It was just after seeing my first resplendent quetzal that I hatched my crazy plan to visit Colombia. I was in the Costa Rican cloud forest at the time and my guide – you need a guide because the birds are impossible to spot without someone who a) can identify the different calls and b) carries a $2,000 Swarovski Optik monocular – said, “Of course, if you really like this sort of thing the place to go is Colombia.”

Costa Rica, delightful though it is, only has around 900 species of bird. Colombia, on the other hand, has nearly 2,000 (including 83 endemics: i.e., ones you can find nowhere else), more than any other country in the world. When I tried impressing on my wife what an incredible incentive this was, she wasn’t convinced. “But what if we die?” she said.

This, I can tell you with some confidence now that we’ve been, is a misconception about Colombia. We spent nearly two weeks there, driving long distances in a hire car, and never felt remotely threatened, not even in the once dodgy, Mad Max-style neighborhood of Medellín called Comuna 13, where, yes, you possibly might have been killed in Pablo Escobar’s day, but which is now a tourist attraction.

But I’m quite glad that Colombia does have this reputation because it has stopped it being ruined by mass tourism. Rarely in Colombia do you get that “if only I’d got there in the Nineties…” feeling. Rather I feel like a bold pioneer, exploring terra incognita, living on the edge, but still within easy reach of a hotel where my luxe private chalet has an outdoor rainforest shower and decent bedside........

© The Spectator