I found Colombia to be a country very similar to our own. From the coffee zone that resembles Dota with its high altitude Cloud Forest, to Cali with its savannah-like vegetation that definitely looks like Guanacaste. Plenty of water is filtered by these forests, creating rivers and waterfalls along most of the places we visited, just like the ones I love so much. And let’s not forget about the gastronomy! I generally dislike soups and vegetable creams, but the ones I ate in Colombia were really tasty, an excellent way to warm up the body before going all out to photograph the landscape and its wildlife.

Yet Colombia has a series of peaks much higher than Chirripó, our tallest mountain at 3,820 meters above sea level. We took the opportunity to be near one of such peaks, namely Nevado del Ruiz. Paramo vegetation is unlike anything else I have seen in our country, and the permanent snow cap is such an unexpected sight, given this mountain’s proximity to the terrestrial equator. Locals said that previous year’s temperatures were too high, so the snow melted, but we were blessed with a sight of the snow cap, albeit a very short one, for a dense cloud posed itself between us and the mountain after 30 minutes of trying to take pictures of the sunrise at blue hour. Yet, we had a wonderful time up there, with temperatures close to 0 degrees Celsius, threatening to freeze our hands, but never breaking our adventurous spirits.