, opening into clear pools — which makes the colour effect all the more concentrated and extraordinary. This is not a spectacle viewed from a distance; you are in the river, among the plants, the colours wrapping around you in the current.
What makes the experience richer still is the story behind it. The finca through which the river is accessed was once a busy barbecue spot — popular, well-attended, and quietly destroying the fragile ecosystem that made it worth visiting at all. Through the work of local guides and a genuine commitment to sustainable tourism, that changed entirely. Swimming and disturbance are now managed with care, the plant colonies are recovering and thriving, and the community that once extracted value from the river now protects it. It is a small but complete conservation success story, and a quietly fitting note on which to leave the Guaviare.
Check-out from Hotel Quinto Nivel
Transfer from Hotel Quinto Nivel to Jorge Enrique Gonzalez Torres Airport [SJE]
Transfer
Hotel Quinto Nivel
Jorge Enrique Gonzalez Torres Airport [SJE]
Scheduled Flight from Jorge Enrique Gonzalez Torres Airport [SJE] to Bogota El Dorado International Airport [BOG]
Scheduled Flight
Jorge Enrique Gonzalez Torres Airport [SJE]
Bogota El Dorado International Airport [BOG]
Transfer from Bogota El Dorado International Airport [BOG] to Hotel Casa Manoa
Transfer
Bogota El Dorado International Airport [BOG]
Hotel Casa Manoa
Check-in to Hotel Casa Manoa
Day notes
Chingaza National Park
Outside of Bogotá, rising dramatically from the altiplano northeast of the city, Chingaza National Natural Park is one of the most extraordinary and ecologically significant protected areas in South America. It has a mosaic of habitats that supports one of the continent's most diverse assemblages of Andean flora and fauna.
Chingaza is home to a remarkable suite of Andean mammals, several of which are globally threatened. The Andean Bear (Tremarctos ornatus, Vulnerable) is the park's headline species and the only bear found on the South American continent. Largely herbivorous, these bears move between the cloud forest and páramo in search of bromeliads, bamboo shoots and fruit, and are perhaps most reliably seen on the open slopes of the upper forest edge. The park's strict protection has seen their numbers recover in recent years.
White-tailed deer are relatively common across the grassy páramo margins and are often seen at dawn and dusk. Woolly monkeys and nocturnal Owl Monkeys are found in the lower forest zones, along with a variety of smaller mammals including coatis, tayra and several rodent species.
The park sits at the intersection of the departments of Cundinamarca and Meta, and its waters feed two of South America's greatest river systems: 99% of the park drains east into the vast Orinoco basin, while a small portion flows west toward the Magdalena. Remarkably, the Chuza Reservoir within the park supplies an estimated 80% of the drinking water for Bogotá — a city of over nine million people — underscoring just how vital this landscape is to human life as well as wildlife.
Its name derives from Chibcha, the language of the Muisca people, meaning 'middle of the width'. The Muisca revered this landscape as sacred, using the park's glacial lakes — particularly the Siecha lakes — as ceremonial centres. Today, that spiritual geography has been replaced by a scientific one, and Chingaza is internationally recognised as a Key Biodiversity Area, harbouring 531 recorded bird species, a suite of critically endangered amphibians, and some of the Andes' most iconic large mammals.
Expert tips:
Birds Species
With 531 recorded species — including six Colombian endemics, fourteen near-endemics, and 37 migratory species — Chingaza is one of the most important bird areas in the northern Andes. Birding is exceptional across all habitat zones, and a two-day visit allows time to sample both the high páramo and the mid-elevation forest.
Páramo specialities and targets include:
Green-bearded Helmetcrest — an endemic, threatened hummingbird that feeds directly on frailejón flowers; arguably the most sought-after bird in the park
Andean Condor — with a wingspan exceeding three metres, this critically endangered vulture soars on thermal currents above the ridgelines
Coppery-bellied Puffleg and Blue-throated Starfrontlet — two spectacular hummingbirds of the páramo edge
Bronze-tailed Thornbill — a near-endemic hummingbird of the high moorland
Silvery-throated Spinetail — a skulking but locally common endemic of the páramo shrubs
Agile Tit-Tyrant — a lively flycatcher of the grassy moorland
Rufous-browed Conebill — a near-endemic tanager of the elfin forest edge
Black-chested Buzzard-Eagle — a powerful raptor that hunts open páramo slopes
Forest zone highlights include:
Brown-breasted Parakeet — a distinctive and range-restricted endemic of the Andes
Black-billed Mountain-Toucan — a spectacular and colourful toucan of the upper forest
Scarlet-bellied Mountain-Tanager — a vivid jewel of the cloud forest canopy
Cock-of-the-Rock — unmistakable males display along forest trails at lower elevations
Golden-headed Quetzal — an iridescent prize for any forest birder
Multicoloured, Black-and-gold and Gold-ringed Tanagers — among the many tanager species that make Colombian cloud forest birding so spectacular
Day notes
Chingaza National Park and overnight near the airport
Our second day of exploration in the park and another chance to look for Andean Bears.
This evening, we drive back to stay near the airport for our flight tomorrow morning to Medellin.
Check-out from Hotel Casa Manoa
Transfer from Hotel Casa Manoa to Courtyard by Marriott Bogota Airport
Transfer
Hotel Casa Manoa
Courtyard by Marriott Bogota Airport
Check-in to Courtyard by Marriott Bogota Airport
Day notes
Medellín — A City Rewritten
Draped across a narrow Andean valley at 1,500 metres, Medellín is a city of steep hillsides and perpetual spring — la ciudad de la eterna primavera —, and it wears its recent history openly, without apology or false polish. Spending two nights here, between the rivers of the Amazon basin and the Pacific humpbacks ahead, is a chance to rest, eat well and encounter a different kind of Colombian resilience.
We begin with the MetroCable — not merely a cable car, but a piece of social infrastructure that quite literally reconnected communities that had long been cut off from the city below. The ride up gives you Medellín in cross-section: rooftops and football pitches and washing lines and church towers, the whole dense, living fabric of a city in motion.
Comuna 13 was once one of the most contested neighbourhoods in Colombia. Today, it's a vibrant and happy place. Walls are covered in murals made by local artists who grew up here. Street artists dance for the crowds. Cafes and shops bustle, and we can drink some great coffee. The outdoor escalators that climb through the neighbourhood were built not as a tourist attraction but as a practical support to residents who had spent decades climbing steep steps to reach their homes. That they are now one of Medellín’s most visited spots is a pleasing irony the neighbourhood wears lightly.
Lunch will be traditional, generous and local. Bandeja paisa if you are hungry enough, which after a morning exploring the comunas we are likely to be.
Check-out from Courtyard by Marriott Bogota Airport
Transfer from Courtyard by Marriott Bogota Airport to Bogota El Dorado International Airport [BOG]
Transfer
Courtyard by Marriott Bogota Airport
Bogota El Dorado International Airport [BOG]
Scheduled Flight from Bogota El Dorado International Airport [BOG] to Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE]
Scheduled Flight
Bogota El Dorado International Airport [BOG]
Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE]
Transfer from Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE] to Hotel Poblado Boutique Medellin
Transfer
Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE]
Hotel Poblado Boutique Medellin
Check-in to Hotel Poblado Boutique Medellin
Day notes
San Rafael — Crystal Waters & Cloud Forest Birds
Eastern Antioquia has a secret that Colombian naturalists have known for years. San Rafael — a small municipality two hours from Medellín — sits at the confluence of six crystal-clear rivers running through a landscape of cloud forest, rocky gorges and cascading waterfalls. It holds around 350 bird species: 19% of every bird recorded in Colombia, concentrated in a single municipality. For a country that leads the world in avian diversity, that is a remarkable figure.
The day is built around water as much as the forest. Hydrosenderismo — river trekking, moving along the river channels themselves, puts us at eye level with a habitat that conventional trail walking never quite reaches. The rivers of San Rafael are exceptional: cold, clear and rich with life. River otters work the deeper pools. Freshwater crabs pick their way across the stream bed. Monkeys move through the gallery forest overhead. And at every bend, birds.
The birding is extraordinary across all levels of the forest. Toucans call through the morning mist. Hummingbirds — multiple species, some endemic to this corner of Antioquia — work the flowering understorey. Tanagers flash colour through the canopy.
There is one small detail that captures something of this place’s character. Along the Arenal River, a colony of Melipona bees — native, stingless, and increasingly rare — is quietly going about its business in the forest margins, as it has for thousands of years. The river is protected partly for their sake. It is a small thing to know, but it says something about San Rafael.
Day notes
Medellin to Bahía Solano and the El Almejal Reserve. PM Whale Watching
The flight from Medellín to Bahía Solano takes less than an hour, but it crosses one of the most dramatic ecological transitions in South America. From the window of the aircraft, watch the Andes fall away beneath you — peaks and valleys and the last traces of cloud forest — before the Western Cordillera gives way abruptly to an unbroken carpet of Pacific rainforest stretching to the ocean. By the time the wheels touch down on the short coastal airstrip, you are somewhere entirely different.
Bahía Solano sits at the edge of the Chocó — one of the wettest, wildest and most biologically extraordinary regions on earth. This narrow coastal strip running from Panama to Ecuador receives up to thirteen metres of rainfall annually, and that relentless nourishment has produced a rainforest of staggering complexity and density. The Chocó is home to an estimated 9,000 plant species, 600 birds and more amphibian species than anywhere else on the planet. Much of it has never been formally surveyed. Arriving here feels less like reaching a destination than crossing a threshold.
El Almejal Reserve is where we base ourselves, and it has a story worth knowing. It began when a woman named Elvira arrived on this stretch of Pacific coast, found a dark, fertile black-sand beach backed by dense rainforest, and started building. What grew around her over the following decades became one of the most respected ecolodges in the Americas — now run by her son César, who grew up here as the forest and the lodge took shape together. That sense of deep, personal investment in the place is tangible the moment you arrive.
César has since declared 80% of the lodge grounds a protected natural reserve — 47,000 square metres of intact tropical rainforest — and established Colombia’s first sea turtle conservation programme on the beach out front.
Check-out from Hotel Poblado Boutique Medellin
Transfer from Hotel Poblado Boutique Medellin to Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE]
Transfer
Hotel Poblado Boutique Medellin
Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE]
Scheduled Flight from Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE] to Jose Celestino Mutis Airport [BSC]
Scheduled Flight
Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE]
Jose Celestino Mutis Airport [BSC]
Transfer from Jose Celestino Mutis Airport [BSC] to Ecolodge El Almejal
Transfer
Jose Celestino Mutis Airport [BSC]
Ecolodge El Almejal
Check-in to Ecolodge El Almejal
Day notes
Humpback Whales — The Pacific Nursery
Every year, without fail, they come. Having spent the southern hemisphere summer feeding in the nutrient-rich waters off Antarctica, the Humpback Whales of the South Pacific turn north in late June and swim approximately 8,500 kilometres to the warm, sheltered bays of the Colombian Pacific coast. They arrive without having eaten for months. They come to give birth, to nurse their calves, and to mate, and the waters around Bahía Solano are one of the most important gathering points on their entire migratory route.
By September, the peak of the season, the bay holds mothers with newborn calves alongside competitive male groups and the full theatrical repertoire that makes humpbacks the most compelling of all the great whales to observe. Breaching — the full launch of an animal weighing up to 40 tonnes clear of the water surface — is a behaviour seen regularly here. Pectoral fin slapping, tail lobbing, spy-hopping: these are not random movements but communications, displays and expressions of a complex social life that researchers are still working to fully understand.
The search for whales is part of the experience — reading the surface for the first distant blow, the faint mist of exhaled air that announces a whale from a kilometre away — before the boat closes the distance carefully and respectfully, cutting the engine to drift. What happens next is in the whales’ hands entirely.
The humpbacks of Bahía Solano are not a wildlife spectacle laid on for visitors. They were here long before tourism arrived, and the community knows it. The whales are woven into local life and identity — into the murals on school walls, the carvings in the market, the pride with which local guides speak about them.
Day notes
Morning in El Almejal Reserve and return to Medellin
The forest itself demands time and patience. A naturalist guide leads walks through the reserve, where the density and layering of life is immediately apparent — towering rainforest trees, their trunks wrapped in ferns and bromeliads, the air thick with the calls of oropendolas, toucans and parrots. Blue morpho butterflies move through the understorey in that unhurried, improbable way they have. The rivers running through the reserve are cold and clear, cutting through the forest floor to form pools and small waterfalls that offer welcome relief from the equatorial heat.
El Almejal has also developed a network of community microenterprises with local guides — people whose knowledge of this forest and Pacific culture has been formalised into livelihoods. The guides who walk these trails with you grew up reading this landscape. That knowledge, accumulated across generations, is what makes the experience here so different from simply walking in a beautiful forest.
This afternoon we fly back to Medellin and our hotel for tonight. Tomorrow we head to our last destination, Cartagena.
Check-out from Ecolodge El Almejal
Transfer from Ecolodge El Almejal to Jose Celestino Mutis Airport [BSC]
Transfer
Ecolodge El Almejal
Jose Celestino Mutis Airport [BSC]
Scheduled Flight from Jose Celestino Mutis Airport [BSC] to Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE]
Scheduled Flight
Jose Celestino Mutis Airport [BSC]
Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE]
Transfer from Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE] to Quinta Ladera
Transfer
Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE]
Quinta Ladera
Check-in to Quinta Ladera
Day notes
Cartagena - Exploring the City and Rum and Chocolate Tasting
We will spend some time enjoying a guided rum and chocolate tasting, a very pleasant way to get a feel for one of Colombia’s best-known food and drink traditions. Hosted by a knowledgeable local expert, the tasting includes eight Colombian rums, each paired with handcrafted chocolates, as well as three local bites chosen to bring out the different flavours and character of each rum.
As we go, we learn a little more about the history of rum in Colombia, how it is produced, and the differences between the styles we are tasting. It is a relaxed and well-presented experience, and a nice way to spend time in Cartagena while exploring a different side of the country’s culture.
Check-out from Quinta Ladera
Transfer from Quinta Ladera to Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE]
Transfer
Quinta Ladera
Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE]
Scheduled Flight from Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE] to Rafael Nunez International Airport [CTG]
Scheduled Flight
Jose Maria Cordova International Airport [MDE]
Rafael Nunez International Airport [CTG]
Transfer from Rafael Nunez International Airport [CTG] to Nacar Hotel Cartagena Curio Collection by Hilton
Transfer
Rafael Nunez International Airport [CTG]
Nacar Hotel Cartagena Curio Collection by Hilton
Check-in to Nacar Hotel Cartagena Curio Collection by Hilton
Day notes
Proyecto Tití — The Cotton-Top Tamarin
There are approximately 2,000 Cotton-top Tamarins left in the wild. They live in a small fragment of northern Colombia’s tropical dry forest, and nowhere else on earth. Weighing less than half a kilogram, with an extraordinary white crest of hair that gives the species its name, they are among the most critically endangered primates in the Americas — and one of the most compelling reasons to visit this corner of Colombia.
Proyecto Tití has been working in this landscape for decades, and what it has built goes well beyond conventional conservation. Nearly 5,400 hectares of habitat are now under protection. Over 200 hectares of forest corridor have been restored, reconnecting fragments that had been isolated by agriculture and development. More than 12,000 schoolchildren have come through the project’s education programme. And 200 families living alongside the forest are now active participants in its protection rather than pressures upon it.
One detail captures the project’s spirit particularly well. Women in the surrounding communities — many previously without steady work — now run artisan cooperatives producing eco-mochilas: handcrafted bags crocheted from plastic bags collected directly from the forest. The plastic that was destroying the habitat is being removed by hand, transformed into income, and reinvested in the community. It is the kind of elegant, practical solution that only works when conservation is built around people rather than despite them.
The forest itself is extraordinary in its own right. Tropical dry forest is one of the rarest ecosystems on earth — less than 8% of Colombia’s original cover remains — and walking through it with a guide who knows every Tamarin family group by sight is a genuinely privileged experience. The Tamarins move fast and at height, but their curiosity often brings them closer than expected.
Day notes
Departure Day
Transfer to Cartagena airport for international flights home, or continue on the optional extension Colombia - the Fourth Frontier. An extension into the Sierra Nevada and La Guajira
Check-out from Nacar Hotel Cartagena Curio Collection by Hilton
Transfer from Nacar Hotel Cartagena Curio Collection by Hilton to Rafael Nunez International Airport [CTG]
Transfer
Nacar Hotel Cartagena Curio Collection by Hilton
Rafael Nunez International Airport [CTG]
