Notes on Colombia

I just finished a month-long trip in Colombia, visiting the Caribbean coast, major cities, and parts of the Andes region. Some thoughts.

1. Lots of people are selling fruit and juice on the street. These are obviously low-productivity jobs, but surely they’re better than living on benefits or begging? It must give them a sense of purpose and provide valuable skills and habits. Hard to see how raising the minimum wage or increasing labour regulation helps them.
2. Crime is a real issue, lots of warnings about being out after dark. One obvious marker is the lack of on-street car parking, with apartments having them underground and houses in driveways. ATMs are often in cubicles with locks.
3. This impacts your ability to both exercise and to discover places. I am unwilling to walk for hours here in a way I would be in Tokyo or Geneva, life is much more about getting Ubers point to point then straight home.
4. City beach fronts are often used for commercial shipping. Is the inability to move this elsewhere a coordination issue or are pristine urban beaches just a luxury?

5. Long queues for banks here, longer than in most places. Most likely an overregulated oligopoly. 
6. Local food is quite uninspired, Mexican and Italian food (as well as burgers) are quite popular. Fresh fruit is excellent and cheap. 
7. Inequality is not as obvious as I’d imagine. Gini is high but it looks like a society that is just uniformly poorer as opposed to one with more stretched extremes, at least when it comes to consumption. I wouldn’t guess I’m in the 12th most unequal nation on earth
8. English speaking ability is really low, even in tourist areas. Fortunately, my partner could translate the Bungee Jumping safety briefing for me but I can’t see how it would work otherwise. Looking at their top 10 tourist origins all are Spanish-speaking (bar Brazil and the US) so this makes sense (added to their domestic tourism).
9. Prices for domestic flights barely go up closer to departure, even on the day. Air travel does seem to be how the middle classes go between cities but liberalised inter-city rail markets need to have highly variable pricing (such as the UK). Freight must be very expensive to move around if it has to go via road, their rail network is understandably very poor.
10. Acceptance of cards was variable, highest in Bogotá. There seems to be a local digital payment system however.
11. Uber is illegal but widely used (often they ask you to sit in the front to reduce suspicion), this often seems a good litmus test for how much a country protects its entrenched interests.

12. Apartments opposite our Airbnb (a rich area) seem to be populated by couples (data shows only 2% of Colombians live alone). I wonder how many rent together before buying. Is renting your own apartment a powermove in the dating market as opposed to living alone? Do love hotels do a good business here (as in East Asia)? Are parents just quite liberal?
13. Apartments have 24-hour security at the entrance and everyone seems to have a cleaner. Inequality of production was more obvious than inequality of consumption. To go full Bryan Caplan, the way Singapore, Hong Kong and the Gulf have combined high domestic wages with plentiful cheap immigrant labour for domestic duties seems a win-win for the immigrants and the host nation. How many of these Colombians working as cleaners here would sleep in a dormitory or maid’s quarters in the US or EU for 5x their current salary?
14. The lack of heating in apartments in Bogota was odd, this is a city with an average temperature of 15 degrees.
15. Hot water is not universally available, even in the cold interior (it’s more understandable in tropical areas)
16. Safety standards are quite low it seems, many buses don’t even have seat belts and I sat on the floor of a bus for two hours between Guatape and Medellin. 

17. Masks are required on flights and in airports but apart from that only one mall and one bus asked for them (despite signs requiring them being ubiquitous).
18. Overall, Colombia seems both a fine place to visit and to be doing okay economically. I’d struggle to recommend it as a “must-see” or as a “must-invest” nation. The crime and lack of English hold it back on both counts and the food certainly counts against it for livability. Bogotá has a highly temperate climate but that’s all I can really come up with as a selling point (which is far from unique in Latin America).