Most trips to Colombia choose one landscape and stay there. We wanted the contrast, and Colombia is one of the very few places on Earth where you can have it inside ten days.
We'll begin above 10,000 feet, in a windswept alpine world above the treeline, and finish just over 300 feet above sea level in flooded rainforest. Everything changes on the way down: the temperature, the rainfall, the air itself, and the plants and animals that live in each band of the mountainside. Ridgelines and valleys keep populations apart for long enough that they become something new. Repeat that across a mountain range for a few million years, and you get Colombia.
The Páramo
Páramo is a tropical alpine ecosystem found in a thin band above the treeline in the northern Andes, and almost nowhere else on the planet. More than half of what remains is in Colombia, and Chingaza National Park protects one of its finest expanses.
It is a strange and beautiful place: rolling, mist-soaked, and dotted with frailejones, tall silver-leaved plants that look like something between a sunflower and a cactus. They grow about a centimeter a year, so a shoulder-high frailejón may well be older than you are, and their soft felted leaves are insulation against the cold and the fierce high-altitude sun.
Beneath them, deep peat soils hold many times their own weight in water. This is why the páramo is called a water tower: the Chingaza system supplies 70 to 80 percent of the drinking water for Bogotá and the towns around it, close to ten million people.
Chingaza is also spectacled bear country. South America's only bear, and one of the most elusive large mammals in the Americas, moves quietly through these highlands, and we'll spend a full day looking.
The Amazon
Leticia sits at the very southern tip of Colombia, where the country meets Brazil and Peru at a single bend in the river. We arrive in April, near the height of the flood season, when the Amazon rises several meters and pushes deep into the forest. Channels open where there was dry ground months before, and we'll paddle between the trunks of trees that were standing on land in September.
Here the river is the highway. It is how children get to school and how families get to market, and it is how we'll travel too, by boat and by canoe, at the pace the water allows.
The Wildlife
Between the páramo and the Amazon we will pass through habitat holding many thousands of species, from spectacled bears and pink river dolphins to sloths, monkeys, caiman, and hundreds of birds. As ethical wildlife travelers we can never guarantee sightings, but we can promise good habitat, guides who have spent their lives in these places, and unhurried time in the field.
