Over the past 20 years I have wanted to travel in Colombia but have always put it off due to worries over security. In that time I have done trips to surrounding Panama and Ecuador a couple of times, also Costa Rica and Brazil and two trips to Peru. In all of those years and trips I survived unscathed, perhaps a little skinnier and scratched right afterwards, but nothing that has stayed with me long term.

This year was finally the chance to get to Colombia and have a play in the forest, one of life's true pleasures. Colombia is a plant lover's dream: instead of one mountain range with all the elevation changes that drive speciation in tropical plants, it has three separate mountain ranges as well as smaller mountain areas that in turn have their own local endemics.

Carla Black, from Panama and I travelled to Colombia this year with the view to take a group of plant people there as part of the post-tour for the 2012 Heliconia Society International conference, which will be held in El Valle Panama in late July 2011.

Beforehand, Carla had managed to find our guide, Emilio Constantino, who made our trip possible. Emilio is a naturalist and a tropical fruit expert, trained in horticulture and tropical agriculture. He has devoted most of his life to studying South American wildlife and to promoting its conservation. For more than 25 years Emilio has carried out assessments of biodiversity and has promoted the creation of private plant collections and nature reserves among farmers and indigenous peoples. The collection on his farm serves as a model. He is the co-author of the Red Books on Colombian orchids, birds, mammals (tapirs and foxes) and insects (See his facebook page at www.facebook.com/ profile.php?id=100000760847983). As well as this Emilio now guides people with specific interests in wildlife and plants, as well as cultural activities.

Emilio's contacts throughout Colombia allowed us to get advice from people on the ground, in specific areas, regarding how safe a particular road may be. This proved to be immensely helpful in ensuring we saw what we were hoping to find while avoiding any potential danger. Colombia is a country where conflicts have been going on between different peoples since well before the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500s. As times change so does the security situation. I remember Peru was a difficult proposition in the late '80s to early '90s. That situation rapidly changed and we had no problems in 1996 on my first visit.

Colombia is becoming safer and areas that were a war zone two years ago are just as safe to visit now as any other place in Latin America, or for that matter the world.

We started our trip in Cali, the country's third largest city, that nestles into the base of the western mountain range, or its correct name, Cordillera Occidental. The weather in Cali is warm, only 30 off the equator, but altitude helps moderate the...