Describing myself has always been difficult, mainly because I haven’t completely figured myself out yet. I ended up making my description based on my experiences in life, leaving aside any psychological aspects, dreams, goals, and many other things that I think change as the years go by. I am a Colombian, an engineer by profession, a rugby player, and a travel enthusiast. I consider my job as a means to pay for my trips, and I will continue to do this for as long as I can. From here on out, let this blog give you a better description of myself.

I grew up with the stories of my father travelling around Europe, inundating my fantasies along with excerpts and images from books and TV. When I could, I would follow him around and talk to him about his travels. I also went through his vintage albums endlessly – with each black-and-white photograph fuelling my imagination. I inherited from my father that hunger for adventure into the unknown, that anxiousness to go and see new places. And from my mother I inherited the obsessive fascination of organizing moments in photographs. She sorted out my father’s collection of slide films and photos into neat albums, and then took the time to hand-write the date and location for each photograph in the albums, unintentionally showing healthy envy of these immortalised European experiences. Her affinity for these photographs became apparent when thieves broke into our house once, and took our slide projector that had a large number of these slides in it. She was devastated by that loss. In homage to my parents, from whom I inherited my thirst for adventure and obsession in organising photographs and memories, I have organized all my experiences into a single repository: Viajista.

My first trips were made with my school, they used to organize an annual excursion to different places of the country and thanks to them I visited a large part of Colombia. With my family, the holidays were restricted to visit family farms or summer houses, and the few trips we had were carefully planned and they waited for my parents to save enough before going on trips. I really started travelling when I lived in Spain. I arrived as a PhD student, but my real goal was to travel across Europe and emulate the experiences that my father had in there decades before. So in Europe, I started saving and travelling every time I had the opportunity to do it.

Many of those trips were small weekend visits to a single destination, others were planned trips with journeys in different kinds of transport, and others were simply, “arrive at the destination” to see what they could offer me. In many was a research for tourist attractions made popular by guides and magazines, in many others I followed the recommendations of friends and locals, and the rest just randomly chose among the possible experiences that I could find. Some trips had paid tours and guides to teach me aspects of the place visited, others were simply done as an ignorant newbie who learn thanks to the first experience. In some I lived the adventure inherent to the traveller with the lack of planning and abundance of experiences, and in others the controller tourist had ready a detailed plan of visits, scales and excursions.

Viajista is the graphic compendium of all the experiences I have had as a traveller and as a tourist throughout all these years. This is my blog of memories, photographs, experiences and places. I already had a slightly more ambitious attempt to maintain a travel blog ( Viajista in WordPress ), but the lack of time and the effort demanded made that the blog was continuously outdated.Therefore, this new approach is simply my exercise of remembering what I have lived and showing the places I visited. And I hope that visitors can find value in my photographs.

Trips

Since I was a child I had a fascination for maps and geography in general. The best book for me was an Atlas, and the ones I had I read them fascinated, first for the aesthetic aspects of their figures, and then for the information that showed and hid on their maps and graphics. As I got older, with the beginning of my travels, I wanted to have a map of the places I visited and, in general, my tour around the world. Of course I have for now a “fake” map that indicates the countries visited, where in many of them I have traveled only in a very small part, but it was done in this way to preserve the organization of Viajista.

This process of creating posts for Viajista was started after I finished many of my trips, so on the map and in the list of visited countries there are a lot broken links. I’m dedicating time to recover the photographs from my hard drive and remember the experiences I had in them. Some of those countries will have to wait a long time for going online, until I find the physical photographs of those visits (the ones that belong to that antediluvian era of photographic rolls). We will see how slow I will be in this process, but without the desire to finish soon it is an exercise that I assume with great enthusiasm. The list of countries that I have visited so far is this one: