With a stable political climate and growing economy, it’s no wonder that Colombia attracted a record number of foreign visitors in 2007 If you’re planning a trip, you probably already know of the inadequacies of current Colombia guidebooks: incomplete coverage, out-of-date offerings and questionable content.
“We have a great many travelers coming in to look for information about Colombia,” says Marcelo Andrés, manager of the South American Explorers Club in neighboring Ecuador. “Of course they expect to have access to good resources, which up until now, we’ve been lacking.”
South America-based VIVA Travel Guides heard these rumblings and decided to do something about it. Recognizing the need for a precise and reliable travel guide to Colombia, VIVA sent an intrepid team of writers into Colombia. Their mission: produce the most comprehensive, accurate guide book available for today’s traveler. They returned with what may be the best Colombian guidebook yet, uncovering every corner of the diverse countryside from the pearl beaches of San Andrés Island and enigmatic mangroves of the Pacific to the stunning Guajira deserts and previously off-limits regions of the Amazon rainforest. .
On her ninth trip to Colombia since 1992, lead writer Lorraine Caputo spent six months exploring large swaths of the country that other guidebooks had completely ignored. Journalist and Colombian resident Richard McColl navigated the much-neglected Pacific Coast and the Río Magdalena Valley as well as the country’s major cities. Writers fresh out of VIVA Travel Guides Boot Camp and members of VIVA’s online community shared their on-the-ground Colombian experiences for this ground-breaking book as well.
“With my first trip, I became enthralled with the diversity and beauty of the land and people,” says Caputo. “I wanted to help other travelers to be able to travel safely in this country and do justice to Colombians by co-authoring the best guide there has ever been on their country with great respect to their cultures and histories.”
VIVA Travel Guides Colombia offers accurate information on everything you need to know. The guide book features comprehensive coverage of hotel, restaurant and activities listings for every budget, soccer and baseball as well as little-known national sports like chaza, tejo and bolo, shopping in markets and workshops for the nation’s best artisan crafts, coverage on almost two dozen National Parks & Sanctuaries, border crossing information (by land or by sea) and an extensive online bibliography to keep the pulse of the country and to help you make your journey safe.
“By drawing on the collective wisdom of travelers, local experts, and professional travel writers who have recently been to Colombia, and creating books using print-on-demand technology, we can provide a guide that is far more accurate and up-to-date than the old school guidebook companies like Lonely Planet,” says VIVA CEO Jason Halberstadt. “With the Colombia book, we're introducing an innovation which clearly indicates when each and every piece of information was updated. This is a level of transparency unheard of in the guidebook industry and will help travelers better decide the reliability of every single piece of information.”
“The VIVA Travel Guides Colombia book is the best resource available for travelers in my country,” says Christian Dojoseba, owner of the Kaffee Erde Hostal in Colombia’s third largest city of Cali. “It’s nice that there’s finally some positive information out there about Colombia.”
“Our South American Explorers members love the VIVA Travel Guides Peru and Ecuador books,” says Andrés. “I think the Colombia book is really going to please a lot of people looking to explore the country.”
VIVA Travel Guides produces the world's most up-to-date guidebook series. Following the publication of VIVA Travel Guides Peru, and VIVA Travel Guides Ecuador and the Galapagos, the latest Colombia book uses the same formula for success. : Online contributions by local experts, professional travel writers, and travelers like you are compiled together to create a community-written guidebook unlike any other, in a process which guarantees that you have the most unbiased, up-to-date and accurate information available for planning your travels.
VIVA Travel Guides is based in Quito, Ecuador and publishes printed and online travel guidebooks read by over 100,000 people per month.
