The singular charm of Cagliari

beach in Chocó — The ‘magical’ and ‘isolated’ area of Chocó on the Pacific Coast

(Image credit: Nestor Morales Moreno / Getty Images)

It’s 10 years since Colombia’s main insurgency ended, and the UK Foreign Office now deems many parts of the country safe for travel. These include some of the world’s most “breathtakingly beautiful” wilderness areas, said Kate Maxwell in the Financial Times, which were long protected from development by the conflict itself.

With two children aged nine and 11 – both lovers of outdoor adventures and animals – I wanted to arrange a two-week tour that took in some of the best, while also giving us time to see a city or two. And I had one other requirement besides: to see a wild capybara – the world’s largest rodent, which is currently “an unlikely tween icon”. Following a bicycle tour of central Bogotá, we flew to Yopal, to explore Los Llanos (“The Plains”), known as “the Serengeti of South America”. Our lodge, the Savanna Orinoquia, had seven thatched bungalows, each with a pool.

On walks, motorised canoe trips and a horse ride, we saw caimans, howler monkeys and many “magnificent” birds. A pair of capybaras appeared on our first morning, “crashing through the undergrowth”. Most dazzling, however, was a flight in a microlight trike, which afforded views of caimans “fanning from waterholes like iron filings” and capybaras grazing in herds, like cows in an English field. Next, we toured the city of Medellín, and went on a “white-knuckle” mountain bike ride in coffee-growing country. Yet more “magical” was our trip to Chocó, an area on the Pacific Coast that is inaccessible by road.

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In Chocó, we stayed at Morromico, an eco-lodge with only three guest rooms and a cabana set beside a private beach among the jungled hills of the Utría National Natural Park. I had never been anywhere so “isolated and untouched”. We surfed, snorkelled, saw capuchin monkeys in the mangroves, ate a “hearty” fish stew in a remote Afro-Colombian village, and sailed close to dolphins and an eight-metre-long whale shark.