How a Country Became a Calling

by Thibaud Perdrix

There is a country where a one-hour flight delivers you to what feels like a different continent.

The Amazon at dawn — canopy to the horizon, the river wide and slow beneath you. An hour north: the Andes, cold and vertical, the air thin enough to remind you it's there. Another hour and you're on the Caribbean coast, the light transformed, the water a particular blue that has no equivalent anywhere else. Further still, the Pacific — wild, drenched, one of the most biodiverse places on earth.

One country. Four worlds. An hour between each.

This is what Colombia did to me. I never really got over it.

I arrived in Colombia in 2009 as a guide — young, curious, convinced I'd stay a season. I stayed years. I went deeper into the coffee mountains, along the coast, into the Amazon, into the slow-built relationships that no itinerary can manufacture. The country kept opening. Every time I thought I understood what Colombia was, it showed me another version of itself.

At some point I stopped thinking of it as a destination.

I left eventually. Moved to France, spent years working with one of Europe's great luxury travel houses, learning that world from the inside. And the further I got from Colombia, the more clearly I saw what I had left behind.

In 2023, María Julia and I came back. We founded TEMPO.

The people who make up our team are Colombians who have spent their lives here, and people from elsewhere who arrived, fell in love, and never quite left — much like me. Between us, we have lived this country from the inside: its roads, its seasons, its rhythms, its people. That knowledge is what we bring to every journey we build.

That knowledge doesn't just shape the itineraries we build — it shapes how we travel alongside the people who trust us. We know the back roads, the unspoken codes, the rhythm of a place at a particular hour. We know who to call, and how things actually work here when they don't go as planned. That fluency, in the country and its people, is what makes genuine care possible.

It is also, we believe, what luxury in travel actually means. We have a name for it: Prendre Soin. One of the pillars TEMPO was built on. It resists translation — but it looks like this:

A client lands in Bogotá having left her medication on another continent — the driver is already holding it. A toy forgotten in Minca at midnight, back before breakfast. A card lost somewhere between two cities, gone before the sentence is finished.

Someone with you, every step of the way, ten thousand kilometers from home.

Colombia changed me the first time I encountered it. I've seen it change others since.

Let us do the same for you.