Where Next? Travel with Kristen and Carol
Where Next? Travel with Kristen and Carol
Colombia, South America - Travel with Jimmy Burroughes
Embark with us as our guest Jimmy, a former corporate cog turned leadership expert and global nomad, narrates his adventure to the vibrant heart of Latin America. Through his eyes, we traverse bustling cities like Bogota and Medellin, uncovering the spirit of digital wanderers who've traded office cubicles for the freedom of the open road. Jimmy's tales are not merely travelogues; they're a deep dive into the soul of each place he's touched, from the revitalizing echoes in Colombia's Comuna 13 to the tranquil charm of Querétaro, Mexico.
You'll feel the warmth of the Colombian sun on your back as Jimmy describes his jungle escapades, delivering aid with a heart as open as the van's rattling doors. This isn't just another travel diary—it's a masterclass in embracing the unknown, with stories of breaking down in the mountains and finding unexpected sanctuary in a driver's family home. As we wander through the musical streets of Medellin and sample the gastronomic delights of local Colombian cuisine, Jimmy's journey illuminates the profound personal growth that comes from immersing oneself in new cultures.
Grab your virtual backpack and join us for a conversation that melds the adventurous with the practical. Whether it's adjusting to a new family life abroad or managing finances in a foreign economy, Jimmy's experience offers a treasure trove of insights for anyone yearning to break away from the mundane. From the vivid colors of Guatape's rock to the flavors of a traditional Colombian breakfast, this episode is a passport to a world of transformational travel and the rich tapestry of life as a nomadic leader.
Map of Colombia.
You can find Jimmy's website here: https://www.jimmyburroughes.com/
And his Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/jimmybleadership/
Please download, like, subscribe, share a review, and follow us on your favorite podcasts app and connect with us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wherenextpodcast/
View all listening options: https://wherenextpodcast.buzzsprout.com/
Hosts
Carol Springer: https://www.instagram.com/carol.work.life
Kristen: https://www.instagram.com/team_wake/
If you can, please support the show or you can buy us a coffee.
Hi, welcome to our podcast. We're Next Travel with Kristen and Carol. I am Kristen and I am Carol, and we're two long-term friends with a passion for travel and adventure. Each episode, we interview people around the globe to help us decide where to go next. Jimmy, thanks for joining us today at when Next podcast, and we look forward to hearing about your experience of spending time in Colombia, so welcome.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for the invitation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, interesting. I just we bring guests together and so sometimes I don't know until literally I'm sort of surprised to meet you. You know right then and there about your background and what you do and I have to say the first thing that came up was a leadership you know thing that you're doing. And then I've got ways of working. I'm like, oh, we need to talk further about that whole thing after Columbia. But very interesting, I was curious that. And then Columbia how did those two connect?
Speaker 2:Yeah, good question. Maybe if we rewind the clock a little bit to 2016,. There's always a good story, isn't there? So I've had the I guess, untypical career. I'm on my fourth career now, but my life started as an army officer in the British army many, many moons ago, which was essentially leading soldiers, leading organizations or teams whatever building high-performing teams. And then, when I finished doing that, I ended up in the corporate HR world for a while, focused on leadership, development, learning and development all those things before finally deciding that actually, if you wanted to run a business, you needed experience running a business. So I switched out of HR and moved into a GM role, which unfortunately, led me to burning out in 2017.
Speaker 2:So 2016 is the sort of the build up to the burnout. I'm struggling immensely and I had always had this great dream of traveling Latin America. I'd done the majority of Asia and Indonesia, I'd been through the majority of Western Europe and in the job that I had as a GM, I'd also managed to cover most of East Asia. So that was, I guess, ticked off the list and there's this big hole on my map of where I hadn't been, which was Latin America. So, long story short, when the burnout finally did come, I thought well, why don't I book myself a one-way ticket head off to Latin America and explore and rediscover my passion for living and learning? And while I was on the road, I built what has now become our business.
Speaker 2:Jimmy Burrows Leadership and we work globally with organizations, essentially to help turn extremely busy, overwhelmed managers into high impact leaders. But part of that journey through Latin America was shacking up with an amazing little organization called Remote Year. Remote Year are essentially a digital nomad support business I guess that would probably be the best way to phrase them. They pick you up from the airport, they take you to a fancy apartment somewhere in the city of choice, they support you through the month with a co-working space, they introduce you to a community, they organize events, they troubleshoot for you if you get into harm's way and then they move you to the next city. And you can do that for one month, four months or 12 months. So I signed up for a four-month program through Latin America, and Colombia were two of the four months. So I got to meet Colombia at that point and since then I've been back a few times and spent some very enjoyable months in Columbia, and now I've ended up living in Mexico but still obviously enjoying that Latin American vibe.
Speaker 1:Wow, it was called Remote Year.
Speaker 2:Remote Year yes, Excellent.
Speaker 1:And then, when you did the four-month stint, what areas of Latin America did you all go to?
Speaker 2:So we started in Peru, in Lima. We had a month living in Lima and exploring the majority of the surroundings of Lima and a few other places as well. Then we moved to Medellin places as well. Then we moved to Medellin and from Medellin we did little side. We call them side trips, but essentially a little sort of week or week, weekend, long weekend or week-long excursion. So we covered a fair bit of Colombia in the time we were there. Then we moved to Bogota and did a month in Bogota. We also had some time in Cartagena in between Medellin and Bogota, and we'll probably go into this story a little bit later. But we actually drove through the jungle in a 1970s Ford van rather than taking the freeway. So what is probably a four to six hour drive took us two and a half days and we were carrying aid to little villages that was interspersed through the jungle.
Speaker 1:Wait, so you're in Medellin, Bogota. Are those in Colombia? Yes, Okay, so the four months did you just stay?
Speaker 2:in four different places throughout Colombia. No, so they move you every month between cities. So first month was Peru, lima, second month was Medellin, third monthota fourth month, mexico City, and then, once I'd finished my four months, I ended up doing a few other cities with them as well in Latin America and also traveled fairly extensively for two and a half years independently through Latin America, but the Colombia stretch was one of the most enjoyable. Mexico and Colombia are kind of my two favorite places in Latin America, and why? Why, I think both for similar reasons. Both are staggeringly beautiful.
Speaker 2:The landscape in both Mexico and Colombia and obviously we're focusing on Colombia today is a mixture of so many different places that I've seen before, all kind of smooshed into one place. So you've got these fantastic cities full of incredible architecture. You've got amazing parks and forests and greenery. You've then got rainforests and jungle. You've got beaches. You've got mountains with snow on top. It's almost like somebody has decided to take the world's best bits and put them all into one place. Mexico very similar, but I think Colombia is obviously a much smaller, more concentrated environment and you can swim in. You know two different oceans. You can. If you go to santa marta, you can be on the beach with a snow-capped mountain behind you. Like, where can you do these things in other places and when we, I think when we were driving through the jungle again, I saw pieces of italy, pieces of france, pieces of germany, I saw vineyards and olive groves and it's just like the most amazing garden of Eden that you can experience.
Speaker 2:And then you said we so did, you and your wife, your partner, no so I was traveling as part of the remote year crew and you essentially sign up with a cohort. So I signed up with a four-month cohort and there were, I think, initially around 20, 25 of us and over the period of the four months we lost a few along the way and we gained a few along the way. So you know, kind of stayed around that 20 mark. I was lucky enough to room with the same guy for all four months and then another guy joined us for three of those four months. So we had a really tight knit little family and even though even now this is in 2018. And even now we still talk most weeks on our WhatsApp group, we've become lifelong friends and we're all very different ages, very different backgrounds.
Speaker 2:One was the CEO of a bank, one's a serial entrepreneur and I'm a leadership guy. So you know you wouldn't necessarily put us all together in the same place, but this experience did that for us. And then, once I sort of traveled independently, I joined what's called the Citizen Network, which is a group of people who, like Remote Year, don't want to sign up necessarily for a program, but like to pick and mix into different cities, and so each different city I went to with Remote Year I was part of the tribe, but once I was a citizen then I could just drop in and join whichever tribe happened to be in that city that month what do they call that program?
Speaker 1:oh, the citizens program and then how much was something like this I mean, this sounds incredible. And like, uh, I mean, when carol and I were talking about doing this, what was it? Three or four years?
Speaker 1:ago yeah, three years yeah over three years yeah, yeah, three and a half years ago, um, digital nomad, I mean we were, we were looking, there was a. Actually I have it saved because when I first put you in here, uh, my phone, uh, noma collective, that's what it was called. Um, it was something similar to that, but this sounds even more. It sounds like something I want to look at. It's really interesting. Was everyone working remotely and how was the wifi? Or was it just kind of all crusty people retired or how was that?
Speaker 2:It was a real mix. So in our little tribe and our little crew that was going around, we had people who just finished university and they were on their sort of gap year. We had a surprising number of people like me who burned out and we're just trying to kind of regain ourselves and there's a lot. There's a terrible cliche that says people on remote year are either running away from something or running towards something, and I was most definitely running toward the next incarnation of myself, which is consulting and mentoring and facilitating. But there were a lot of people who kind of had taken some time out of their workplace and just needed a break, and the four-month programs, I think, are a good opportunity for that. The year-long programs maybe don't lend themselves to that so much.
Speaker 1:So is there a lot of time to actually work, or are you like is? There too much activity where most people really actually aren't working working.
Speaker 2:No, I would say probably half to three fifths of the group were working full-time in jobs.
Speaker 2:So we had. We had lawyers, we had programmers, we had salespeople, we had leaders of teams, remote teams, people in marketing, people in PR. There was a girl I met who was running PR for Primark, the clothing brand. We had the CEO of a bank. He was on a sort of sabbatical but was still chair of the board, so he was working back into his country. So the daytime is generally for working and then the late afternoon, evening, is when they put on the more structured activities. So in Colombia it was let's go and visit a farm, or let's go to see a cultural evening about Colombian culture in this particular city, or let's do a city walking tour, and they would happen after working hours to allow you to get some work done in a day. Alternatively, if you didn't want to work, that was beach time or exploring time or whatever you wanted to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, did you also volunteer or actually give back, like, do things like that as well.
Speaker 2:They do. They have a philanthropic element to the business and I don't necessarily want to promote Remote Year above any of the other organizations that do this, it's just the one I had the luck to have the experience of. There are others as well, if you want to research, you know Wi-Fi Tribe and Nomad Cruise and lots of other ones, but they do, they have a philanthropic element. So if I think back to some of the work in Medellin we did, we went to a school and we helped to paint some walls that had been graffitied and were, I guess, relatively run down. So we painted the walls, we dug the weeds out of the garden, we created a vegetable patch for them where the kids could then go and learn about vegetables in a more pleasant environment than graffiti walls and trash and beer cans and whatever had been thrown over a fence. We tidied it up.
Speaker 2:And in each city there was an activity. In Bogota they went and built houses for families, so they got sort of prefab sheds and turned them into houses with wriggly tin roofs, and so there's always a philanthropic element to each group that goes through each of the cities and if you think you know, remote Year has, I think, about 20 cities on the go at any one point and there's a group in every city, sometimes more than one group. The Mexico City sometimes has two or three groups. So you know you're talking 30 to 100 people in 20 cities around the world. That's a fairly large community of people that you can be part of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was curious how many people so about 30 to a hundred people are at one time going through the program. Did you notice any difference, I'm curious, between the one month, the four month and the 12 month. I was curious. Did you meet any people that were going for a year and what? Why were they doing it? I was just curious.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I actually jumped into in Chile, santiago. I jumped into a group of year-long travelers and they were quite a different dynamic to our group. Much more of them were full-time workers, much more and we were probably half to three-fifths they were 75% were in employment or trying to create employment for themselves.
Speaker 1:They're freelancers who were looking for opportunities and that was a very different dynamic employment for themselves. They're freelancers who were looking for opportunities. That was a very different dynamic I also had there were freelancers looking throughout the countries they were going through.
Speaker 2:All virtual, all online stuff. So I'll give you an example. One of the guys I met was a film producer. He'd worked in Hollywood, he had been in that world and decided to get out of the rat race. So I met him in Santiago and he was trying to set up a freelance film editing and film production business and ended up doing a documentary about Remote Year while he was on the road, which was a nice little portfolio piece, but was also picking up freelance work from Fiverr and Upwork and through his network and gradually now fast forward five years he has a reasonably successful independent film production business.
Speaker 1:That is really neat. And then with the 12-month, are they also picking Latin America or Asia? Are they bouncing? Six months there and six months?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the 12-month programs you do are essentially around the world trip. So you get three or four cities in each continent. So you have a couple in Europe, a couple in Asia, a couple in North America, a couple in South America, um, a couple in Indonesia, and depending on which program you choose, you know they pick and mix the, the, the cities that you go through. So they, they used to be in the early days, used to be like this is the route that you all went around, Um, but as they've picked up more cities then now there's a bit more variety. So you could have a more Europe element or a more Asian element to your program.
Speaker 1:This reminds me of like it's like study abroad for life. I mean, there's people there's people.
Speaker 2:I know there's a very famous citizen called Hunter Hunter Pine and he's been a remote citizen for five or six years and he just travels perpetually with Remote Year and they organize all of the logistics for his life and all he has to do is just take his laptop wherever he goes.
Speaker 1:Oh, like Kristen, like that lady had said, getting your own travel agent. But this is just a more group travel agent almost, where they organize everything for you. And Colombia is somewhere where I would kind of be scared to go to, just for these stereotypes that I have in my head. So, doing it with someone that's organized and they know where to go, where to stay, how to get around, I think like much of Latin America, colombia has a mixed reputation.
Speaker 2:Obviously, there were the dark years back in history Pablo Escobar's years and then beyond. Colombia has done a very good job of creating pockets of safety within each of the cities and each of the tourist areas tourist areas and there's agreements been reached between the gangs and the government and so on. So it means now that there are many places you can go as a nomad, as a traveler within Colombia that are completely safe. You know you wouldn't have to worry. Obviously, you have to have some common sense. You know there are places in America that you wouldn't go at night alone with lots of valuables. The same thing applies in any city in the world. Then you do the same thing in Colombia. So you don't walk around in the middle of the night, when you're drunk, with your thousand dollar camera around your neck because you're going to ask for trouble.
Speaker 2:But equally, I never felt at any danger when I was in Colombia.
Speaker 2:I know, when we drove through the jungle, that was what historically was counted as FARC territory, which is the um, the Colombian sort of revolutionary freedom fighters. Uh, but the people that we were traveling with, the guide that took us through the jungle. Uh, he knew and had made the appropriate arrangements for us to pass without any issues whatsoever. Uh, we were always advised when we were in each city which areas were safe to go and which areas were unnecessary for us to go. And then some. One of the I guess most memorable things we did in Medellin particularly was we went to a place called Comina 13, which is a suburb of Medellin, and this used to be one of the most dangerous suburbs in all of Colombia Murders and bombs and really, really violent incidents happening all the time and over a period of a few years now we're now a couple of decades they've transformed that now into a tourist area, and so it's the most incredible cornucopia of street art and street entertainment and cafes and beauty that you would not see.
Speaker 2:It's called Comuna 13, c-o-m-u-n-a 13, um. There's another one that's up and coming called commoner 8 same thing, but they've really taken this violent area and said we don't want to live like this anymore. We don't want to live in fear and violence. We want to make something really beautiful. So they've made this incredible suburb that you can visit and there's tours every single day. Thousands of people go through there every day to see all this incredible street art and all these amazing places, and that's an example of where Colombia is trying to turn itself around and get out of the perception of this drug capital of the world and this super dangerous place and become actually somewhere really attractive for people who want to have a great life, to go and live.
Speaker 1:Wow, I'm just looking at some of that actually somewhere really attractive for people who want to have a great life to go and live. Wow, I'm just looking at some of that.
Speaker 2:So Communa 17 is what Communa 13. And the new one is Communa 8, which is they've done the same thing, they've put a gondola access to it, basically, so it's become a more accessible part of the city, which has turned it from a ghetto into a beauty spot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:It's like Hunger Games, hunger games, district 13, district 8, there you go right, that's so colorful. Oh, I can see. I see the graffiti trying to see. Yeah, I'm not getting the pictures, but I'll look at it, I'll get. It's very crowded, well, and I was curious also how much, um, if someone wanted to do remote year, uh, what are the costs involved? Is it what? What is a cost? What's included in that?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean I with that again, without advertising them. Um, I would go to remoteyearcom and have a good look. They havea pretty transparent web page full of the prices. I think when I did the program it was about two thousand us dollars a month, uh, plus certain optional activities, it's probably more than that. Now you know, things have got more expensive over time. It was significantly more expensive than just backpacking. You know, I I uh, in the four months I was with remote year I spent as much as I then did in the 12 months, um, afterward.
Speaker 2:So you know you'll put you about three times as much as doing it on your own, but you're in, uh, a real like in Condesa. I was in living in Condesa, in Mexico city, in one of the nicest parts of Mexico city, um in in Parker, mexico, so literally having to go in in a penthouse apartment that was probably worth, you know, a couple of million dollars. In Medellin we had this enormous 17th floor condo looking over the city, um three large double bedrooms, huge living open area, facilities, security. So you know, that's much, much nicer than you would do if you just booked an Airbnb, for example.
Speaker 2:Uh so you're. You're paying for that, that level of support of, of example. So you're paying for that level of experience, but you're also paying for the support that you get. So you don't have to organize your airport shuttle, you don't need to worry about making sure you're there for your flights on time. They tell you what to do in the city, they give you an orientation walk, so you're kind of up and running really quick and that was what made it good for me. I could get to a city within 24 hours. I was up and running and I knew I could just work. I knew where everything was.
Speaker 1:That's what I heard. It's hard to like get that kind of situated, the system in place, and where am I going to work out? Where am I going to eat? Where am I going to go buy my food?
Speaker 2:So you've got somebody on site who can help you with that straight away, Cause there is a city manager who lives there and is the expert in that area of the city. They're like I need a gym, I need a pharmacy, I need a supermarket. They go cool here's the map, go there.
Speaker 1:Can we dive into the jungly area that you said that you had to have a guide? I have one last question, also With the remote year. When you paid it, did it include food, or I'm assuming, or do you pay for food? Do they do meal-wise? Is that included or separate?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so a mixture, I'd say so. Most months there was some sort of team event or team get together which was included. So it might be a breakfast or a lunch, but the majority of the meals you're paying for yourself. So if you want to eat breakfast, you can. There's a. Let's use Medellin as an example. There's a million cafes. You can walk out out of your Airbnb and or your apartment and it's just full of cafes.
Speaker 2:Mexico city the same, so you pay for yourself. Lunches Often we'd be working, so just grab a sandwich or sushi or whatever. And then dinner we'd often go out as a group. So somebody would put in the group chat hey, I'm going to go try this amazing place. I went to three Michelin star restaurants while I was traveling Latin America and one of them was in Medellin and it was uh, it was beautiful, absolutely beautiful. And so somebody would say, hey, I'm going to go here tonight. Anybody want to join by? And that would be around lunchtime, and then five, six, 10 people would sign up and we'd all go off and have dinner together. But it was at your own cost.
Speaker 1:Okay, Got it. So it sounds like room and boards included and then activities would be included, if you know.
Speaker 2:All the fun is where you spend all your money. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's not included in it, or is it? It's not included, so what you get is room and board and a place and security, and then what you pay for is your food and your fun Food, and fun, your food and fun Basically, exactly that Okay. Excellent, thank you, I just figured, just for.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm even interested in looking into that?
Speaker 1:I think that sounds great. Yeah, explore the world and work.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely, so I definitely recommend checking out some of the other ones. There's a beautiful organization called Wi-Fi Tribe. They do something exactly the same, and there are a number of others there. The Remote Year and Wi-Fi Tribe are the two big ones, though, who've been around for a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like Wi-Fi tribe. That's a fun name. Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much so Columbia, and talking about I know Carol was mentioning the jungles and your experience with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was one of those serendipitous opportunities. I guess we were reaching the end of the month, living in Medellin, and we had traveled a little bit. We'd been to Guatape, which is one of the most incredible places I've ever been in my life. We'd been to San Andres Island, we'd been to Cartagena and we felt like we needed something else to round off that month. And when we were in Medellin we'd met this guy who does the Guatape trip and he runs a van business, basically a minibus business, but his vans are all these 1970s Ford vans that he's kind of pimped, so they have LED lighting and big fat wings and they're pretty cool and most of the time you spend sitting on top of the van in the roof rack rather than actually inside the van. So it's a lot of fun, it's a really party vibe. And so we spoke to the program manager and the city manager while we were there and we said, well, hey, it would be really cool to just do something that would involve this guy in his van. We asked could we potentially drive through the jungle with him? And they'd never done it before.
Speaker 2:But we basically came up with this trip. Myself and my two roomies came up with this trip where we were going to drive through the jungle, and then this opportunity came up to be a little bit philanthropic about it and deliver some aid. So we went to the supermarket the morning we left and we filled the entire back of the van with rice and beans and veggies and drinks and whatever we could find. Basically A couple of thousand dollars worth of food went into the back of to paint and do some art, with the local women helping out on. You know, dig a trench on a farm or whatever it is to help out one of the working men. We painted some stuff while we were on the way and it was just.
Speaker 2:It was a lot of fun, absolutely, and the rest of the time we were sat on top of this van listening to crazy loud rock music and partying in the jungle.
Speaker 2:So it was a very enjoyable activity until the last day when we were about four hours outside Bogota and then the poor 1970s van showed its age and broke down in the middle of the mountains. So we then sat on the side of the road for four or five hours waiting for some things to be made in a workshop. Thank goodness 1970s vans are simple, so a little piece of metal got hit with a hammer and we finally made it to to bogota, uh, late that evening and the I guess the the culmination of the trip for us was actually being invited to the, the van driver's family home, uh, to meet his mom and his, his sister and his brother and their kids, and we got to have this beautiful cultural experience. Through the whole journey Still got some incredible memories and photos and videos of that trip and it really was a beautiful opportunity to experience something that most people will never experience, which is really deep into what we consider the dangerous parts of the jungle in Colombia.
Speaker 1:Wow, that is incredible. I can only imagine that's probably a life highlight, right?
Speaker 2:It's definitely up there for sure.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And now do they speak? Is it Spanish? I'm sure it's a dialect difference of that.
Speaker 2:It's known to be actually one of the easiest versions of Latin American Spanish to be able to pick up. It's quite a clean version of Spanish. I did a couple of weeks of Spanish school while I was in Columbia and I definitely I definitely progressed Um, albeit, you know, now I'm living in Mexico and Mexican Spanish is also pretty easy to pick up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh wonderful. So, um so communication. I mean you had your driver that could communicate when you were going through the jungles of what, what you guys were doing, and it sounds like he knew who to uh arrange to make it safe and fit. Where did you guys sleep? Was it just in the different jungle cities?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there would be hotel, hostel, motel type places that we could just pull in, and he had prearranged all the stops, apart from one night where we were running quite behind for one of the evenings. So we ended up just literally pulling over on the side of the road and knocking on somebody's door and it turned out he was actually one of the most amazing hotels in the entire region that people book months in advance to go there and we just happened to stumble across it one evening. You can imagine this super rural area. There's nothing there and there's this guy with a hotel with a water slide and a beautiful swimming pool and we were this guy with a hotel with a water slide and a beautiful swimming pool and we were getting, we were helping harvest coconuts, we played a game of soccer with his kids and we turned out and said this is one of like the highlight hotels in the region that we just stumbled across. It was just luck, I guess.
Speaker 1:And I'm curious, how much was it to stay at a hotel, like for the night? I think we paid 15 each so it looks like bocata is like elevated. Is it in the mountains?
Speaker 2:is. It's high. Yeah, I guess it's an interesting city because there's lots of things going on there, obviously the capital of columbia, but it's it's quite gray and it's quite rainy, uh, and has a lot of smog issues and I think, like most Latin America cities, the centro of the city is not the place you want to be. There's always going to be a suburb outside the centro which is far more desirable, and so we were living almost in the centro, which was. It was nice, we were in a sort of executive neighborhood, but definitely in Bogota there were other areas to visit, but it's quite high. So I remember I used to be well, I still am a runner and running in Bogota, after about three kilometers you'd be starting to really feel it in your lungs and heart because the oxygen is less and the concentration of oxygen is much lower. So it's about 16, 15% versus the sort of 21, 22% you'd have at sea level 15%, versus the sort of 21, 22% you'd have at sea level.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then going to these like the jungle, I see there's a lot of parks. It says like on the map, but would you say anything that's like not in a designated, like safe area? Would you just like don't go there unless you don't really know what you're doing? Or is there like national parks that are, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2:I guess it depends. So let's use one of the parks that's very famous in medellin which is called paca avi, which is basically you can get a, a gondola from the river or the main train line right up into the mountains, and it's this huge national park like central park in new york, you know, but significantly larger and has trails and mountain biking, and it's extremely safe and people go up there every day. I wouldn't necessarily recommend putting a backpack on and heading off into the jungle on your own in in colombia. Equally, I wouldn't recommend maybe hiring a car and doing it on your own and, to be honest, if you, I think with many things, if you want to get the best out of a country, it can often really help to get yourself a local who knows, and whether that's a structured tour or whether that is part of something like I did on a remote year or booking something off Expedia or Viator or one of those website Airbnb experiences, there's plenty of people who know where to take you and how to take it and book sensibly as well.
Speaker 2:Look for something with lots of reviews that's had many people go through it. Don't choose somebody who's got no reviews and it's their first time out? Um, yeah, and it's free. Um, you know, be sensible. I think probably my biggest lesson in latin america is if you're sensible, there are many, many people here who are absolutely wonderful and cannot wait to help you and are so generous and so kind and so honest that the perception is everybody's out to get you. But you have got to have your guard up all the time because there are many people who are out to just rinse you of your money and your possessions.
Speaker 1:Okay, and Cartagena looks like it's on the water. Is that a?
Speaker 2:touristy area Cartagena is incredible.
Speaker 1:With a G, Cartagena with a G right.
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the G is a soft G. So Cartagena is a UNESCO World Heritage Wall City. Actually, you may have seen Cartagena used in one of the James bond films, uh, and he's on a motorbike. Uh, it's also in, um, it's a will smith movie. Which one is it? Gemini man? There's a scene in gemini man where he's being uh, chased by himself, um, on a younger version of himself on a motorbike.
Speaker 2:Imagine a walled city, little narrow streets, almost like a sort of french or or a Spanish colonial town that is full of little boutiques and beautiful five-star hotels and cafes and restaurants and it's the most gorgeous colors They've renovated and restored all of these buildings Absolutely spectacular.
Speaker 2:Then you walk out of the walled city, you go across one of the rivers and you're in this. What used to be the slum area of the city was where all the merchants and the bars and the cafes were for all the sailors, and that's now become this really hipster area full of cool, vibrant restaurants and underground cafes and sort of really cool hipster scene. And then you go a little bit further and you go into the area called Boca del Toro, which is like Miami, so it's full of skyrise, skyscrapers and hotels and first world facilities. So, depending on what you're into, you can kind of make yourself at home in any of those regions. I've kind of jumped between all three. And then the beauty of Cartagena is you can go out to islands from there and they have beach clubs on islands and hostels on islands and all sorts of very cool things you can do. So it's a really fascinating place.
Speaker 1:Wow, really, I'm looking on the map and looking at pictures and things. But there's a lot there, and I was looking, you said rivers. I mean I see a lot of just shoots of rivers. And then there's a completely protected huge bay and then there's another one that's almost looks like a hammerhead shark or something Water on either side and then there's it looks like a little. There's a couple little islands on the inside of it too.
Speaker 2:Lots of islands and if you know, part of being catahena is, you do like an island hopping tour, so you jump on a boat in the morning and they take you to five or six islands during the day and there's party islands and sunbathing islands and jungle islands and you can have a real kind of mixture of things. You can swim with rays and sometimes you can swim with sharks, so it's a very, very cool environment environment, yeah, wow.
Speaker 1:And then this island, tierra Bamba, right next to the whole, there's like a huge island. Is that also part of Colombia? Yep, okay, got it, and did you get a chance to go to that island? I'm curious what that was like as well.
Speaker 2:No, I didn't get to go there. I was kind of smitten with the walled city and exploring all the different fortresses. I'm a bit of a historical architecture nerd, so I was busy doing city tours, looking at doorway architecture and fortresses and then looking at some of the. I'm also a foodie, so I was exploring all the cafes. But I'm also a very keen scuba diver, so the rest of the time when I was in katahina I was out scuba diving, uh, exploring the underwater reefs and some of the the exciting dive sites I was gonna ask if scuba diving was big there.
Speaker 2:Huge, yeah um there's some incredible places to scuba dive, uh, all through colombia, but I would say the two highlights is diving off Cartagena, uh, and then there's a, an island off the shore of uh, offshore from from um, from Columbia, called San Andres, which is only small, uh, and then near to that there is another island called Providencia, um, those two are really well regarded for first-class Caribbean diving, um, you know, beautiful, clear, you can see for hundreds of feet and it's warm all year round and it's beautiful, beautiful diving places to go.
Speaker 1:Wow, I have to rank the three. Which ones First, second and third in your mind?
Speaker 2:I would say Providencia is probably first, then Katahena, diving off Katahena and some of the areas there, and then probably San Andres third, although I actually spent most time in San Andres because it was cheap and easy to get to. Providence is a little bit harder to get to.
Speaker 1:Got it Okay. I'm looking at it right now. It does look very tropical, for sure.
Speaker 2:It is yeah.
Speaker 1:And what's the cost to stay in Cartagena?
Speaker 2:Depends. Is that more like Mexico or like Miami? $14 a night. And then the third time I was there I stayed in a little boutique hotel right inside the walled city and that was about 150 bucks a night and that was literally a sort of five-star, beautiful little environment with all the facilities of a five-star hotel.
Speaker 1:Okay, and are you being so kind of converting this all into US dollars for us?
Speaker 2:US dollars yeah.
Speaker 1:I'm very impressed you live in Mexico. It sounds like what's your I'm originally British.
Speaker 2:Born in the UK but I live in Cabo, so the majority of our currency transactions are pesos or dollars. We think in both currencies here.
Speaker 1:Okay, oh, you live in Cabo Nice. Do you just live there part of the time, or is that your home base and now you just kind of bounce other places?
Speaker 2:So we spend probably six, seven months a year here. It's, it's. We actually live about 30 kilometers from Cabo San Lucas, in a beautiful little town called San Jose del Cabo, which is the home of boutiques and farm to table restaurants and a much nicer, calmer standard of living than you would find in Partyville, which is down there in.
Speaker 2:Cabo San Lucas and then the rest of the time. We have a place in the center of Mexico, in a city called Querétaro, which is again a very elevated city up in the mountains. It's near to a city called San Miguel de Allende which is where a lot of Americans have been. Yep, I hear about that, so it's about 30, 40 minutes from there and then the rest of the time we'll be traveling, so going back to the UK to see friends and family. Headed off overseas to see friends and family.
Speaker 1:How did you decide that town off of San Miguel?
Speaker 2:My father-in-law lives there. So, we went on a visit to meet the dad when my now wife and I got together and we visited, and it's very, very different to Cabo. Obviously, we live where the desert meets the ocean, at the bottom of a. My now wife and I got together and we visited, and it's very, very different to Cabo, obviously it's you know we live in where the desert meets the ocean, at the bottom of a peninsula, here Over there it's wineries and green and mountains and it's a beautiful city, very historical, colorful city.
Speaker 2:And while we were there my wife said, oh, I, you know, I'd love to have a place here. So we went and bought a house there and so now we have this wonderful house that we can just jump between the two and, depending on how we feel, we can be at the beach or we can be in the city, in the mountains.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. What was the city called that you live in?
Speaker 2:What was it At the beach or in the city?
Speaker 1:Well, I guess, in the city.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the city, the city is called Queretaro, so it's Q-U-E-R-E-T-A-R-. Okay, yeah, you might spell it as Queretaro. Okay, yeah, it's about two and a half hours northwest of Mexico City and about 40 minutes from San Miguel.
Speaker 1:So six, seven months out of the year you're down in Mexico and the other time you're either back in UK or traveling somewhere? Is that?
Speaker 2:No, six, seven months a year in Cabo, three, four months a year in Queretaro and then the rest of the time on the road. I think now we'll probably lean more towards being in the city because we want to spend more time with family and obviously we've got my wife's family are based in Mexico City and Querétaro, so it's much more accessible for them.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's great. Wow, what a fun, fun life.
Speaker 2:A life by design, which I think is so important in this modern modern life. We only get one go at this and many of us, I think, sit in cubicles, bored, hating our existences and wishing we could make a change, and then the only thing that's stopping you making a change is you. So I decided in 2017 that it was time to do something different and and build a life around the things I wanted to do, versus trying to squeeze life into what I'm doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. Do you have kids or family? I'm just curious if they? I know one friend did and she's traveling the world right now with four kids that are young.
Speaker 2:Wow, amazing. Yeah, no, we do. We just had a daughter. She's four months old and she is definitely changing sort of the way we're approaching things, but I, my wife and I are definitely keen to continue traveling. We've got a few trips booked this year that we're going to experiment with and actually probably next week we'll we'll do our first flight, uh, over to the other house and see how we manage with all the things you need to carry with kids yeah, so.
Speaker 1:So, columbia, what else in terms of, I mean, it's really great, it's got mountains, it's got snow. Is there skiing there as well?
Speaker 2:Don't think it's. No, I think it's snow-capped mountains that I don't think they're skiing. I could be wrong. I didn't get to go skiing, and if there is skiing there, I would love to experience it, but no, I don't think so.
Speaker 1:And then you've got a lot of beaches and um, and how's the temperature and um it depends, real diversity and temperature.
Speaker 2:Bogota is is cold. Um, we were certainly cold there. When was I in bogota, like august, september time, and you know, jackets and and hoodies and jeans were definitely the order of the day. There were sunny days where you could go out in shorts and t-shirt, but the majority of it was quite, was, was quite, sort of ballish. Medellin is is known as the city of eternal spring, so every day is, you know, 27, 28 degrees, uh, you know seventies, uh, all year round you get rain quite frequently, cause it's in the middle of a jungle, so you get, you know, the four o'clock or five o'clock downpour, but it's still warm rain and within 20, 30 minutes back to normal again very, very humid. And then Cartagena is in the Caribbean, so it's hot and sticky most of the year. They get all of the joys of the Caribbean lifestyle. So you get hurricanes occasionally, but it's very, very different. And again, if you go to different parts of Colombia, climate varies wildly. So that would be, it depends, is probably the best answer.
Speaker 1:Caribbean Sea and then the other side. It's funny because you look at the Caribbean Sea in Cartagena and then I just was panning out a little bit and it's literally like this bay of water with Cuba directly across from you, nicaragua, like all of Costa Rica, panama and then all of the islands St Lucia, barbados, dominica.
Speaker 2:All of the Atlantic and the Caribbean and I think a little bit of the Pacific as well on the Northwestern coast. So it's really diverse.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and in terms of where you were at in corporate America like buildings, it sounds like very diverse, but lots of tribes, country farming, things like that a lot as well.
Speaker 2:I think one of the biggest surprises I had going to Latin America in general was I'd been to Mexico quite a few times before I traveled Latin America and coming to Cabo as I'd been doing. I, a few times before I traveled Latin America and coming to Cabo as I'd been doing, I thought this was what Mexico was like. And so flying into Mexico city and realizing this was a full-on city and this is huge, and the same thing when I got to Latin America, to Columbia. Bogota is a you know, it's a capital city. It's just like any capital city anywhere.
Speaker 2:It has obviously slums and the standard of living is lower in those slums than it would be in maybe in the US, but equally there are extremely upscale neighborhoods with very, very well-off people. There are beautiful malls You've got your Chanel and your Gucci stores and all those things and skyscrapers full of fancy offices and apartments. Medellin, exactly the same Really backpackery areas, really upscale areas, really financial services-focused areas. Cartagena is a little bit different because it's got this more walled city UNESCO heritage but in Boca del Catorre there were still office blocks and still people making a living there, working in those cities.
Speaker 1:And cost of living in terms of someone who. I don't know if you got an opportunity to do just there for just a little bit, but expense wise if someone wanted to live there for like a year. Yeah.
Speaker 2:A fraction of what you pay in the U? S. Yeah, I mean joy. It's interesting, and one of my team is is from Cartagena and just completely randomly hired somebody to run our online platform, and he happens to come from Cartagena, and part of the joy of having him is the currency arbitrage, so I can pay him really, really, really well for a Colombian, and it's still a fraction of what it would cost me to hire an American or a Canadian or somebody from the first world, so to speak.
Speaker 2:So, definitely, when you go there, your dollars go a lot further than they would if you went on holiday in Miami or wherever, so it definitely helps. Equally, though, the prices are going up, and tourist prices are going up as well. So, medellin when I was living there, you could live easily on 20, 30 bucks a day, and now, obviously, they've caught wind of the fact that all these nomads are coming in with lots of money and they have lots of money to spend and they want yoga studios and fancy cafes, so the prices of those are going up. So, then, my recommendation is always, when you go to those places, if you're trying to live on minimum wage or social security, which is what a lot of people try and do. They retire abroad and maybe think about the suburbs that aren't the touristy suburbs. Maybe try and live in a more local suburb and the prices are a fraction. You just choose carefully where you go and think about where you're going to settle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think COVID changed everything and everyone was trying to make their dollars stretch further and sadly, they're trying to make their dollars stretch further and it's going back up.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I was curious also water, food is it safe? Do people get sick? Does that happen also in Colombia?
Speaker 2:I didn't get, no, I never got sick in Colombia. Again, choose carefully. Don't eat places that you, if you can see it's filthy, don't eat there. Often, in the suburbs that we were staying in, generally the restaurants are more tourist focused, so they're they have a certain standard of hygiene yeah um, but equally, you know, be smart, use your common sense.
Speaker 2:Uh, if you can see that the food is hanging or is coming from one of those though um pots that's been sat there for three days and they reheat it, maybe don't eat there. Uh, choose something that's fresh Water. A lot of people drink bottled water. I was lucky in the apartment I had had a filter system built in so I could drink the tap water and just carried a water bottle, and then when I was in the co-working space, I could refill. When I was at the gym, I could refill, so I just carried a water bottle. For the months I was traveling and everywhere I could.
Speaker 1:I just refill it for free, rather than buying a bottle of water and wasting plastic. Okay, all right. Well, we got to hit our rapid fire. Questions, kristen, anything burning before we'll talk about the food and stuff in the fire. Rapid fire, yeah. The only thing I was going to say is just, with anything any place, like looking back, you're like, oh, you need to go here, and this is why, if there's anything that stood out in Colombia, do you know what.
Speaker 2:The place we probably haven't spoken about is Guatape, so it's an easy day trip from Medellin. It's a long day but it's an easy day trip and it's basically this enormous stone column that you climb up and have an incredible view of thousands of lakes all around you. You climb about 650, 700 steps to get up to this place, so it's significant. I think it's one of the largest stone columns in the world, if not the largest, and the morning that I went on my trip to Guatape I actually found out my mother had been taken to hospital and was very, very seriously ill, and I still remember it as one of the highlights of my entire life. So you can imagine quite how spectacular this place is. It's quite breathtakingly beautiful.
Speaker 2:And the view from the top is sensational, and the houses that are sort of around the edge of the lakes. I guess it's a little bit like the Ozarks. It's got lots of lakes all over the place and people have bought these waterfront properties that are worth millions of dollars and they have a very abundant lifestyle there. It's also very lush countryside, so you're driving through the jungle to get there. There's lots of rivers and hills and incredible thinkers like country homes you can stop at and have beautiful farm to table restaurant experiences. So you know if you're going to do one thing from edin, I would definitely recommend guatape as a place to go.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's great, it's beautiful. Thank you. Now, that was wow. I'm looking at it now and there's like a lot of. I'm trying to pan out because it went directly into it, but it's almost like a really big lake that has a lot of fingers. I would call it. Yeah, it's big, it's beautiful. Thank you. How long does it take to get to the top?
Speaker 2:I guess that depends, how fast you climb stairs. I think for me it was like less than 10 minutes. Oh, okay, so it wasn't a significant. It's like a, so it wasn't a significant 600 and something steps, but there were people who were making a half day of it to get to the top and there's little rest spots. Oh okay, so you can do it slowly if you want, but I wanted to get to the top and see it, so I just went as fast as I could.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, well, and then one last question Was there any holidays or anything specific? That was kind of neat that celebrations that they do, that someone would want to see or go to in Colombia.
Speaker 2:Do you know, I think, like most Latin American countries, there's an awful lot of public holidays.
Speaker 1:They celebrate.
Speaker 2:I think that they've got it right in this part of the world where they celebrate a lot of things, and that's really good. I always think Independence Days are a great time to go, so I definitely recommend hopping on Google and seeing when is the best time to be there in terms of national holidays. Food festivals is another great one to go for. If you can find a food festival, if you can find wine festivals. There's always beautiful things to look for without knowing specific dates for specific days, but I recommend looking for those types of events to get the best out of the country.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Thank you very much. Great Okay. So my rapid fire questions. What is the popular religion there? Catholicism, catholicismism? Okay, um, what was your favorite food? If you have to have like one meal, what would you? What would you be eating there?
Speaker 2:so I should say arepas con chocolate, which is the arepas are sort of like a breakfast or a snack um, how do I describe? Second, across between a muffin and a crepe and a pancake, and they're beautiful. But actually I have to say that I really loved I genuinely really loved in Colombia the burgers, because the beef, the quality of the beef, is fantastic.
Speaker 1:So they make incredible hamburgers. Wow, okay, and what did you have? Like what would it be a typical breakfast that you'd have when you're there?
Speaker 2:Arepas is a very popular breakfast item. And what?
Speaker 1:do you call it Arepas?
Speaker 2:Arepas A-R-E-P-A, so they're kind of the standard Colombian breakfast, but you can have anything. You can have tacos, or you can have cereal eggs, I mean all the standard stuff that you would want to eat. I personally don't eat a lot of breakfast, so I would probably avoid. I normally have a cup of green tea and that's enough for me. Anything you want, and if you're in the more tourist centric areas or the nomad traveler centric areas, you'll find all of the delights of home that you would like.
Speaker 2:So you know your eggs benedict and your mushroom omelets and whatever you want. Okay, nice, all right. Is there a specific type of music that you noticed in Colombia? Absolutely, colombia is famous for a type of music called reggaeton, which is Latin American dance, vibe music, very popular rhythmic beat. So people like J Balvin and some of the people that collaborated with justin bieber uh, many, many artists that you probably have heard of without realizing that they're colombian um, it's a huge music scene and definitely very, very popular and really catchy to listen to. My now wife, when I first moved to mexico, um was quite stunned that I knew what reggaeton was and I really, I genuinely love it and it's very lively and gets you in the party mood.
Speaker 1:So I definitely oh, I have to look that up For sure Definitely look for that. Okay, got it. Are there a lot of live music events then?
Speaker 2:Huge yeah. Medellin has loads of live music venues, and Bogota are the same and in Cartagena you can go and find lots of bars with buskers and live music playing in squares and whatever. But definitely Medellin is amazing for live music places.
Speaker 1:Okay, great. And what's the money called? It's the.
Speaker 2:Colombian peso.
Speaker 1:Is it easy to deal with the money down there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the interesting thing with Colombian money is the numbers are really big. So if I give you an example, if I just say what is one US dollar, it's 3,889 Colombian pesos. So when you're buying things, you're paying in hundreds of thousands of pesos.
Speaker 2:Yeah, literally, you could be a millionaire in that currency, and that can be interesting. So if you go out for dinner, for example, could spend a hundred dollars on dinner. If you're going to a nice place, well, that's four hundred thousand pesos, which is you know? So you that's probably the interesting part of the currency is you're having these, you're having these notes with lots and lots and lots of noughts on them, and you have to be careful that you're not giving a, you know, a five hundred thousand. When you went to give a fifty thousand, for example, oh, oh, wow, okay.
Speaker 1:And then that closest place to surf. I know scuba diving, but is there also like a surfing?
Speaker 2:I think Santa Marta is a place for surfing Um the and definitely I'm not a surfer, so I would recommend Googling uh, where, where to surf in Columbia for for good options. I couldn't I couldn't speak authoritatively on that.
Speaker 1:Okay, no worries, okay, well, thank you so much. This is super, super educational and it looks like there's so many beautiful places the Santa.
Speaker 2:Marta sounds amazing. Yeah, I have to check that out and I definitely recommend it.
Speaker 1:If you it says ways of working, what is that?
Speaker 2:So ways of working is one of the product offerings that we have from our business. Essentially, we help really busy, overwhelmed managers to become high impact leaders, juggle all the balls and keep all the plates spinning and is feeling maybe a little bit burned out because they just have so much on their plate and they can't seem to see the wood for the trees. And they're also trying to get the rewards and the recognition that they feel they deserve for all their effort that they're putting in. What we do is we help those leaders start to switch the way they work with their team to become more impactful, to get better results and to drive productivity.
Speaker 2:And the goal is a commercial benefit, which is to drive down the turnover in businesses, because often in those types of teams people are leaving quite frequently. The manager is always having to recruit, Then the cost of bringing new people on. You've got low engagement maybe in the business. You're not making the money you could as a team because you're not getting the results, because you're not performing as well as you might. So our goal is to improve all of those results, make you a high performance team with a high performance leader, using the ways of working methodology, which is essentially a facilitated program to support the team to develop.
Speaker 1:And how do we find more about that? Is there a website or social channel?
Speaker 2:You can go to jimmyburrowscom and we're we're in the process of revamping at the moment, but you can find information on jimmyburrowscom about our high performance leader podcast, the two books that we have available. You can read our blogs, you can join our newsletter and there's also information about our product offerings there, and if anybody's listening is interested in a conversation about how we do this and how we make it work in some of the case studies that we have, then I'm more than happy to connect.
Speaker 1:And what do you cover on your podcast? Do you have guests?
Speaker 2:We do so it's called the High Performance Leader. We tend to partner with leaders from larger corporate organizations who've run projects or have experienced something, have gone through something that has ended up with them getting better results, and we share that wisdom with other people. And then the other half of the episodes we do are me doing solos on specific topics that tend to come up in our workshops or events. So, for example, this morning I'll be recording one around why it's important to prepare to perform as well as actually doing performance, because often we just relentlessly grind and grind and grind, uh, and we don't take any time off to recharge the batteries or think about the most important thing.
Speaker 1:So uh, preparing to perform is equally as important as just performing. Well, thank you so much, Jimmy. It was so nice to meet you and appreciate shared Um. Yes, and we'll definitely have to keep in touch also.
Speaker 2:For sure, and if you end up in Colombia or if you end up in Mexico, let me know.
Speaker 1:Sounds good, awesome, so nice to meet you, take care Bye. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast, can you please take a second and do a quick follow of the show and rate us in your podcast app, and, if you have a minute, we would really appreciate a review. Following and rating is the best way to support us. If you're on Instagram, let's connect. We're at where next podcast. Thanks again, thank you.
